821: LIVE from ⁠InsightsEDU⁠ 2024 - with Bruce Douglas, CEO, EducationDynamics

Joe Sallustio: Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, it's your time to up on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. We are continuing to make education your business here on day two at Insights EDU, hosted by Education Dynamics in Phoenix, Arizona. Beautiful Phoenix, Arizona - the weather could not have been better. They did let us, Elvin and I, out of the cage. We got lunch upside up there in between recording 13 episodes with amazing leaders across higher education as we talk about marketing, enrollment, and what it takes to be the best to catalyze your enrollment into the future. 

And of course, for those of you that don't know, I am a happy, happy, happy client and customer of Education Dynamics who help us at Lindenwood University boost our new student recruitment, and things are working beautifully. So I couldn't be happier and I hope that you get a chance to talk to the team at Education Dynamics like I did. I say that this isn't a plug, that's not a paid ad, that is the truth. And I do it every single day with the great team that Education Dynamics provides over at Lindenwood.

But I'm not here to talk about that. I am here to talk about Insights EDU and the gathering of amazing higher ed professionals, enrollment marketing professionals, looking at what the future holds. Education Dynamics released a report, the Online College Student Report - I think this is the 13th annual report, chock full of insights. And yesterday, we were privileged enough to interview Katie Tomlinson, who unloaded a bunch of data on us. I've never met anybody that loves data so much. I mean, she really loved the data, which is awesome, right? Because you produce great reports. 

But none of this comes together without great leadership. And I have a great leader in front of me today, ladies and gentlemen. He's Bruce Douglas and he is the CEO of Education Dynamics. Bruce, welcome to EdUp.

Bruce Douglas: Mike, thank you very much. That's the best introduction I've ever gotten.

Joe Sallustio: Ladies and gentlemen, Bruce Douglas. We got to do it. So now somebody's got to beat it. CEO of Education Dynamics. Bruce, welcome to the EdUp Experience. First of all, thank you for bringing us here. It's been a privilege and an honor to record with amazing leaders at your company, Education Dynamics, and in and around higher ed. How's the conference going so far?

Bruce Douglas: I think fantastic. I've been to about, I think, eight or nine of the 13. I haven't been to every single one. And this one is top in everything. It's top in everything I've ever seen. And I would say having also been to tons of industry events that we don't host, I'm a little bit biased here, but I think this is the best industry event there is for the adult higher ed space.

Joe Sallustio: Bullseye. I would say one of the things that I've liked the most is it's intimate. It's big, but it's intimate. These people are here to really learn and you're providing great sessions, great opportunities for really digging in. There's a big difference between a panel session where the audience is sitting back and not doing anything. There's been engagement. There's been questions. There's been Q&A, a back and forth in all these sessions. That engagement, I think, sets the difference for what you're doing here at Education Dynamics. And is this a planned part of this to say we need to engage these people?

Bruce Douglas: Very much so. I think when people are talking at you, you don't absorb as much. When you get a chance to ask questions and interact with the speakers and the panelists, it's the best. So whether you're asking questions on the app, whether you're raising your hands, interjecting your opinions, that may not even be a question. We're looking for points of view from the audience because we've got so many experts from so many different schools. That's what we're really looking for.

Joe Sallustio: And it's a dynamic interaction. And obviously, there are a lot of conferences you go to where you feel people are talking at you. And this one feels like more of a dialogue. I like your style, dude. Bruce, tell me the Education Dynamics story for everybody listening here. You know, they've heard of Education Dynamics. They have seen the reports that you put out. I know that for sure. I have so many colleagues across higher ed. We talked about the reports. How did this company get to this point? Because you've been here for a long time. You've been working in different roles. But tell us the story of how Education Dynamics has gotten to this point.

Bruce Douglas: Sure. So first of all, I've been with the company for 12 years. The company is a little short of 20 years old. So I was not here at the beginning part. So I can't speak to every last detail of that aspect. I am a corporate hire rather than a founder. But ultimately, the company goes back almost 20 years, as I mentioned.

