It’s easy to be comfortable with your way of doing things. But, “That’s the way we’ve always done it” isn’t a good reason to avoid trying something new. Every year at Collegewise, we try to improve how we do things. Sometimes they’re incremental changes that only we would notice. Other times, they’re fundamental changes to our business. Those are scary changes, but we embrace the opportunity by asking ourselves three questions:
- Why is this good for us?
- Why is this good for our customers?
- What’s the worst that could happen if this doesn’t work?
It’s important not to exaggerate our answer to that last question. When we first hired editors to help our students with essays, it would have been easy to say, “The worst thing that can happen is that our students will have terrible essays, and none of them will get into college.” But that just wouldn’t have been true. The worst that could have happened was that within a week or two, we would have noticed that one or more of our editors wasn’t doing a good job. A counselor would have stepped in to help the student just like she’d always done in the past. Maybe we would have had to let an editor go. But no matter what had happened, the student would have been taken care of. We tried it, and it worked. As long as you’re thoughtful and deliberate, the worst that could happen almost never does.
Here are a few of the more substantial changes we’ve made at Collegewise over the years using our three questions to guide us:
2001
I stopped counseling students myself and hired counselors to work with the families.
2002
We hired and trained essay specialists to take over the brainstorming and editing work with our students.
2003
We tried a classroom version of our senior program over the summer. This change didn’t work—almost nobody enrolled in the program. But the only loss was a financial one, and it was a loss we were prepared to handle. And we’ve used the curriculum from that program for training and other workshops.
2006
We launched our blog and started giving away college counseling advice for free.
2009
I started doing a “financial aid and scholarships” seminar, something we'd always worried was beyond our expertise. It’s now one of our most popular seminars.
I began posting at least one blog entry every day (July 7, 2012 will be my 1000th consecutive daily post). The posts share our Collegewise advice and also talk about how we run our business.
2011
We hired part-time assistant counselors to handle “first-pass” reviews on applications and to help students with the letter of recommendation process.
2012
We raised the price of our senior program 20% and cut the maximum number of senior students per counselor by 30%.
One of the advantages of running a small business is that you can try anything within reason without having to run it through the committee. Take advantage of it. If you want to try something, run it through the three-question litmus test. And don’t cop out on the “worst thing that can happen question.” Don’t be afraid to try it. Chances are, you’ll start to embrace just how great change can be.