From the Desk of Tom King, Cleveland, Ohio increasing enrollments.
I can remember clearly the day, eight years ago, I first learned how I could increase our school’s revenue 30-40% without spending to any additional money to do so.
When I first met the folks at Enrollment Resources and listened to their 30-40% revenue increase claims, I rolled my eyes and thought, “here we go with yet another too-good-to-be-true pitch.” At the time, I’d been struggling to find ways to improve our revenue and, of course, increasing our marketing budget was not an option.
How could some laid back guys from Canada help me out?
First, they had the ‘guts’ to guarantee the results
During that first meeting I spoke with Enrollment Resources co-founder Shane Sparks. I remember him saying: “Look Tom, there are promises or proof. Here’s our promise: When we are finished working with you after a few weeks, if we can’t find you 20x our fee in increased revenue OR you just simply feel you didn’t get enough value, I want you to adjust the invoice to whatever you deem to be fair…even $0.”
That got my attention. Guys who make lofty claims and back them up are rare, especially in Career Ed.
A History Lesson Put Things in Context, now the Guarantee Made Sense
Shane then gave some context to his bold claim, insisting on giving me a short history lesson about a guy named Edward Deming. I’m paraphrasing, but here’s a summary:
After the Allies won the Second World War, they shrewdly created something called the Marshall Plan, where they set about to reconstruct the economies of both Germany and Italy.
A year later the Allies defeated Japan and then set about to help them reconstruct their economy. They decided to ship over to Japan a controversial American Economist, Edward Deming to help with Japan’s reconstruction. Deming had developed a new economic theory called Choke Point Theory. He stated that any process could only move as quickly as the weakest part of the process, the weakest link. His view was if there was a choke point, most of the resources invested downstream of the weak link were flushed. Open the weakest part of any process and magically everything works a lot better!
The Japanese Industrialists, battered from the war, were all ears and enthusiastically followed his economic laws. They also embraced another father of the Quality movement, Joseph Moses Juran, who shared his ‘Law of the Precious Few’ which was all about focusing on powerful leverage activities while putting no effort into useless activity. To make a long story short, Deming and Juran’s disciples such as Toyota, Mitsubishi, Sony to name a few, created the world’s second largest economy. Not bad.
You want to be like Toyota, Tom?
OK, now I was intrigued…
Shane went on to explain: “Tom, what my partner Gregg and I did was take Deming and Juran’s core ideas and applied them to Career Education, specifically Enrollment Management. We can do for you what Deming did for Toyota. Do you want to be like Toyota, Tom?”
I came to understand how a management system borne of Japanese manufacturing sector could be used so effectively in my Marketing and Admission departments here in Cleveland. We went through what he called an “Enrollment Management Scorecard” where we broke down every tactic and task in our Enrollment Management process and compared my school’s performance to North American Best Practices. While many of the things we identified I was aware of, I also remember there were opportunities isolated for me that “I didn’t know I didn’t know.” It was an amazing exercise in clarity.
I stayed with the principles taught to me eight years ago by Enrollment Resources and am pleased to say over 8 years, I increased the enrollment of my school by over 650% while keeping within my budgets. It was a great ride!
Now I have an exciting new challenge. I get to share the Scorecard with you. I am now part of Enrollment Resources, leading schools like yours through their proprietary Scorecard process.
Let’s Take a Test Drive
Full Disclosure: one reason for our excellent guarantee is when we start the Scorecard process, we are not 100% sure we can help you. There are just too many external variables we are not aware of when we start. So, here is what’s fair. I’ll take you through the first one or two Scorecard sessions, no strings attached. It will become evident very quickly if we can help you.
What I promise you is this; even if we can’t help, you ‘will’ take away three or four free actionable items that you can easily implement yourself without any outside help. That’s your downside. I want to make this ‘performance improvement test drive’ a valuable experience for you, as your time is valuable.
The next step
Contact me to set up some time for us to talk and let’s see if I can help you increase your enrollment 30-40% without you having to buy advertising, hire additional staff, or increase your budget… Email [email protected] or call 216-577-8296
