Rugby-loving boss of Knovia Group Mark Botha has big plans for care, early years and dental training after learning to seize opportunities and take risks
‘Discover the limits of the possible by going beyond them into the impossible’, reads a slogan on the picture looming behind Mark Botha of a man skiing off a mountain peak.
The bravado-enthused image adorning his home office seems appropriate for a man who leads a training provider specialising in some of the riskiest apprenticeship markets out there – care and early years – with their notoriously low margins and achievement rates.
And Knovia Group, made up of Paragon Skills (specialising in care and education), Shaping Lives (early years) and Tempdent (dental), has just taken a sizeable risk by buying up another provider, Babington, after it hit financial turmoil and became embroiled in a historic subcontracting investigation.
But Botha is a man who has never been afraid to take risks. After starting his career in South Africa, he went on to live in England, then Dubai, before returning to England 10 years ago to take the helm at Paragon Skills.
‘Gregarious and confident’
Aside from his boldness, Botha has an unwaveringly cheerful demeanour. As he goes through his life story, there is not a moment of it that he does not describe as having “thoroughly enjoyed”.
Botha grew up in Zimbabwe playing rugby, a game that suits his six-foot-five frame and strong risk appetite. In his late teens, his family moved to South Africa for “better opportunities” at an “economically challenging time”. He was paid (though “not a lot”) to play rugby at county level for Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal).
He was inspired by the example set by his mum, who was a national sales manager for a hotel chain, to study sales, marketing and business management at college. His first professional job involved selling health club memberships on a commission-only basis.
His boss noticed his “gregarious and confident” persona, and he was soon promoted to regional sales manager.
England-bound
But by the age of 25, Botha was “struggling to get to the next level up” in his career. After getting married, he and his wife decided to move to England in search of opportunities.
Botha’s grandparents were both British, and he felt a “cultural familiarity” with Brits having grown up watching the comedies Fawlty Towers and Mr Bean.
The couple brought their beloved Staffordshire bull terriers along with them, but this made it tougher for Botha to find work in those first few months when the dogs were in quarantine.
“Our immediate priority was to be near the kennels, so we could go visit them. It was pretty disruptive for them and us,” he explains.
Botha occupied himself by working for a distant cousin’s removals business and playing rugby for Newbury. He found the break from high-pressure sales “pretty cathartic”.
Commercial mindset
He returned to corporate life in 2002 as south London sales manager for Fitness First, then the world’s largest privately owned health club chain. When the company launched a specialist women’s-only brand of clubs, Botha became its national sales manager.
He was then made sales and marketing director of an operator of local authority-owned leisure facilities, Leisure Connection, exposing him to the slower-paced world of the British public sector. The facilities they ran for councils tended to employ staff on long tenures who lacked a commercial mindset. Botha was tasked with shifting the culture and set about showing colleagues that “profit isn’t a bad word”.
“It was quite a quick turnaround – success breeds success,” he says.
Botha then joined Premier Global, a health and fitness company that at the time owned the awarding organisation Active IQ, where he was promoted from sales to chief operating officer.
He learned that whereas in the commercial world, “your only stakeholder really is your customer,” in the compliance-dominated world of awarding organisations, other stakeholders, including Ofqual, had to be responded to.
Creating fruit salads
A unique opportunity then arose for Botha to return to Fitness First. Although its brand was then struggling in the UK – “squeezed out” by low-cost 24-hour gyms – in Dubai, Landmark Group had just bought franchise rights to expand the brand across the Gulf. Botha moved to Dubai with his wife and five-year-old son Kai to lead its sales and operations.
Over the next five years, the group opened 50 health clubs in the region. Botha took regular trips across the Middle East, and to India and South Africa to recruit new talent.
On one trip to India he interviewed around 500 people in three days, asking them to leave their families for the prospective roles but without being able to tell them which country he might send them to. He found it “fascinating how resilient people are, and willing to take a leap of faith”.
The health clubs were a “fruit salad of cultures”, although not all cultures gelled well.
It was also a “challenge”ensuring that newcomers, particularly party-loving South Africans and Australians, were aware of the Gulf countries’ strict laws.
Going ‘home’
After four years in Dubai, Botha and his family returned to England so he could take the helm at Paragon Skills. The provider had been established in 1998 and bought by Sovereign Capital Partners, a UK private equity “buy and build” specialist, 10 years later.
Botha was brought in to “set the tone and direction” for a turnaround. Paragon had just been downgraded by Ofsted from grade two to three and was struggling to embrace the online age by moving away from a paper-based portfolio system.
But Botha found his tutors “pushing back” against moving online, claiming their learners were against the idea. “It turns out it was mostly our tutors who were probably a bit afraid of change,” he says.