And it started for many years in the early days as really a lead generation company, finding new prospective students, mostly for for-profit schools back in the day. That was probably true for the first six, seven, eight years of the company. And it became kind of the biggest player in that particular space, both organically, plus buying a few other companies and kind of rolling them up together. When I joined back in 2012, the company was pretty much a powerhouse in that area.

For reasons that I won't rehash here, but I think most people know, a lot of schools in the for-profit space started getting in trouble with Obama administration regulations. Really, the rise of nonprofit schools getting into the adult space, a little bit late to wake up to it, but once they got to it, there were a lot of nonprofit schools that kind of started eating the lunch of a bunch of those for-profit schools. And we realized if we're going to be an ongoing entity, we need to do other things beyond lead generation.

So we started what we now call kind of a managed services division and said, we kind of stepped back and said, what are we great at? We're great at marketing. We're great at running kind of call centers and contact centers. We're great at working with schools. We feel we intimately understand the adult learner. We have great kind of reporting and analytics, but it's not going to be enough if we just stick to the lead gen side of the house. So we said, let's take that expertise and do it for individual schools. And that sounds kind of like a no-brainer. On the other hand, when you're known for one thing, it's kind of hard to pivot. It sounds easy in the PowerPoint, but it was a lot harder, and there were lots of ups and downs. We weren't quite sure we were going to make that division kind of stick for a while.

Joe Sallustio: It's almost like having to re-penetrate the industry in your own industry. It's almost like a re-imagining of the business with new mission, new focus.

Bruce Douglas: For sure, for sure. And not everyone kind of took to that right away. It took quite some time. And really what it comes down to is it's kind of a marketing agency. You've just got to prove yourself one school at a time. You finally get that first client, the first three clients, the first five clients. And the best thing to do is not worry about the sales effort. Do a great job for those schools. Get them results.

Joe Sallustio: That's right. You get them results. Word of mouth will get out there. You'll have a story to tell. You'll have a case study to put out there. You'll have something to prove.

Bruce Douglas: And it was just grinding away day after day after day and just proving ourselves. And really kind of there's some rebranding and repositioning that had to go in it and kind of corporate marketing or marketing communications as you might call it, but the reality is we had to deliver for schools and that was first and foremost in our minds all the time. You know, I believe we have and it's taken a lot to get there. But we've really kind of transformed the company where really at this point, you know, the majority of our business is actually that managed services side. The lead gen side is still very successful, very established. I'm still the biggest player in the space there, but it's a much smaller space than it used to be.

Joe Sallustio: Very slim. Exactly. It's a different claim to fame.

Bruce Douglas: But we're really proud of what we built on the managed services side of the house. And that's really where the growth engine is going to be for the next, you know, X number really for foreseeable future.

Joe Sallustio: That's a fact. That's a fact. What's leadership been like? If you transform from one thing to something else, you can't take everyone with you because not everyone's going to be with you. You have to reimagine what leadership looks like, especially as you went through. I know you went through some acquisitions. And so you took big companies or medium-sized companies and absorbed them, merged with them, acquired them, had to culturally look at things, reimagine leadership teams. That's easy work while maintaining your client base, while still getting results, while getting referrals, which I think is a really important part of this business in higher ed is, "Yeah, I use so and so, you should use them too," right? Talk about the transformation that had to take place and your role in that because it is very easy to lose focus on the culture when you have to provide for the client and the balance that has to be there.

Bruce Douglas: Well, I think and this is like truism, I think for all businesses everywhere, it's all about the people and we're ultimately and more importantly, we're a service industry. Okay. It's not like we have a widget that we sell. It's not like we have a retail store that we put salespeople in front of. It's all about the people. So you gotta have the right people all the time. So whether they came organically with you or came through acquisitions, I'll mention in a second, the reality is, and you're right, not everyone made the cut. There were people that were amazing for us. I mean, we wouldn't be here if some of those people hadn't done their jobs 10, nine, eight, seven, six, five years ago, but the reality is they weren't always right for the organization at a certain point in time. We did have to cut some people loose, where some people left on their own because they realized they weren't the right fit. 

