Texas Barber and Beauty Colleges: You can’t manage what you can’t measure

Texas Barber Colleges (TBC), a long-established school with multiple campuses throughout Texas, was experiencing several gaps between where they were in their enrollment process and where they wanted to be.

The leadership at TBC identified the need for a Director of Admissions to oversee their enrollment management process.

Director of Admissions Esti Merlo asked ER to assist in an interesting challenge, “While we had, in my opinion, a successful organization my sense was we could be more effective in how our admissions team used their time. The objectivity and interest in best practices that ER brought to the table was of interest to me.”

The new DOA asked Enrollment Resources to take on an interesting challenge: Help TBC increase revenues by 20% without the school having to buy additional advertising or hire more staff.

A Simple Five Step Process

Enrollment Resources took Texas Barber and Beauty through a simple 5 step process over three months:

1. Evaluate TBC compared to best practices in North America
2. Quantify how seemingly small oversights translate into specific financial implications to learn how many hundreds of thousands of dollars were being left on the table
3. Create an opportunity set of low cost/high return activities that would stack the odds of improving results
4. Analyze each possible opportunity for appropriate risk. Eliminate activities that might be too risky to actually undertake
5. With risk analyzed and mitigated, aggressively turn opportunities into results. ‘Nag’ all those involved in turn those ideas into results, in a timely manner

Evaluation and Measure against Best Practices

Enrollment Resources took Esti and his team through what is, perhaps, the most comprehensive Enrollment Management Evaluation process in North America;

• A review of over 108 marketing and admissions activities schools can typically undertake to improve enrollment figures. Schools are scored and compared against what ER perceives to be North American Best Practices
• A dollars and cents review of how seemingly small oversights translate into financial implications
• Comprehensive mystery shops by phone, online, after hours, and of Internet portals
• A survey of ‘stale leads’ identifying why good leads leak through the process
• A survey of existing alumni, students and stakeholders to establish the refer-ability of the offering

Through the Enrollment Resources evaluation and research process, TBC identified specific insights that would offer clues toward gaining some rapid success.

Enrollment Resources co-founder Shane Sparks led the evaluation process for TBC. “We have invested thousands of hours developing and perfecting our evaluation process. What amazes me time and time again is how a seemingly small oversight can lose a school hundreds of thousands, and in some cases millions of dollars, in revenue. Such was the case with Texas Barber and Beauty College.”

While TBC scored exceptionally well through the rigorous process, opportunities for improvement were quickly identified:

• The need to create a consistent sales process across campuses
• Close a couple of small sales process leaks, causing leads and prospects to be lost in the enrollment process. This included optimal capturing and tracking of lead information and tracking sources
• Opportunities for TBC to follow up with and re-market to ‘seemingly’ stale leads
• Creating a structured predictable internet advertising strategy

Through the evaluation process TBC was also able to identify several untapped resources and areas of potential revenue improvements.

The Drive to Create Tangible Results

Before partnering with Enrollment Resources, TBC was not able to measure lead volumes or sources. This made comparative improvement measures difficult to assess. Solutions were put in place to capture this information:

• Creation of an in-house Call Center was implemented. The Call Center also collected lead source information
• Enrollment increased 17% after going through the Enrollment Resources Performance Improvement program
• There was an 81% increase in Internet lead flow, largely without incurring additional advertising costs
• Conversion rates improved by 3% due to the higher quality of the leads and further improvements in TBC’s systems and processes

Intangible Benefits:

The most notable intangible benefit TBC experienced was the satisfaction of knowing that the changes implemented made the enrollment team’s job easier. The admissions team now have key performance indicators available to them in real time if needed.

This key process improvement in turn allows Admissions reps to isolate on specific areas of the sales funnel. Individual reps can then test and improve their respective sales process. This leads to conversion and revenue increases.

The staff also appreciates knowing that when a call was missed or the office was closed, the school was still able to capture lead information for future follow up.

• The culture of testing allowed management and reps to focus on improving processes not personalities
• These intangibles resulted in improving the productivity and environment within the admissions team
• The measurement of processes have also allowed staff to share and document new ideas

What the Client Had To Say…

“… [the] 800% increase [in internet leads was] based on the systems and process put in place by ERI. By increasing the volume so significantly [we] are able to improve applications. By looking at improvements and implementing the systems and processes we were also able to improve the conversion rate.”

“…when we first came aboard with ERI there were a number of shortcomings, there was a big gap on where we were and where we wanted to be as a company. Through some of [ERI’s] market research and Mystery Shopping, we were able to identify some key priorities that we needed to address in order to reach our goal…Professionalizing [our] process in a very short period time resulted in significant improvements.”