918: LIVE From the 2024 ⁠Career Education Convention⁠ - with Bill Buchannon, President of EDU Practice, Level/Becker

Welcome back everybody to The EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. This is Dr. Joe Sallustio back with another episode. Of course, my co-pilot, here he is, Douglas Carlson. I think it's Douglas J. Carlson. Douglas Andrew Jilene Carlson, agent. Holy moly. He is head of partnerships at LeadSquared, of course, the amazing partner that has brought us the EdUp Experience here to the Career Education Colleges and Universities Annual Convention in Indianapolis, Indiana as we celebrate the amazing work done by, or contributed to higher education by our amazing colleagues in career education, for-profit schools and so on. Douglas, thanks to LeadSquared and you for bringing us here. We've had, I would say, there has not been one conversation that I could say has not been absolutely cool, incredible, amazing.

Douglas: I couldn't agree more. And what's been really fun is we've gone the complete spectrum. We've talked about admissions, we've talked about FA, we've talked about legal, we've talked about political, we've touched on everything. However, what we've missed and what we're going to rectify is really diving into marketing. So I'm excited for this guest.

Joe: Yeah. And in fact, we, I said, Douglas, can you go get me somebody that I've known for a long time that I can give a bunch of crap to alive here on the podcast that, you know, LeadSquared can't be embarrassed by it because I've known him before I even knew LeadSquared in fact. And you went and you selected the perfect person. Let's bring them in right now. I had some music planned for him, but I won't do that to him. Let's get him in. Here he goes. Let's use this one. He's Bill Buchannon. He is the president of the EDU practice at the combined forces of Lovell and Becker. What's going on Bill, how are you?

Bill: I'm awesome man, how are you?

Joe: It's been a while, hasn't it? It's been five years probably?

Bill: Probably five. But I've known you for 10 at least.

Joe: I remember the last time we were together in Denver.

Bill: Fabulous hotel suite. Some sort of pitch that we were doing.

Joe: I remember that was no, that was that was pre-conference room we were like in some weird conference. Yeah, but that's because you were pitching me on your marketing services, which I bought. You did at National American University when I was there and I will be, I would suffice it to say that we saw our lead count go up by 27% over the time we worked with back from India. I still remember that.

Bill: It was amazing. It was a great run. It was a good run we had, wasn't it?

Joe: It was amazing. Shout out to the one and only son of a gun, Roger Becker, who has since retired, sitting on his ass somewhere. Can I say ass on this podcast? I'm not sure if I can. I have to put the swearing disclaimer on it. Bill, how are you?

Bill: I'm doing well. I'm doing really well.

Joe: Tell us about Lovell and Becker. Tell us the story. So what do you do? How do you do it? What do we do? How do we do it?

Bill: Well, first and foremost, Lovell and Becker have both been phenomenal marketing agencies in the EDU space for the last 10 years plus. Becker's got a 23-year tradition in EDU. Lovell has been in it for 10. We combined forces last year, last August in fact, so it's been 10 months. It seems like a minute, but it's been a long time. It's actually the deal got consummated here at CECU last year.

Joe: Amazing. Secretly. No kidding.

Bill: At a jazz bar as we were in Kansas City was the final, like, got it all together. It was like, yeah, it was a drink and a handshake. It was like the worst kept secret at CECU last year. But we brought together two great agencies, very similar skill sets, but in some ways, pluses and minuses on both sides and been able to bring those together. Now the largest EDU advertiser in the space. Amazing team, we've got 45 professionals working on helping schools generate leads to be able to support their business each and every day. What really sets us apart though is we're not just about driving that initial lead, that 27% you were talking about was great. What really, the part I remember, is not the 20% more leads, but I think it was like 23% more enrolls.

Joe: Higher conversions, yeah.

Bill: Higher conversions and sort of bringing that all the way through the funnel. And so we really focus on deepening our understanding of your data and being able to not just generate more leads, because if you want more leads, I can go get you the phone book. And that's easy. It's about getting the digital data to get more enrolls. And that's where using people like LeadSquared has been incredibly important, because it allows us to get that life cycle data and really get everything from lead to application to enrollment and ultimately start, so that we can make sure we're delivering leads that actually enroll for schools and really getting those high intent folks that everybody at the school's going.