But yeah, and I think the biggest thing I'd say from a leadership vantage point is you can have an ego, but check your ego at the door and make sure that you listen really well and you absorb the best of other organizations. And here's the best example I could give. We thought we had the greatest company and look at us. We're succeeding. We're finally growing this managed services and it's all because of the culture we've built. And we made a kind of a big acquisition about four years ago and we bought the majority of the assets of ThruLine Marketing, which is still an ongoing company, but we bought two different divisions from ThruLine Marketing. And we absorbed, you know, exactly the exact number, 150 people. It was the biggest acquisition we've done in our history. And it was really transformational. Here was a, we were a successful company, they were a successful company. We could say, hey, we're the acquiring company. It's our way or the highway. You could have said that. I mean, it was our choice to say that. But the reality is that just would have been flat out stupid. 

You listen, you learn, you absorb and go, wow, they were doing those five things actually way better than we were. But you know, we had a couple of things that we were doing that they weren't doing. Let's find the best of both worlds and merge it together. Make those people feel at home. Make the U.S. there. You know, they have their own histories.

Joe Sallustio: Take away their uncertainties too about what this merger might mean.

Bruce Douglas: Exactly. And we have to assure them, listen, your jobs are safe. No one quite believes that on the first day. OK. And you have to prove it over and over to them like, no, you're not going to be fired. It's not like you're going to stay here for six months and we're going to get rid of you. And that you can say all you want. Then you just have to do it.

Joe Sallustio: You got to live the promise or else the promise is hollow.

Bruce Douglas: But we took the best of both those cultures and merged it together to ultimately create a different but way better company and culture. I think that's proven by a lot of the talent that we still have today. The majority of the leadership that came over in that ThruLine acquisition are still with the company. Not every single person, but the majority are still with us all playing leadership roles.

And we are so much a better company for that and we made other acquisitions too and we tried to do the same thing take the best of those companies. Sometimes the best of was just technology. Yes, take their technology. Sometimes it's people, sometimes it's culture. Sometimes it's a view of analytics and that there's no one - this is not acquisitions and I've personally done seven of them in my tenure.

Joe Sallustio: Wow.

Bruce Douglas: And it's not cookie cutter. Everyone's totally different, right? It's all unique. That's right. And we've made our fair share of mistakes. I'm not going to say they all went perfectly. They didn't, you know, one or two, I wish to take back right now if I could, but that's life. You know, you just figure it out as you go along. You take bets and you know, that's the only way to go as a company. You just got to take educated bets.

Joe Sallustio: And people always forget that the part you mentioned, it's the integration. Yeah. You have to integrate them into the company and that's the only way to - I want to talk about point in time. You said it's a point. Not everybody makes it in a point in time. We're at a really interesting point in time in higher education in that value of higher ed is being questioned. The traditional student age demographic is declining and everybody goes, you know what, just, I've said this a million times in the podcast. We're just going to go after the adult market. We're just going to, you know, we're going to do it in-house. We're going to start doing our own marketing. We're going to go after the adult market. And really what it is is this.

I like your plan, except it sucks. So let me do the plan. And that way it might be really good. Right. That's what everyone is going after the adult student. And it is not the same as a traditional student. So these institutions of for-profits were really good at marketing. And say what you want about for-profits. They invested really heavy, sometimes 20 to 30 percent of their gross revenue in marketing and messaging and going after students. On the nonprofit side, it's a little not as prominent marketing in terms of dollars and investment, maybe even a seat at the table, the decision making, it's different. So I want to go after the adult student, I'm just going to do it myself. We're just going to do the same messaging and extend it to adult students, but it doesn't work, right? So the plan that you have, it needs expertise. And aren't you seeing that with these schools who are wanting to go after the adult market because the adult student is changing rapidly by the day. And if you don't know exactly what you're doing, you're not going to succeed.

