Way back in 1995, the company that would become
Destiny Solutions was founded as Destiny Web Designs, putting the best practices of the then emerging World Wide Web to work for Toronto business clients.
"One of our clients was the University of Toronto's continuing education department. We built out their site in the late 1990s and realized there was a huge opportunity in creating applications for this new market in higher education," says senior vice president Jonathan Tice. The needs of continuing education departments are different than those of traditional "tuition cohort" models, and new administrative tools were needed to help grow the potential of those departments.
He says that U of T was the first university in North America to put its systems fully online in 2001, and the reputation the school's then-president, Mary Cone Berry, had as an innovator gave the newly born Destiny Solutions a great advantage. "That relationship made it easy to make Stanford our second client."
Eleven years later, the Yonge and Eglinton-based company is the leader in providing specific administrative solutions for non-traditional learning departments at some of North America's biggest and most prestigious schools, including Georgetown, Duke, Penn State, Stanford and University of Toronto. It's a market that has begun to rapidly transform education itself. Tice cites US education department executive
Richard Culatta's impression that "this is education's Internet moment."
"We're growing quite quickly," says Tice. Currently at 40 employees, the company is
hiring for nine positions now. Tice says they've been growing their staff at a rate of about 25 per cent per year—revenue growth has significantly outpaced that. "We really can't hire fast enough, but we're very specific about who we hire. We serve clients who are the best in the world, and we're really looking for A-players."
Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Jonathan Tice, Senior Vice President, Destiny Solutions