Youth Enrichment & Education: Unleashed Brands’ Platform-Building Prowess

Learn more about the Harris Williams senior professionals featured in this article.

Key Learnings

• Due to several secular trends, including an ongoing focus on childhood development and associated specialized services, the youth enrichment and education sector is poised for long-term growth.

• A highly fragmented landscape presents investors with the opportunity to build platforms of scale that cater to children through all stages of their development.

• Unleashed Brands, a recent Harris Williams client, showcases the power of platform building and other key traits for success in the space.

Youth enrichment and education is a large and expanding market driven by a rising desire to enhance the lives of children while simplifying the lives of parents. Across key service categories encompassing learn, play, and grow activities, the space offers evergreen demand drivers and an estimated $73 billion total addressable market.¹

Below, senior professionals from our Consumer Group share the trends attracting investors to the sector and how Unleashed Brands built a leading youth enrichment franchise platform.

A Focus on Families

The growing youth enrichment and education market has proven to be recession-resilient due to a persistent focus on childhood development, a powerful theme propelling continued spending in the space. At the same time, these services solve a critical need for parents: a safe and reliable place to bring their kids that provides instructive, engaging experiences.

The sector is further supported by a favorable and enduring shift toward out-of-home consumer spending. “Despite macroeconomic headwinds like inflation, consumer spending remains healthy, with a heavier focus on services versus products,” says Spiller. “Demand for experiential services, particularly those related to childhood enrichment, is expected to keep accelerating,” he adds. For instance, 78% of millennials would choose to spend money on a desirable experience or event over a product, with 55% spending more on events and live experiences than ever before.²

Within youth enrichment and education, parents are also seeking the convenience of several kid-friendly experiences through a single vendor. England points out that the market’s high fragmentation presents investors with the ability to provide just that. “The landscape of small, founder-owned businesses offers a substantial opportunity to build unified platforms of scale with expanded service offerings and supply sophistication, infrastructure, and data intelligence to existing business concepts,” he explains. 

Unleashed Brands: The Power of Platform Building

Unleashed Brands, a recent Harris Williams client, is a best-in-class youth enrichment franchise platform that features several differentiating traits. 

For example, Unleashed capitalizes on parent demand for a one-stop shop for their kids and untapped consolidation opportunities within the child enrichment space. “Through its proven platform-building vision and M&A playbook, the company has identified and integrated a portfolio of innovative learn, play, and grow brands,” says Budlong. “By bringing together companies offering a variety of activities to a range of age groups, Unleashed has become the market’s leading platform serving children from infancy through high school,” he continues. 

This breadth of services fuels long-term customer retention and loyalty for Unleashed Brands. “The company makes their whole package of offerings simple for parents,” notes Ledwith. It’s a single, trusted forum that parents can rely on with an array of options to keep kids engaged and inspired throughout their youth, creating attractive recurring revenue from end customers, as well as franchisees. “Under Unleashed, franchisees can diversify their network of services and own their market. They’re creating their own multi-concept platform and benefiting from everything Unleashed does to create synergies across the brands,” he adds. 

Thanks to its leadership and scalable infrastructure, Unleashed also has a strong track record of organic growth. Its management team has worked with top franchising businesses in the U.S., helping them to nurture existing franchisee bases and identify the best franchisees to accelerate growth. Spiller says that, through investing in this leadership and the technology and infrastructure to support its brands, Unleashed provides a valuable model for their franchisees to expand. 

Lastly, as a franchise platform with category-leading brands, Unleashed gains deep data on a diverse customer base and uses those insights to regularly enhance their services. “Its team harnesses this information to uncover cross-selling opportunities, strategies to target new customers, advertising optimizations for its audiences, and ways to improve key metrics like customer lifetime value and customer acquisition cost,” says Ledwith.

Room to Grow

Across the youth enrichment and education space, a long tail of founder-owned businesses and small franchisors provides ample room for continued consolidation. Budlong explains that unifying these brands and service offerings under one platform is an effective path to value creation and growth: “Companies that do so can bring support to the franchisees of newly acquired brands, take market share, scale their businesses more effectively, and be attractive to both private equity and strategic buyers.”

Top youth enrichment and education acquisition targets share several sought-after characteristics. For instance, investors and buyers should look for businesses with an established engine that proves the ability to scale. “This engine is often fueled by a great management team, the infrastructure to support growth, and technology that drives efficiencies, data intelligence, and seamless customer experiences,” explains England.

Another component of winning companies is a clear competitive advantage that has led to a track record of success, with an established tool kit to repeat it. Finally, white space for growth is a priority. “It’s critical to have a clear road map for continued expansion, with a concept that’s proven to win in different environments and geographies,” says Spiller.

For consolidators that can identify and integrate these leading companies, the highly fragmented youth enrichment and education sector is a great place for growth. To discuss M&A opportunities within youth enrichment and education in greater detail, please contact our senior professionals.

1. Third-Party Whitespace Analysis

2. Eventbrite Research