Bruce Douglas: That's right. Listen, I think a lot of schools that try and go on their own, the first year or two actually might be okay, because they have a brand they're known in their particular market, whether that's regional or otherwise.

Joe Sallustio: Exactly.

Bruce Douglas: And you can get and they have a let's just say they even have a decent website. And many don't by the way, but let's pretend they do. You can get up to a certain level and almost do it organically relatively not cost free, but not even costing all that much. So you can get, I'll make a number of it, you can get up to your 500 or 1000 students, right? You got to that level. And you did it maybe without outside help, you go, "Wow, maybe this isn't so hard." But I think the next part is the hard part. Okay, you got the easy wins. How do you keep growing? And you want to, you say your master plan says it's going to grow 20% every year for the next 10 years. Really? I don't - that's where the hard part comes.

And by the way, some schools do bring the talent in-house. I'm not going to sit here and go, it's impossible to do in-house. It is possible. I'm not - it's very hard to do it right. It's really, it's really hard, but it's not impossible. I'm not going to sit here and say it's not possible, but it's really hard. And I say most schools underestimate what it will take. Also, also they don't - I think everybody wants to achieve some level of scale. And what I find in input with a lot of nonprofit schools that I talk to is the definition of scale is very different. Like, you know, when I think scale, I think the University of Phoenix back in the day, that was scale. Like, how do you create scale? Well, you have to have the right partners to do it or else it doesn't work. You don't ever achieve the right scale, the right level of scale. So yeah, if you want to grow 5% a year or 7% a year, you might be able to do it. But that's not scale. That's not really going through great population growth. 

Joe Sallustio: And if these schools that - I talked about it with some of the guests yesterday. How do you just figure out all of a sudden you have a $230 million deficit? How do you how do you just notice that you've got $40 million in the hole? There's a lot of detail missing. And the only way to get out of it is to invest in revenue generating activities, which is marketing.

Bruce Douglas: Exactly. And that just - it's a hard sell, especially you have a lot of kind of academics who are not a fan - that marketing is kind of a curse word. Marketing is not a curse word, but somehow it's become this terrible thing. We, you know, we're great. We should, it should just sell itself. That's build it and they'll come. 

Joe Sallustio: That's right. 

Bruce Douglas: But it's a nice theory. It just doesn't meet reality and reality needs expertise. So whether that's expertise in building and maintaining a website, whether it's expertise in paid search or paid social or awareness media with TV and radio and billboards or the like, the expertise, there are people that have done this for a living. And so again, maybe hire in-house, but more likely that expertise lives in an outside agency or entity. It could be consultants. It could be an independent firm. It could be a big firm. It could be a small firm. I'm not going to say we're the only people doing it, but there's, I think, ultimately to get that scale you mentioned, you're going to have to go outside.

Joe Sallustio: That is correct. Even Darth Vader agrees with you. As we transition here to talk about Insights EDU, we're on day two. There's a lot of energy in the air. There's a lot of learning happening. Has this conference so far met your expectations?

Bruce Douglas: For sure. For sure. There's like a - there's a buzz. There's a hum. And that's where you kind of feel it. And I think if I feel it by looking around and seeing what percentage of the room is on their laptops or phone during the speakers. Now, let's face it, it is the year it is. And there's going to be a certain number that are always on their phones and laptops, but I find that the vast majority are paying attention. And that to me is the sign of engagement.

