Basic system setup required to run an education consultancy.

After working in the industry for about 8 years now, that too, focusing on the system i think these are the initial set up one needs to have to smoothen basic operation of an education consulting business.

In few paragraphs below I delve into various systems and tools. Most of them will not be a new things or unheard of. However, I am presenting how differently they can be used so that the business could be sustainable and scalable.

Email System:

I feel this is the most important system. I am not talking about personal Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook emails, but office emails (e.g., [email protected]). This is needed to separate all your office communications, documents, and access to other systems from cluttering your employee's personal email, which later becomes very difficult to retrieve, remove access to, or delete. Office emails can be controlled by admin logins, and access can be easily revoked from the user, preventing data loss and many other forms of mishaps.

Office email is necessary not just for communication, but also to sign up and use other systems like CRM, storage, productivity tools, and subscriptions to information, and much more. I insist on having one email for each employee, which is not properly exercised in Nepal. Rather, they are using one general email like frontdesk@..., which is accessed by two people sharing the same password.

Companies can take advantage from packages like Office 365 and Google Workspace as they not only offer email but whole lot of other services as well. One feature I wanted to talk here is the Shared Inbox or Collaborative Inbox.

A shared mailbox is a mailbox that multiple users can use to read and send email messages. Shared mailboxes can also be used to provide a common calendar, allowing multiple users to schedule and view vacation time or work shifts.

The use of these shared inbox will help scale your email like admission@... or application@... or info@.... . A team can handle the emails, and the company owner can also be included. There is not issue of forgetting the password. However, one needs to having their own email ID through which they will access the shared inbox or collaborative inbox. Thus having one official email for each employee is an absolutely necessity. These days many CRMs integrate email in their system, which are mostly shared inboxes. If you are not using such inboxes, you might miss out on many things.

Storage:

Where to you keep all the files of the business? This includes documents from all departments like Administration, Finance and Accounts, HR, Marketing, and Sales. It could be very important documents like your business registration, taxation, audit reports, contracts while on the student front, it could be dealing with highly confidential documents like passport - an identification document of your student. It is given that all these have to be stored in proper folder structure. And going little beyond organizing, it has to be searchable.

A lot of companies might want to organize the folder as per calendar year or fiscal year, which is not a problem, but having a consistent folder structure through out the company, with all team understanding it and adhering to it, is always a challenge to overcome. On top of that, a high employee attrition rate brings another challenge in training the employee to reach to that level.

I view the folder structure as a matrix - how many folders at the screen with how many sub-folders deep? Of course there is not correct answer to that, but one will need to think in order to organize this. Another thing to really consider is the folder or file naming convention. When documents are scanned, they can have names like Scan2409203.jpg with the date stamp, which does not tell what document it is. While naming the file, I suggest to avoid the underscore '__', as it makes it difficult to search. Rather use a hyphen '-' which will ease the search. Additionally, naming the folder properly can also help reduce the sub-folder levels. A B2B organization receiving student application from their Recruitment Partners, can write the name of the Partner following by the folder name, which lessen sub-folder levels. This is also advantageous. See image below to gain clarity on this

And to note, Google Drive given 100 levels of nested folders while Microsoft One Drive gives 300 to 500.

P.S.: Here is a great file and folder management YouTube Video, I've found:

CRM / Lead Generation Software

The requirement of business is such that one single person's brain is not enough at all. Things store as concept in one's mind must be transmitted to the all team members. To achieve the business target one needs to collaborate. Thus, just writing notes in a piece of paper, sending WhatsApp group messages or instructing over the phone will not work. Also, it is not scalable model. You will need something called a CRM - Customer Relationship Management Software.

Now it is not wise to expect one CRM will solve all business problems. There are various types of CRM. Some focused for Lead Generation while others might be in Lead Conversion, and some might have both components but might focus on one more than the other. The whole idea is to visually see the customer's journey, see how the team is serving to your customer and generate meaningful analytics for informed decision making.

Lead generation goes from making potential customer being aware of your product services to being interested to come to your store/office. These would be prospects but not yet your client. Now form that point onwards to the customer purchasing the product is Lead Conversion. CRMs which your marketing department uses would more be focused towards, Lead Generation, while your sale team could use CRM focused towards Lead Conversion. It is little difficult to achieve both with one software. But I could be wrong and I'd love to be proved wrong.

CRMs such as HubSpot, Zoho, Salesforce are much diverse and fit most of the industries. There are other such as Agentcis, Condat Solution, CMST are some of the International Education Industry specific CRMs that might be a good fit for the organization. These will not only help you grow, organize and manage your customer base but also open door for collaboration and integration with other software and leveraging automation. With all these, your business can run at a different level achieve more each day gaining momentum.

The CRM can give you information and data from the dashboard in various charts and number portraying you the actual scenarios of your business in real time. If you want to know the exact number of students increase, decrease and In Progress, CRM could give it to you. An example chart that can give you such information is presented below:

Besides using the CRM, a business can still achieve similar organizing capabilities from Excel or Spreadsheets too. Though it can be collaborative online, it is still limited by its nature. There are lot of manual tasks that you will have to go through. One small error decreases the credibility of the whole data.

Alternatively, you can use simple Task Management, Collaborative software like Asana, Trello, that will help you achieve more - not miss anything, be reminded to your To-Dos, facilitate collaboration, complete your task and say "Done!".

If anyone wants to know more about systems for the industry, I'll be happy to connect.