Document Your Current Business Model

Using our proprietary mapping techniques, you document your academic enterprise’s present business model to engender a collective understanding of your value proposition, market segments, and revenue and cost structures.

Study Performance Trends

We apply our data analytics, visualization, and dashboarding tools so you can thoroughly examine recruitment, enrollment, completions, financial, and other operating trends essential for informing future planning and decision making.

Assess Your Capabilities

You use our Capabilities Inventory to catalog your present capabilities and resources that fuel your differentiated value in the marketplace—and identify what additional capabilities are needed for your business model’s success.

Establish Your Brand and Reputational Baseline

Through our reliable opinion research, you learn what brand characteristics and messages are important to students, alumni, donors, and community partners, how well you’re communicating them, and what new positioning to undertake.

Build a Momentum Case

You employ our decision modeling tools to forecast a Momentum Case of future five-year operating and performance trends under your current business model.

Analyze Market Demand

You have us complete market demand analyses for your academic and professional programs to show what disciplines are growing, how instructional delivery may be changing, and what competitors challenge you for market position and share.

Reconnoiter Competitors

You set us loose on a deep dive into your programs’ principal competitors, in order to document critical information on their program and curricular designs, delivery options, market and brand positioning, resources, pricing, performance trends, and other key competitive intelligence.

Assemble Occupational Trends and Forecasts

You rely on our extensive sets of national, state, and regional labor data to determine how your academic programs align with current and future occupational and industry needs in your targeted market regions.

Determine Future Forces

With our guidance, your study teams of faculty and administrators consider the futures of the professions, industries, and markets served by your programs and complete “future forces” analyses relevant to your business model.

Complete a Comparative Value Assessment

You employ our proprietary Comparative Value Assessment instrument to visually map your position among competitors based on comparative value, size, market share, and price in order to determine how to focus your planning strategies.

Envision Business Model Scenarios

Through a series of our expertly designed workshops, you engage program leadership, faculty, and other constituencies to synthesize the performance and situation intelligence from the first two phases and conceive a range of business model scenarios for future development.

Decision-Model and Test the Scenarios

Using the business intelligence platform on which the Momentum Case is built, we load the necessary inputs for each business model scenario and derive the resulting enrollment, recruitment, credit hour production, revenue, financial, and other operating forecasts.

Choose the Best Business Model

Through a series of decision-modeling exercises and consultations, we assist your planning team in evaluating the various business model scenarios and deciding which one portends the strongest strategic advantages.

Define Market Segments and Personas

We work alongside your planning team to define the market segments that will be targeted by your academic and professional programs and offerings and to fashion vivid personas of each segment’s geodemographic profile, needs, and constraints to inform program, brand, and marketing strategy.

Vitalize Your Brand Platform and Extensions

We collaborate with your internal marketing team and external creative counsel to refresh your academic enterprise’s brand platform and extensions in congruence with the business model—or to create a brand platform if one is not in place.

Improvement and Expansion Strategies: Existing Programs

Using our planning templates, you and your planning teams develop and explicate a set of strategies to strengthen your existing programs and expand their value, service, and market reach.

Launch Strategies: New Programs and Offerings

Informed by our Situation Intelligence findings, your planning teams identify new program opportunities, select those with the greatest potential, design those offerings congruent with student and market needs, and start on launch plans.

Delivery Strategies: Instructional & Learning Technologies

In light of the competitive environment and future needs, your planning teams devise how to extend your programs’ value and impact through investments in alternative delivery methods and teaching and learning technologies.

Effectiveness Strategies: Student Learning Experiences

Cognizant of student performance outcomes, your planning teams determine the best ways that they can enrich the student learning experience and enhance the effectiveness of your programs, curricula, delivery, and instruction.

Marketing Strategies: Reputation and Recruitment

Through cross-functional planning teams of admission, recruitment, marketing, and branding staff, we help you create brand communications, marketing, and recruitment strategies to reach your business model’s enrollment goals.

Operational Strategies: Organization and Support

Your leadership and planning teams formulate operational strategies requisite for your enterprise’s success in cultivating partnerships, organizing administrative functions, staffing, refining price and cost structures, securing professional accreditations, managing external resources and vendors, and other actions.

Schedule Strategy Implementation

Applying our business intelligence and optimization tools, you construct an implementation schedule for the business plan that sequences your strategies for greatest gain, value recapture, and ongoing reinvestment.

Budget Resource Investments and Value Recapture

With our assistance, you configure annual operating and investment budgets that make the case for adequate institutional funding and show how your business plan recaptures sufficient economic value to sustain itself.

Finalize Operating Pro Formas

We translate the outcomes from our decision model into five-year operating pro formas that document your plan’s enrollment, recruitment, revenue, and financial targets, and which electronically update at the close of each business cycle.

Set Performance and Outcome Indicators

We guide your leadership and planning teams to identify and detail the critical KPIs by which you can measure, report on, and adjust your college’s, school’s, or division’s performance in implementing your business plan and attaining the outcomes of your strategies.

Document the Plan and Secure Approvals

We collaborate with you to create the documents necessary to attain institutional approvals of your business plan and budget, as well as to meet any governance and accreditation requirements.  We can also help prepare public print or web versions of the plan to support fundraising, reputation-building, or other constituency outreach.

Design and Publish Implementation Dashboard

Using our plug-and-play BI templates, we can design and build interactive dashboards that track your progress in implementing the business plan and report on your success in reaching annual goals and strategic KPIs.