Joe Sallustio: It really is. You make a good point. I mean, Elizabeth, we're all multitasking. We think we're multitasking. The reality is you're on your phone and your head's down. You're not really listening. You say you're listening, but you're not. As we record this episode, of course, Elvin Kratzer, to my right, is on his laptop, so he must not be listening. No, he's listening. He's producing episodes. Bruce, yesterday we recorded 13 episodes of the EdUp Experience podcast with amazing guests from your team, from higher ed institutions. There was an excitement in the air. One of the things that keeps coming up is of course the report that you put out every year. One of the biggest takeaways was that the comparison set of institutions that an online student is selecting from has gone from like six to three or seven to three. So you better be really good at marketing and enrollment marketing to get the student to be so that you're in the conversation. And then you better have really good people in enrollment management as the differentiator. This is a huge finding in this report that online students are only selecting from a couple of schools.

Bruce Douglas: Yeah, the industry really invented by the for-profits at speed to lead word. Again, another kind of insider terminology sort of thing. But if a consumer is only going to be looking at three schools to win that race, you've got to get to them quickly and you got to treat them like gold. And you're right. So right. You can spend as many - you could be the greatest marketer in the world. You can bring all these people to a landing page. It could actually fill out their name. I am interested. I call them hand raisers. Okay, prospects are hand raisers. But that is not a student. That's just someone who said I might be interested in going to your school. Maybe if you don't have an awesome enrollment management organization, then you're just dead. In fact, you just wasted every marketing dollar you spent. I don't care if you spent half a million or 5 million or 50 million. You wasted every dollar if you're not going to treat them like gold, get to them really quickly. And by the way, these days, talk to them and engage with them the way they want to be engaged with.

Joe Sallustio: Right. Personalized, individualized, right? Maybe it's a phone call. But maybe it's a text. Maybe it's an email. Maybe it's an AI-driven chatbot. Engage with them the way they want. This is you know, this is people of a certain age and they're used to technology interacting that way. And don't say well, this is the way we do it.

Bruce Douglas: No, this cannot just be a phone-based operation. Phone is still hugely important. I heard someone, one speaker, unnamed yesterday say that that might be going away. I don't think it's going away at all. Personally, it's going to evolve though.

Joe Sallustio: It is evolving today. You know what I wanted to say to that? The phone's not going away. What is going away is the person answering it. So I'm going to leave a voicemail and it's going to transcribe and they're going to read the transcription because they're used to text. So I'm going to leave the voicemail anyway. I'm still going to make the call, right? But you're right, it's the touch points. And it's about variation of those touch points because we don't know how the student really consumes the contact. So you've got to hit them 10 different ways.

Bruce Douglas: That's right. 10 different ways how they want it and when they want it. Right. It's not quite a 24/7 operation, but it can't just be a classic nine to five-ish either, by the way.

Joe Sallustio: That's right. What if someone wants to come to your school desperately but can't talk after hours? We're going to have to have - well, that's just too bad. That's what we do.

Bruce Douglas: Yeah.

Joe Sallustio: And so you know what, so you make such a good point about the when. As I came into Lindenwood, one of the things that we were doing is we're expanding our online - online adult students, but we didn't have the infrastructure. So we really build that from scratch. And that's where I came from the for-profit sector. So I had 15 years in for-profit. So I go, OK, here's what we need. We need all these things. So we got to hire enrollment people in different time zones. We're not going to work eight to five in St. Charles, Missouri, at Lindenwood, only talking to people eight to five in the central time zone. I got to have people in New York, I got people on the west coast who can basically we're working from, you know, 8am to 5pm in every single time zone or beyond, or else I'm just not going to have the conversions that I need. Those are hard decisions to get an institution to make and to do because they're used to something. And higher ed is used to - what do you - let me ask you this, I mean, maybe this is a better way for me to ask. Do you see leaders in enrollment and marketing overseeing both of those things or is it usually split amongst the schools that you work with? Because I feel like it's easier to get to those decisions on enrollment and service when you can oversee both of those verticals.

Bruce Douglas: Sadly, I think it's more often split. And not always. It depends. I don't know the exact statistics.

Joe Sallustio: I'd actually like to quantify that. That would be an interesting part of the study.

