April 6, 2018

“Creating long-term value with limited resources is a huge challenge for entrepreneurs, but it’s hardly a novel one.” In Fast Company’s article, The 7 Fundamentals of Sustainable Business Growth, Faisal Hoque explores how even though circumstances vary, the fundamentals of sustainable growth remain the same.

1. Authentic Purpose - “why we do what we do” – your school’s mission
2. Powerful Brand - build brand equity with emotional connections with customers by developing and sustaining those relationships over time
3. Partnership and Collaboration
4. Customer Retention - acquiring new customers can cost an organization around five times more than retaining current ones
5. Community - adds structure and spreads “stakeholdership” out into society
6. Repeatable sales - design and implement sales processes that can be successfully deployed again and again
7. Flexible, Adaptive Leadership - To continue growing, entrepreneurs, managers, and business owners must become the leader the business needs for each stage of growth. Since a company’s needs change at each stage, its leaders need to keep evolving at the right pace.

In these uncertain economic times, it is more important than ever to focus on sustainable growth in the education sector. PAISBOA is committed to ensuring growth and sustainability not only for the association, but for our member schools and universities.

March 23, 2018

A few months ago, we sent you a Member Engagement Survey in order to find out why your membership in PAISBOA is important to you and how we can improve our member services to you.  To be an effective member-driven association, it is important to know what we are doing well, what types of programs are interesting to members, where we need to improve, but most importantly, are we providing value for your time and money?

Here is what you told us:

 March 9, 2018

This week, while many of you were dealing with snow removal, power outages, and all the complications of winter, some of us were dealing with planes, trains, and automobiles on our way to (and from) the NBOA Annual Meeting in Nashville and the NAIS Annual Conference in Atlanta. It is always a privilege to attend these conferences and gather with our colleagues from all over the world to celebrate independent school education.

For a variety of reasons (weather, expense, illness, etc.) I know many of you were not able to make this trip, and we will do our best to share programs and ideas that impacted us with the entire membership in the next Friday Flyer on March 23. For those of you who attended either or both conferences, please share your top three takeaways with me by Wednesday, March 21, and I will pass them along —you can reach me at [email protected].

February 23, 2018

With the tragic events in Florida last week, the safety and security of our school communities continue to be of the utmost importance for our member schools and universities. Yesterday, PAISBOA hosted a program on Situational Awareness with John Gooley from US Security Care, Inc. An authority on school safety, John offers specialized professional training based in part on his 28 years of experience with the Lower Merion Police Department. He is a proponent of trusting your intuition in the context of pattern recognition.

Situational Awareness is comprised of observation combined with orientation. An observation can be a stimulus you perceive with your senses, a “bad guy”, or an object out of place. Orientation puts what we observe into context so we know what to do next.

February 9, 2018

The Malters are a sports-loving family! Last spring, I received a call from a friend who offered me two Philadelphia Eagles season tickets for the 2017-2018 season, so without hesitation I grabbed them. My husband was celebrating a big birthday, and being a diehard Eagles fan I knew this was the perfect gift for him — best wife ever --- right??? Little did I know that these tickets would bring our family so much joy — aside from seeing the Eagles play some amazing football and reconnecting with each other every weekend around the game, we were reminded of some important lessons along the way.

After that incredible victory, Nick Foles shared a message he received from Drew Brees, quarterback of the New Orleans Saints, just before the Super Bowl, “A lot of the messages I'll keep to myself, but the big thing was going into this game, he reminded me that it's just football. There's a lot going on, pre-game, a longer pre-game, a big half-time show, but at the end of the day when you're out there, the game will settle down, and it'll just be football."

January 26, 2018

In anticipation of hiring season, we continue our conversation related to performance management with Scott Barron of School Growth for Data Driven Talent Recruiting, Selection, and Evaluation on February 8, 2018.

Scott will discuss how independent school administrators and board members are beginning to prioritize human resources and talent capital as the critical path to achieving sustainability and growth goals. With higher parent expectations for faculty quality and engagement, strategic improvements in core HR functions are necessary to deliver greater value. This requires building the school’s leadership capacity and continuous improvement around talent recruiting and development.  Driven by intense competition, this idea of “people analytics” is trending in all businesses and industries.

January 12, 2018

Welcome back from the Winter Break!!! As we settle into a routine after the fits and starts of the past week with freezing temperatures, school closings, and delayed openings, it is time to put those New Year’s resolutions into action. For those of you who have already abandoned your resolutions — here is a great idea for you. I never make New Year’s resolutions -- ever. Rather, I reflect on the past year over the holiday break and come back to work with a renewed sense of purpose using a theme or some meaningful words as a guidepost for the next year. Last year my word was communication—this year my word is engagement.

December 15, 2017           

We have much to celebrate as 2017 winds down!  We continue with the implementation of the new website, database, and communication systems into the first quarter of 2018.  The next project will be moving the affinity group listservs to the e-lists in MemberClicks.  We originally planned to move them in the first phase of implementation, but with the lively, important discussions, we chose to wait until the winter holiday break to make the cut over to the new system. Look for the new listserv addresses when you return from winter break in January.

