Over the past twenty years there has been a tremendous amount of growth in the supplemental education business including tutoring, test preparation, and other educational services. With the exception of large education chains such as Sylvan, Huntington, and Princeton Review, supplemental education companies have been primarily owned and operated by educators, usually ex-classroom teachers. These companies have been operated from an educators perspective, which often times has translated to large amounts of time dedicated to program development and delivering quality educational services. But these companies often times have not been operated from a business perspective.
The primary result has been that these owners have created companies that require tremendous amounts of personal time and resources to maintain. Rather than creating a business, these owners have created jobs for themselves, and success has translated into more work, which has ultimately limited growth. Limited growth does not bode well for these companies as the supplemental education industry is evolving and becoming more competitive.
So, how do educators learn how to think in terms of business? They start by understanding that the business of supplemental education is not merely providing the education itself, but rather, the business of supplemental education is to an enormous degree the business of efficiently managing information. A month in the life of a supplemental education business will see information flowing as parents communicate their concerns and objectives to center directors, directors communicate student requirements to their instructors, instructors communicate with students about their sessions, and administrators use this information to communicate back to parents. Information is communicated about billing and payroll to accounting, and owners and directors use this information to create business analysis reports to help form strategic planning. On top of that, administrators must keep track of ongoing communication from parents and tasks must be delegated to administrative assistant and instructors.
The bottom line is that if a company does not have the infrastructure to efficiently manage this information, then a majority of that company’s resources will be dedicated to inefficient information management. In this light, long administrative hours and lack of growth are not surprising outcomes.
Over the coming weeks, I will be writing on various aspects of information management as it relates to the supplemental education business. We will look at how companies have struggled with these issues and the solutions they have arrived at to overcome these problems. We will examine a few case studies and see how efficient management of information has provided a key to growth and financial success.