Bruce Douglas: Yeah, I don't know the exact answer, but I'd say more often than not, it's split. They shouldn't be sides, by the way, they're all part of one organization. Sometimes they are sides. Sometimes they get along great. Sometimes they don't get along great, don't even talk to each other, don't coordinate. But I think in a perfect world, if I were structuring starting the school from scratch, I'd have it all reporting up to the same person. Yeah, because I think it's one and the same until that student starts and you can hand it off to the learning side of the house. I think it all needs to be coordinated because, like I said, an application, a hand raiser. Wonderful. But those aren't students. You're not a student until you're a student.

Joe Sallustio: I have both at Lindenwood. Both marketing and enrollment report up to me and we'll have meetings and I'll go, OK, if we don't generate enough inquiries, it's the enrollment team that is just as responsible as the marketing team, because you got to generate referrals and you got to convert these students. And if we don't get enough inquiries, it's also the fault of the enrollment team. So I, you know, there's none of this pointing fingers. It's everyone. It's the financial aid team. It's the advising team, the transcript review team. You can get the lead, you can enroll them, they're going to submit you a transcript, takes you two weeks to review that transcript. And the adult student says two weeks to get my credits reviewed? I am out of here.

Bruce Douglas: And all that time and staff time is worth nothing and all the money you spent to generate that lead is worth nothing. So you have to control that full life cycle for your marketing to really be effective. And I think a lot of schools miss that point. 

Joe Sallustio: But your team doesn't because they come in and go, well, how you guys doing with this and how you guys do with that? And I go, I appreciate that you ask because it forces us to make those changes.

Bruce Douglas: Exactly. And it's a feedback loop. Your own management side can say, wait a second, I see these type of leads are not really converting. They're not as good. Where do they come from? And you can track back. Maybe there's a marketing source that really you think it's good, it's got a good cost per lead or whatever, but it's not playing well on quote-unquote the back end. And so that feedback loop is really important for the marketing people to hear and both statistically and then also qualitatively. Well, I talked to this candidate, this prospect on the phone for half an hour, but they just - they didn't quite understand. I think maybe the marketing messaging is missing something. Maybe if we just tweaked something in the messaging a little - and so just that constant feedback loop, you know, it's numbers, it's KPIs, sure, but it's that qualitative side also.

Joe Sallustio: What else do you want to say about Insights EDU or Education Dynamics to close us out? Open mic.

Bruce Douglas: I mean, it's a great conference. If you're not here this year and you're just listening, please come next year. Check us out. We're doing some kind of smaller, what we call huddle events throughout the year as well, where we'll be going from city to city throughout the year. I think we're probably going to be in three or four different ones before next year. New Orleans next year February. I don't have the dates on hand. I should have had them. But you know, come to this conference in the future if you're not here. Check us out online. And it's a great place and Education Dynamics if you need help and your school is looking to kind of grow and scale and just don't have the expertise or bandwidth in-house, we'd be happy to talk to you at any time.

Joe Sallustio: Yeah, I mean Tracy Kreikemeier, Greg Clayton - you can reach out to them. They're gonna treat you like family the minute that you do. That's a big part of I think the value proposition of Education Dynamics is your team, I have to give just a really, really important shout out to Lana, who works with Lindenwood University. She is the best. I told her she's never allowed to leave Education Dynamics because we love her so much. But your team is amazing. And I think that goes a long way in this industry to feel like your partner, your marketing services are truly your partner in the success or failure of your goals, which is not always common.

Bruce, it's been an honor. We've been chasing you for a couple of years. You've been avoiding us. That's fine. But we pinned you down. I just want you to remember if we need to do this again. Just call me up. You know, I'll make home visits. So we could do it wherever you are. We hope you had a good time today. Thanks so much.

Bruce Douglas: Appreciate it.

Joe Sallustio: Ladies and gentlemen, he's Bruce Douglas, CEO of Education Dynamics. And you've just had EdUp.