Maxime Aiach capitalizes on tax credits to grow the home services market

With 300 million euros a year in turnover and 80,000 stakeholders across three different companies – Acadomia, Shiva, and Our Loved Ones – Maxime Aiach has created professional service providers out of the ‘odd jobs’ market by utilizing a 50% tax credit available to customers of personal services or educational support companies.

Maxime Aiach capitalizes on tax credits to grow the home services market

With 300 million euros a year in turnover and 80,000 stakeholders across three different companies, Maxime Aiach has begun a special campaign to mark 20 years since he founded Acadomia. The 59 year old Parisian who also created Shiva and Our Loved Ones has launched a poster campaign that brings his domestic workers to the limelight, with their photographs displayed in metro stations and bus shelters, photographed by the legendary Studio Harcourt. For Aiach, who started Acadomia in 1990 it is a mark of recognition for professions that were long considered merely “odd jobs” like cleaning and tutoring.

The Acadomia model – and why it is successful

In 1989, Maxime Aiach, then a student, founded “Cours Études Secours,” which would later be renamed as Acadomia. Aiach found himself giving small private lessons, and he realized that there was a large market in tutoring services. At the time, the thought of having tutors be employees on permanent contracts was out of the question, and instead the company acted more as an agency, connecting teachers of private lessons with students or parents of students.

The official date of the start of Acadomia is 1997, when it took the current name, and the company has come a long way since then. It now operates a network of 120 agencies, helping more than 100,000 students a year by connecting them to 20,000 teachers. All of this is supervised by more than 500 educational advisors. The range of of services offered by Acadomia includes:

• Private tutoring, either in a center or online across a range of subjects and with a choice of teachers
• School coaching, to help improve organization, prioritization, and stress management skills that will benefit students after school, in higher education or work
• Traditional Schools, such the company’s Paris school where students study the program established by the National Education Board
• Holiday courses that occupy children during each school holiday period, giving them an opportunity to learn, revise or maintain curiosity in a productive and stimulating way, as well as providing a relief for parents

All teachers must hold a Bac+3 license to work with Acadomia, and while the original model was with the company acting as an agency, the company now retains over a thousand employees on permanent contracts. The company has achieved wide success, taking 40% of the tutoring market share in France in 2013.

Having had such a big impact always leads to criticisms however, and Acadomia has been accused of ‘stepping on the toes of the National Education Board,’ something denied by the company which says that Acadomia is not in competition with National Education, but rather in complement to it.

Beyond academic advancement

In 2005, Maxime Aiach founded Shiva, a household staff supplier business based on a similar model to Acadomia. Shiva offers a personalized cleaning and ironing service for complete maintenance of a home’s interior. The parent company has also recently launched ‘Our Loved Ones,’ which specializes in home help for the elderly or less-abled. 

The key to the success of all of these companies is a 50% tax credit available to customers of personal services or educational support companies. This is not available when hiring freelancers or ‘off-the-books’ providers, and it significantly changes the pricing. Where an hour of personal tutoring might cost 37 euros, after the tax credit it is only 18.50.

The model clearly works, and Shiva now has more than 7,000 qualified housekeepers working from 160 branches throughout France. Our Loved Ones is expected to replicate the same success as Acadomia and Shiva in time.

The man behind this success

The founder of all these successful enterprises, Maxime Aiach, was born in 1962 in Nogent, an eastern suburb of Paris. He studied at Em Lyon, from which he graduated in 1985, before going into finance, working with Citibank for a time. Now a father of three, Aiach is married to a dentist, with whom he spent a year traveling around the world before they got married. The trip included such far-flung destinations as India, Hawaii, Uzbekistan, and Mexico, among many others. Aiach states that this trip has been a ‘remarkable’ experience that forced him to ‘take charge,’ and helped him develop his entrepreneurial spirit that is vital to his current success.

Sources: parismatch.com – acadomia.fr