Strategist. Operator.
Insider.

The Origin

The moment that changed everything.

I can still feel my hands quivering. I was sitting across from the provost — a nationally respected economist who had once urged the chancellor not to pursue the very initiative I'd been hired to evaluate. An entire portfolio of degree programs was on the table, bleeding millions each year. Everyone wanted answers. Nobody agreed on what those answers should be.

I knew the numbers cold: enrollment trends, revenue projections, competitor benchmarks, market intelligence. On paper, I had all the evidence I needed. But here's what gnawed at me — how could I call an initiative good or bad if we had no strategy to measure it against? Every memo, every meeting, was just another angle in a never-ending debate. Brilliant people, talking past each other.

That realization was my spark. I wasn't just analyzing programs. I was staring at the void where strategy should be.

Higher education leaders had been trained within a world of stability, not volatility. Our playbooks were designed for yesterday's challenges.

So I dove into corporate strategy. Nights and weekends, I tore apart case studies from Fortune 500 companies, testing how their frameworks could — and couldn't — apply to institutions just as large, but governed by mission and shared governance. The frameworks existed. Nobody had translated them for education. That's what I set out to build.

That's how The Education Strategist was born — a conviction that education leaders deserve the same level of strategic rigor as any global corporation, tailored to the complexity and future of higher education.