Less is more
Before Covid, Paragon’s provision extended to 100 programmes ranging from automotive to hairdressing and boatbuilding, all split into north and south regional teams.
Post-pandemic, there was a period of soul-searching about the company’s direction, and Botha’s team decided to shed its reputation as generalists. “We wanted to be the experts,” he says.
So they “stripped right back” to 40 programmes (since pared down to 19) and moved to a sector-based model around care, professional services, early years and education pathways.
Botha says the move has helped his company engage more employers and not harmed growth.
But it is striking that the sectors Paragon has chosen to specialise in also have the slimmest profit margins and some of the greatest recruitment and retention challenges. The level two adult social care apprenticeship is its fastest-growing.
Although “there are sexier sectors we could be in”, they are “on a mission” now, “without a doubt”, he says.
“There are probably no more important jobs to train people for than looking after the elderly and the young.”
Shaping lives
In 2023, Knovia Group was formed by Sovereign Capital Partners after it bought dental training company Tempdent – tapping into another sector with a social purpose and dire workforce shortages.
Last month, Knovia took over Babington, one of its competitors in the professional services space. Babington recently reported financial losses and is currently being investigated by the Department for Education over subcontracting irregularities.
Botha had considered making another acquisition, this time in early years, but the company decided instead to build up and rebrand its existing early years provision into ‘Shaping Lives’.
“I anchored in on the name, because that’s exactly what we’re doing,” he says. With the expansion of free childcare provision from 15 to 30 hours a week and the national focus on improving school readiness, Botha says that early years is his company’s “focus for this year, without a doubt”.
Making up headlines
Botha steered Paragon to grade two Ofsted results in 2017 and 2023, but is aiming higher.
The “internal joke” at Paragon, he explains, is to imagine what they would want the headline to read if, following a visit from Ofsted a year from today, the inspection result makes it onto FE Week’s front page.
They have settled on “Paragon Skills delivers outstanding teaching and learning to every learner every time”, which I tease Botha sounds like rather too lofty a goal to ever achieve.
“But what’s the alternative?” he responds. “If I don’t set that as the ambition, I’ll end up with mediocre teaching to some of the learners some of the time.”
Botha’s staff seem to have put their faith in the business.
Staff satisfaction scores range between 92 and 94 per cent and the average tutor tenure is 3.7 years which Botha says is “very good for our sector”.
In order to retain tutors, for the second year running Botha is providing those employed for at least the previous six months with a “loyalty bonus” of £500 in August, and “hopefully another at Christmas”.
This replaces a pay rise, which he would “love to give my teams… but we are not well funded”. But the bonus is “something tangible that they can see in their paycheck, rather than a salary rise that they just don’t notice”.
Botha is a great believer in “positive energy”, which was integral to his past career in the fitness industry. That means employing people who “wake up in the morning happy”. “I don’t want to surround myself with people that just suck the life out of me,” he says.
On top of ‘energy’, another key Knovia corporate value is having an ‘edge’. To that end, they are piloting AI marking tools with software developer Bud.
So far the project has provided “incredible feedback”. The tutors buy into using AI “if it frees up their time for teaching and developing… rather than making them feel like they’re out of work”.
Sizing up
Botha’s mission is for Knovia to be “number one in size and quality” in its respective sectors. In dental, it is already number one “by quite a long way”, and in adult social care, “we oscillate between first and second”.
Although Botha expresses discontent over how recent announcements to relax functional skills requirements for adult apprentices came with “no warning” to the sector, he feels “very fortunate” that most of Paragon’s adult learners are sticking with their functional skills programmes regardless, and no tutors are losing their jobs.
Shorter apprenticeship durations present an “opportunity” in adult social care, with “lots we could concentrate on to get them through those programmes in eight months”.
The company’s apprentices have not had to endure long waits for end-point assessments in recent times, which he puts down to its “pretty accurate” profiling of apprentices six months in advance and “good working relationships” with EPAOs so they “know what’s coming down the line”.
Overseas aspirations
The only “bottleneck” happens in July when “stress levels get higher”. But creating shorter apprenticeships of eight or nine months “would help with that”, Botha says.
As well as expanding Knovia’s footprint in newly devolved regions, Botha would like to gain a foothold in the devolved nations, and perhaps further afield too.
He confesses to missing the “international side” of his time in Dubai.
He believes that education products “with an English badge on” are generally “really well received” abroad, and shorter, more flexible apprenticeship programmes could be more easily exportable.
Botha is feeling “really optimistic” about the future.
He concludes: “We’re so lucky to work in the sector we work in – what is there to be sad about?”
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