The university had been operating at a loss for roughly 18 months of a self-imposed, three-year timeline to reach revenue neutrality, and its own attempts to fix the problem hadn't moved the needle. Leadership treated it as a programming and enrollment problem, the kind of thing you solve by adjusting course offerings. The real problem was upstream: a business model that had never been benchmarked against what actually works in continuing education.
Case Study
Turning an operating loss to a $1.8 million opportunity.
Running an operating loss with no internal framework to explain why, a university continuing education division needed a structured, data-backed path to revenue neutrality. We delivered one, projecting up to $1.8 million in annual revenue improvement.
Engagement at-a-glance
Industry:
Education
Organization size:
~ 10-50 employees
Services:
Strategy Creation
Business Operating Model Design
Operations & Process Improvement
Business Operating Model Design
Operations & Process Improvement
The Challenge
Losing money, with no clear reason why.
-
A revenue-share model no one had stress-tested
The organization's compensation arrangement with instructors had grown unsustainable relative to industry norms, quietly eroding margins on nearly every course delivered. Leadership sensed the terms were too generous but had no comparison point to know how far out of line they actually were.
-
No shared method for turning academic judgment into business decisions
Programming decisions were made on academic instinct, without a consistent way to translate them into pricing, portfolio, or margin choices. That made it difficult to change course on any single offering without the conversation being read as a judgment on academic quality rather than business economics.
-
A three-year clock with most of it already spent
The organization was operating under its own internal deadline to reach revenue neutrality, and roughly 18 months of the three-year window had already passed with limited progress. The risks of missing it were concrete: continued dependence on the university for funding, and the possibility that programs would be redistributed to other academic units.
Our Approach
Treating the revenue problem as a business problem.
-
1
Mapped the business models used across continuing education
We benchmarked the organization's offerings, pricing, delivery methods, revenue structure, and value proposition against five to six distinct business models used across the continuing education industry, establishing where its practices diverged from what worked elsewhere.
-
2
Interviewed leadership and functional teams across the program
Structured fact-finding interviews surfaced how pricing, staffing, and revenue-share decisions were actually being made, and where those decisions had never been tied back to a clear business rationale.
-
3
Applied AI-assisted analysis to size the financial impact
An AI-driven analytical model processed the qualitative and quantitative data gathered during the interviews and benchmarking, producing financial impact ranges for each recommendation instead of directional guesses.
-
4
Validated findings with leadership before finalizing the roadmap
A midpoint checkpoint tested emerging findings against leadership's own read of the program before the team finalized a phased set of recommendations covering the first 18 months.
Value Delivered
Clarity on where the money was going, and what to do about it.
Put a number on the size of the fix
AI-assisted analysis translated the qualitative and quantitative findings into financial impact ranges of $800,000 to $1.8 million in projected annual revenue improvement, giving leadership a concrete target instead of a general sense of the gap.
Rebuilt the instructor revenue-share model
The compensation arrangement with instructors, benchmarked against industry norms for the first time, was restructured into a model built to protect margin rather than erode it.
Sequenced the work into three phases over eighteen months
Recommendations were organized into 0 to 6, 6 to 12, and 12 to 18 month phases, giving the organization a sequence to work through rather than a single undifferentiated list of ideas.
Gave leadership a case they could act on internally
Leadership walked away with third-party validation and a structured, data-backed business case, giving them standing to pursue changes to pricing, portfolio, and instructor compensation that had been difficult to raise internally on their own.
Results that reflect the work behind them.
$800K–$1.8M
Projected annual revenue improvement identified through the engagement
12-18 month
Projected timeline to reach revenue neutrality
5-6
Industry business models benchmarked against the organization's own
Related Insights
Case Study
They went 30 years without a strategy. We built one in four months.
Read more
Case Study
Turning a newly assembled leadership team into one team.
Read more
Resource
Turn strategy into a continuous operating system.
Read more
Work With Us
The firms that move fastest don’t wait for clarity. They create it.
We help leadership teams cut their ambiguity, align around what matters, and build the momentum to transform their business.