Joe: How is current technology changing or evolving the necessity of sophistication of marketing? I mean, you know, it's artificial intelligence, blah, blah, blah, Google, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, does it mean you need to have better engineers and better experts looking at this 24-seven? Is it really just the same formulas that work with different tools? What do you think?

Bill: So you should have come to my presentation yesterday.

Joe: Do you think that Douglas Carlson would let me get up from this chair one time?

Bill: No. If you did, it would be a lie.

Joe: He's got you working here full time.

Bill: Yikes! I zip tied him to the chair. It's an ugly sight, folks, if you can see it. He's got no arms. It's fuzzy math. Go ahead, tell me.

Bill: The basics is, I would say that you need to have extreme experts at this. I've been doing this for 20 years. I've been doing it in education. At least. I've been doing this in education for 20 years. I've been doing it for 30 years. The difference between good and great used to be five or 10%. Today, the difference between good and great, the people who are doing it amazing, is more like 20 to 25%. And that is because of understanding of AI, it's because of understanding of the deep data and everything that goes along with it. It's about being on the cutting edge with the Googles, the Facebooks, the LinkedIn's and everybody else, of understanding how those platforms go, bringing the backend data, having strong partnerships with the schools and understanding their data and their CRM and being able to pull that data all the way out. And that's how we get those insights.

But yeah, just having an average set of people isn't gonna get it done. There are schools that are unfortunately going out of business, partially because they can't find enough students. And I can tell you for so much of the industry, we're seeing huge, phenomenal year over year results. We put out a study earlier this year for our Q1, and our average client saw 30% more enrolls year over year from Search based on everything we were doing with less than a 30% increase in spend. It was like a 20% increase in spend, 30% more enrollments out of paid search. And it's those sorts of phenomenal results which are fueling growth in many parts of the sector. Now they're in high demand fields, like we'll talk a little bit about that. Some of our biggest clients are folks that have very straightforward roles to play, whether that's welders, whether that's electrical workers, whether it's nurses, whether it's medical assistants, but incredibly high demand. And that's actually where students want to be. More and more, we're seeing more students being interested in those sorts of careers than are interested in a four years bachelor's degree than that's ever been the case. The tide is turning on that. And so it's a great time to be in this space, I think.

Joe: Earlier today. Bill, did you know that?

Bill: I did not.

Joe: Against your will. My god. And I recorded you on a phone call giving an order to your team to turn up the lead flow for your schools. Execute order 66. I mean I don't know what that meant but you know.

Bill: It was, I can tell you it's gone well ever since the order was executed. More leads are coming in as we speak.

Douglas: Well, obviously, don't divulge the secret sauce. But there's more than one person out there doing search engine marketing. What are you doing different? How are you achieving those results?

Bill: The core of what we do is continuously be restless. Continuously be in a learning process which starts with curiosity and it goes through, we've got a very detailed playbook that we call Test, Learn, Grow. Where we're constantly out in the marketplace trying new things. Trying to figure out how to beat the game. We've got a team of experts that treat so much of what's out there, and I hate to say it this way, but like when you're dealing with Google, it's like playing a video game in some ways. And how do you get to the 17th level and how do you get to that next space? And you only do that by really being creative and really being innovative and doing that every day and setting the bar higher to say, I want to get better tomorrow, I'm going to get better the next day, and not be in that set it and forget it kind of environment where you come back and it's like, there's probably people listening to this call right now who work with marketing agencies and it's week over week over week and it's the same story and nothing's changing. What we try to do is try to continuously innovate and try new things. Some of them fail, some of them fail terribly. And the key is when they fail, you stop doing it really quickly. Like I have a saying. Like I have a saying, like I've been wrong more often than I'm right. I'm just right for longer periods of time. Right, so it's the fail fast and then ride what works for a long time. And that's how we've gotten those things is continuously trying new things, getting the feedback. Ultimately the customers are gonna tell us what works and what doesn't. And that's the clients, it's also the individual students.

Douglas: Well, and also, you're welcome to name names if you want for clients. We've actually had quite a few mutual customers and clients of yours on today. One of the things I want to highlight and talk about a little bit is the change in attitude of students. So, welding, trades, et cetera, hasn't always been cool. In fact, the message has really been, no, no, no, you're going to four-year schools. This tide has kind of shifted, and I suspect that's giving you a little bit of tailwinds, but it's not all that. Is that also kind of what you're seeing in the space? Are you taking advantage of those attitudes in your marketing? Can you tell us about how those two things interact together?

