3 Year Enrollment Plan | What does an Entrepreneur | CEO do? Week 10
What a great week Patricia Maben and I had.
We started the week in Mississippi, working on a 3-year positioning and enrollment plan with a client. In one day, we built a solid 3-year plan with key milestones and ranking expectations to track progress.
For all the talks, conferences, and discussions around strategic enrollment planning, I find almost none that are valuable, hence why few schools achieve meaningful institutional progress. There are a few schools that have a clear, bold vision with measurable goals and invest significantly in the plan, those schools you hear about all the time. Most others do little more than roll up incremental department goals with no cohesive investment plan to achieve them.
What did we do at our workshop?
Here are a few of the steps we took:
--Documented current position / top 20 in our segment
--Analyzed key metrics of 5 institutions in the top 10 to establish what is needed to reach top 10 status. This included changes in: applications, enrollment, NTR, academic profile, admit rate, retention, graduation rate, endowment, and a few other key factors. We studied the past 3 year trends of these factors for these five institutions. We also projected forward what the next three years run-rate would be for them.
--We then examined ourselves, documented our past three years based on those same factors, and projected forward our run-rate.
The base case showed us running in place. Moving down in the rankings was the worst case.
--We then studied precisely what we needed to achieve to gain share and move up to be ranked in the top 10 in our segment in three years.
--We did the math on all key factors and what needed to happen by year. The business world often refers to this as a "revenue walk."
--We then went into the market by student profile breakdown and mapped out a path to achieving those goals, from student recruitment to graduation to giving.
--We mapped out the investments and resources to achieve these goals. Along with other key dependencies.
--Early socialization with the President and key board members was positive. They had not seen such a clear, coherent plan aligned with the strategic goals of the institution presented before.
--This cycle, we are already well on our way to validating that the plan is achievable. The needle is moving, and we are aggressively tracking our metrics.
I have over 25 years of corporate business planning experience and 10 years in higher education. This is rewarding work. We bring this level of planning to our clients every cycle, and we are sure it's one of the reasons our clients' results exceed industry benchmarks.
The rest of the week included one-on-one meetings with executive team members, new product development meetings, client delivery reviews, and client result reviews.
That's it for this week. Thanks for joining us.
You can learn more about The Institute for Higher Education here:
Patricia Maben and I are the co-founders of:
Difference Maker at 3 Enrollment Marketing, Inc.
1 周It was a powerful workshop with a lot of “a-ha” moments. So rewarding knowing that a 5 year plan can be built in a day with the right people in the room.