How Our Engagement Process Works
If this is your first time engaging with us, here’s a snapshot of our process.
- The complimentary WhiteBoard Session: This is just as much an opportunity for us to get to know you as it is an opportunity for you to evaluate us. We give you 2-3 hours of our time to help think through a problem, opportunity (or group of them). As you see us in action, you get an idea of how we think and operate. We also get to see how you think and operate – so we can decide if we’re the right fit for you.
- The kickoff engagement: Our initial engagements with most clients has a price tag of under $75,000 and involve a very specific set of deliverables and outcomes. It could be a audit/assessment. It could be the hosting of a series of ThinkSpaces with the objective of positioning you to design your 3-5 year strategic plan. If this is all you need from us, we finish the project and stay friends.
- The bigger roadmap/strategy: As we gain a richer understanding of your organization during the first two stages, both you and us often identify areas where major progress could be made if the right people, strategy, and execution were put in place. That’s where our people become your secret weapon and workforce. Work at this stage could involve re-design of the student experience to something that is modern and frictionless. It could involve the design of a ground-up, enrollment strategy aimed at doubling enrollment at the college. It could even be a roadmap to foster intrapreneurship and innovation to thrive in the new normal. Roadmap/strategy engagements like this are never built in an ivory tower. We go deep in the trenches and get hundreds, if not thousands of voices involved in crowdsourcing the best and brightest strategies that align specifically to your school. We have no report template. We use no cookie-cutter tools. It’s always custom, and ground-up. These engagements are typically 6 months only require a low six-figure investment.
- The long-term engagement: As clients see the true value of our firm, it’s only a matter of time before they embed us as political insiders, trusted advisors, and transformation catalysts within their organization. We essentially become an extension of your staff and deploy senior executives and talented staff to think, work, and act like they belong on your leadership team. We don’t sit in staff meetings, but we advise the people running the meeting. It is this level of cultural integration of high performance leaders into your team, that elevates the culture of performance in your school, while getting important things done. This is typically when we are executing on the roadmap/strategy designed in the previous step. On any given day, we could find ourselves bouncing from leadership development, and technology transformation, to revamping outdated policies/procedures, and optimizing business processes. The term of this engagement is yearly, with renewals based on mutual agreement.