Bill: I think that you see that showing up in so much of social media that's out there. I mean, there are some, I was watching this weekend, there are some really cool folks that are out there on TikTok and Instagram that have nothing to do with any of the schools that even are in this sector, but they're out there talking about what it's like to be a female welder. And making it cool and making really cool videos. There's a guy, I think it's called something Knox Wood, I forget his name, who's just a carpenter. He's learned the trade and he's out there and he's got tremendously high following. It's folks like that who are making it be cool. And that's why the demand for four-year education is continuing to fall. And I see that with my, I've got three kids who, one graduates college on this Friday, I've got two more that are in college.

Joe: Right? Some financial relief.

Bill: Yeah. She's going to grad school.

Joe: She's going to grad school, so she's got one more year on the payroll.

Bill: Feeling about this. But there's an end in sight at this point. But as we go through that, it's not been a straight line. So for her, she wants to be a teacher. So it's a fairly straight line. She wants to go do that. I've got one who's honestly struggling with where she wants to go and probably is going to be better off not spending another two years in education but figuring out like what she needs to do for six months or so and gets a career and really gets out there she may change that at some point in her life sure but that's the right thing for her and that's becoming more and more apparent and for folks and their friends and their friends that's that are going through that it's like now more okay to say gosh I want to go be a cosmetologist like they make great money like

It is like where I live in California. Cosmetologists can make 30, 40, 50, 60 dollars an hour. And it's like, they can make amazing if they, particularly if they get their own chair and they get their own stuff. And it's got tremendous repeat business. It's like, I'd love my kid to go do that and have a career and then go anywhere in the country. Go become a nurse. There's all kinds of just great opportunities there. Back to how that relates to marketing. It does give us probably a little bit of a tailwind, but it just means that we have to lean more into the past and really sort of show that passion and show that it's cool and okay to go be a nurse or it's okay to go be a welder. It's okay to want to become an electrician. It's okay to do these things and that's the message I think all the schools have been sending for years. It's now just resonating more with folks.

Joe: You know, one of the things that we don't talk about as much and you're making me think about it, I don't know what you said that made that kind of triggered it for me. But, you know, back in the old days, I've said this before, 10 years ago, there are a lot more career schools than there are now. The sector itself has shrunk. And it's not just a school that that is, you know, you could you could say there were some bad actors there were. There are also a lot of good actors that just didn't make it because of the regulations and stuff. That doesn't just hurt the students, it hurts the ecosystem of businesses that serve that university that either then went out of business because they were maybe they were a single client vendor or maybe, you know, so the number of people that you can serve as an agency in this sector is smaller than it's ever been. So you have to be better than you've ever been to get that business and keep that business.

Can you talk about that strategy part of this? When you're with whoever you're with talking strategy, is that part of it? Like, hey guys, we gotta just be crushing it because these guys can go anywhere. They can go anywhere. If they're gonna stay here, we have just a limited amount of clients that we're gonna serve.

Bill: I don't know the number, somebody else could quote me, the better number, but it's like 86,000 digital agencies in the country. So all the clients have tremendous other places to go. I think it starts base level, table stakes. You gotta produce phenomenal results for your clients day in and day out. You also have to do customer service so that they wanna keep working with you. You gotta show up in a way, have a relationship, have interactions. I spend a ton of time on the road, a ton of time on the road, traveling to meet with people, even in a world where we're 100% virtual, there's nothing as good as going out to dinner. Catching up on life, getting to know people, it gets you into a better space. And then you constantly have to be going back and setting that bar higher and higher and saying, okay, last year we got 20% better results than we did the year before, what are we gonna do this year? And really working a deliberate plan to drive that results day in and day out, make sure that you're actually seeing positive growth, correcting those failures immediately, and doing the things that are winning so that you can keep the business moving forward for your clients. Happy Clients makes everything possible.

Douglas: Well, and I want to talk about some of the marketing trends that are out there. So you can't talk about marketing and not talk about AI. You can't talk about marketing and not talk about sort of digital and social media. Do you have a sense or what's your opinion on what's hype versus what's actually creating value today and maybe how that will, how, you know, crystal ball, how that might evolve over the next, you know, two to five years?

Bill: Yeah. So it's, I mean, most things are hype today, but they're going to create tremendous value over the next three to five years, and if we don't jump on them now, we're not going to be able to ride it. AI is a great example, right? AI, people are like, okay, what am I going to do with ChatGPT? I was having a conversation with a school owner earlier today, not a client of ours, but just was a fun conversation, and he's taken and trained his ChatGPT to look at his SIS systems, student information system, and be able to determine the signs that somebody is likely to attrit, so that he can intervene in that. And he's using that in real time with that, and then he's also got it so that it triggers messages that goes to his staff that says, go intervene with this person and have those conversations. And so it's things like that. And he's just taken that as just a smart guy trying to figure it out. Like no one's packaged it, he hasn't figured it out. He's just got like five schools and he's doing a great job at it.

But it's things like that that are gonna drive the innovation. AI is about getting rid, content, we used to pay a lot of money for content, whether that's writers, whether that's code to drive things like retention that I was just describing, that's all just content. AI makes that content creation practically free. And so that's really the innovation. You can try stuff like that, that before you'd have to go hire a programmer and do stuff, you can now just ask it questions. And every day in what we do, what we've tried to do is enable that in our staff and our workforce to allow them to figure out how to get rid of mundane manual tasks so that we can use smart people to try to solve the bigger problems as opposed to how do you do the manual stuff. So a great example of that in marketing is we literally had a guy the other day who was able to take a whole spreadsheet of data and give you the three insights on a whole spreadsheet of data and say this number's up by this, this number's up by this, this number's up by this.

And then do a daily summary of that that posts automatically into Slack so that when everybody gets in in the morning they know the status of the numbers so that somebody doesn't have to go do that, do that analysis and write it down. And just simple things like that that just make everybody's life easier. That's where the future is. It's in small increments. It's not gonna be a wave. It's not gonna be something that comes down from on high. It's not gonna be Google releases this great new thing. It's gonna be how all of us use it in the smallest ways possible that make the biggest impact. I think about it like how can I save myself 20, 30 minutes a day doing dumb shit and be able to do far more interesting stuff that's gonna move one of my clients' businesses forward with that time instead.

AI is freeing things up. That's the way it's working. It's also a great thing with the marketing platforms and stuff like that where it's really automating stuff and automating bidding. But a lot of that just becomes table stakes. It's what we add on top of that and how we enhance that. And that's where the fun is and that's where the challenge is still in the business.

Joe: Yeah. Do you use AI for anything kind of fun in your personal life besides business? I don't use it in the night. Outfit choices perhaps? Outfit choices? No?

Bill: I'm not sure I'm actually willing to divulge that on the podcast. I don't know. But there are lots of great uses for it in business. I actually don't personally use it a lot on my personal life. I have a very simple personal life that I like to leave. But it is amazing in making things simpler at work. It's amazing at organizing information and all those sorts of stuff.

Joe: Yeah, I've been using, I actually have been using it for advice, kids advice. Interesting.

I'll say, you know, my son is going to make his soccer team and he's learning the, you know, the scissor, right? The dual scissor move. You know, what's the best way to teach it? So I might get him out in the grass. Even though I played for a number of years, some of those things, you know, they leave you. Or, you know, my kids talking back, what's the best way to handle this or whatever. So because you would look up an article anyway, but at least it saves me the time of scouring the Google results to find the article that's going to be most relevant. It gives me what I need.

I will tell you one of my, and since we're talking about AI, let's leave everybody with a couple of tips. My favorite AI program still is barely, like the bear, AI, barely.ai. You run it over the top of any article and it gives you an executive summary without having to read it.

Bill: That's nice.

Joe: And you know, because I scour every day, I go through as many higher ed articles as I can find. It would take a long time to read them. So I run barely over the top and it gives me the executive summary and tells me whether it's worth for me to dive in and read the entire article or not. So that's my favorite one. I don't know if that helps answer your question, but there you go. You didn't ask me, by the way.

Bill: Yeah, that's fair.

Douglas: Well, my application for it is exactly that. It's more like playing around with it, like asking kind of ridiculous questions. And I try to break it. And you know, you sometimes break it. And more often than not, it actually gives pretty relevant answers. So it's amazing. It's fun.

Joe: Yeah. I put in, why should I interview Bill Buchanan on the EdUp Experience podcast? And it broke. It didn't give me an answer. There's no good reason to interview me on the podcast. Let's just be honest.

Bill, what's next for Lovell and Becker? Like what comes next and what's the outlook look like and where you going as an organization?

Bill: The outlook is amazing. What's next though is we're really doubling down, tripling down on AI right now. Right? I mean, tomorrow if anybody's still around the show, our CEO, Patrick Patterson's here, doing a session tomorrow on AI. We're trying to figure out how to use AI in everything we do. Everything from copywriting to image generation to analyzing data to figuring out next steps. It is a tremendous push throughout the organization to really try to figure out how to double down on that and to make it be something that's truly a differentiator and something that really helps our clients get to the next level, whether that's helping them with chat, whether that's helping them figure out how to analyze their data, whether it's helping them connect dots, or if it's giving advice to them if they need to coach their kid on how to do scissors. So there you go.

Douglas: There you go. Any final questions for the one and only Bill Buchanan?

Joe: Yeah, I think so. Taking everything we've talked about and applying it back to the education space. What do you think education looks like over the next two to five years? And you've answered some of that, but I'd be curious to kind of elaborate a little bit further.

Bill: So I think education's going to continue the path that's going on, which is a fight towards simplification towards career goals. I'm talking about whether you're talking about Harvard or you're talking about cosmetology school and everything in between, there's an increased focus from students on I want to be able to do something when I get out with it. What is that thing? It described that to me. My daughter just went through this process. My three daughters went through the process. I love that you have real world applications.

Joe: Yeah, and they're like obsessed. What job am I going to get with this thing? And going to grad school, like the decision was, I don't see how this is going to get me a job, this program. This program over here, I can see how it's gonna get me a job. My daughter literally turned down, it's grad school at Stanford with a scholarship because she couldn't see, it was too theoretical for her. She wanted something practical and so she went to a different school and went down that path, right? Because that was what she wants to get a job, right? She's not interested in like...

Bill: No offense to the PhD on the podcast, but she's not.

Joe: EDD. EDD, okay. Either way. I wouldn't want to have anybody turn down their nose at me because I falsely said PhD. Heaven forbid.

Bill: But you know, she wants to go get her masters, but she's like, I don't want to be a researcher. I want to be hands-on. And that's where education is going, right? And it's continued to innovate. I think COVID, rightly or wrongly, whenever you think about things that happened to COVID, there was a lot of bad things came out of it. The best things in education is we broke down the wall on online and sort of like dramatically accelerated and proved that any program, any college can figure out how to go online and really try to break that down. And so you're seeing just the acceptance of online go up dramatically. I think that's only going to accelerate as we go forward. You got innovative schools here that have embraced things like virtual reality and those sorts of things into their learning. I think we're gonna see more of that as we go forward. And I think it's just gonna make it more interesting. The value equation though is going to be the most important. Students want to figure out how to get value out of education.

My kids, all their skill set, all their friends, they're like trying to figure out the economics of things and it's like, you mean I gotta take on 50, 60, 70, $80,000 of debt, what am I gonna get at the end? How is this going to work? Different time, different kids.

Joe: Yeah, it used to be. When I went to school it just didn't cost that much. And I didn't know what the hell it cost. My mom and dad took out Parent Plus loans and then I paid them back for 20 years. It's just amazing and it's like...

Bill: So they're looking for that value and I think there's going to be continuous push towards like making sure that the cost value ratio is right. And that's the thing, and I come back to this conference we're all at and what's here, the great thing about this sector and this part of education is that's the core of who they are, is really understanding that ratio and really making sure they're delivering solid value to their students.

Douglas: Yeah. And I love that vision, and I think some of that's always also been true at Harvard. For instance, if you want to be an investment banker, well you make a lot of money going to Harvard.

Bill: Exactly. And that's actually a very logical career path. Maybe not because the education is so much better, but your network to a job is what you have.

Joe: Amazing networking.

Douglas: Yeah, exactly. So I think I love that vision and I could not agree with it more. And I love also the fact that it isn't just about a sector, it's about the entire sector needs to provide value at every step of the way. And I completely buy into that vision.

Joe: Yeah. Well, there you have it, everybody. He's my guest co-host. He's Douglas Carlson, he's head of partnerships at LeadSquared, our amazing sponsor. He brought, I would say, an old friend, and I mean old friend, to the microphone. He's Bill Buchannon, he is the president of the EDU practice at the combined forces of Level and Becker. Bill, thanks for joining, man, and good to catch up with you and hear about all the great things you're doing.

Bill: Thanks, man, it was great to be with you guys.

Joe: Ladies and gentlemen, you've just ed-uped.