December 1, 2017

Many associations are creating and monetizing their knowledge-sharing networks to build member engagement and create a return on their investment for their e-learning platforms. At PAISBOA, we have a long history of providing opportunities for knowledge sharing with our in-person professional development programs featuring industry experts, with our affinity group listservs (soon to be launched elists), and now with our Wednesday Webinars featuring industry experts and PAISBOA members with valuable knowledge and a particular expertise. All of this is included in your PAISBOA membership fee!!!

Why is knowledge sharing important?

November 17, 2017

As we gather with our families and friends next week to share food, fellowship, traditions (and in my house lots of laughs), it is a wonderful time to reflect on all that we appreciate in our personal and professional lives. I am grateful for a happy, healthy family, and especially our two grandboys who give us endless joy and laughter.  I am thankful for my role with PAISBOA which challenges me and allows me to engage with so many dedicated independent school and university professionals who care deeply about ensuring a premier educational experience for students of all ages. I am also grateful for the volunteers who lead the boards of PAISBOA, PAISBOA Services Corporation, PAISBOA Health Benefit Trust, and the PAISBOA Business Insurance Group.  Without their herculean efforts, PAISBOA would not be the healthy, financially sustainable association.

In the most recent McKinsey Quarterly, there was an article about The Yin and Yang of Organizational Health, which got me thinking about not only the long-term health of PAISBOA, but the long-term health of our member schools and universities.  The premise is that when long and short term performance is coupled with organizational health, they become interdependent and complementary, and unable to exist without the other despite their apparent opposition.

November 3, 2017

The PAISBOA Board of Directors met back in August to map out the strategic direction of the association and set goals for the future. The primary goal for the next year is to enhance the value and experience of PAISBOA membership, resulting in Association growth and long-term sustainability. To achieve this goal, we need your help!

We want to learn what you value in your relationship with PAISBOA, and we want to hear your stories about your PAISBOA experience. To that end, we will be sending you a short survey about how you would like to share your feedback with us. Your options include:

October 20, 2017

In independent schools and universities, our greatest resource is our workforce and our largest budget item is the compensation of that workforce. Yet, for most of our institutions, we rely on performance management and evaluation systems that are not working! In fact, according to Gallup, companies are not getting the ROI they assumed, and these processes may even be driving out top performers!

Traditional performance management programs focus on the bottom 20% of the talent pool and have been less effective for three reasons: unclear and misaligned expectations, ineffective and infrequent feedback, and unfair evaluation practice and misplaced accountability. Most members of the workforce today, particularly millennials, want a coach, not a boss. “They want their work to have meaning and purpose. They want to use their talents and strengths to do what they do best every day. They want their jobs to fit their life and they are less interested in settling.”

October 5, 2017

There are three takeaways this week that require your immediate attention:

1. PAISBOA launched a new integrated website, database and communication systems on Thursday, October 5, so if you have not received your welcome email from us and are not able to log in to your member page at www.paisboa.org, please contact Ron Hill ([email protected]) for assistance.
2. PAISBOA Annual Data Survey – General Survey must be submitted by 12:00 Midnight EDT, Friday, October 6. There can be no exceptions and no extensions. Your Salary Survey must be submitted by 12:00 Midnight EDT on Tuesday, October 10, and you must submit the General Survey to receive the results of the Salary Survey.
3. Registration is open for our October Wednesday Webinar and Professional Development programs—have you registered yet?

You may be wondering why there are 3 takeaways this week and not more or less —communication experts like Carmine Gallo agree that 3 is the magic number of items we can keep in our short-term memory. So, most people are likely to remember 3 items from a conversation, presentation, or email, so why give them more?

September 22, 2017

Last week, a number of key influencers in the independent school sector gathered in New Orleans for meetings and conferences related to enrollment management, accreditation, and independent school association leadership. As a member of ISAnet, the association of independent school associations, PAISBOA leaders meet twice a year with our counterparts from across the globe to share experiences, learn about best practices in our industry, and keep informed about trends that are important to our schools.

Instead of our regular programming, we attended the Enrollment Management Association Conference. If you have not attended this conference, I highly recommend it, and here is why…

September 8, 2017

August 25, 2017

In the next few weeks, PAISBOA will launch a new integrated website, self-service database, and communication system -- very exciting!!! Since January, Al Greenough, Ron Hill and I have combed through our own website for content, and we have visited hundreds of association websites looking for inspiration and interesting ways to communicate all the things you need to know about your PAISBOA membership. In that process, I noticed that many associations not only have mission statements, philosophy statements and vision statements, they have an explicit Code of Ethics, as well.

PAISBOA has always had an implied code of ethics - an "all for one, one for all "ethos, a mantra of "there is strength in numbers," and a rationale for operation in the lessons of the geese. A code of ethics is explicit in our Purchasing Consortium, Business Insurance Group, Health Benefit Trust and our Annual Data Survey. 

July 28, 2017

When I read a recent article by Donna Orem, President of NAIS, her examination of the tension between competition and collaboration, it resonated with me on a personal and professional level. As a quasi-competitive person, I feel that tension every day. At my professional core, I am always striving for the win-win, which explains why the mission of PAISBOA makes sense to me: Comprised primarily of 
a volunteer team of business officers working for the common good of all members, PAISBOA’s mission is to create savings in both time and money while providing useful resources and expanded knowledge.

 Before PAISBOA was a formal association, a group of Business Officers came together to help each other with the complexity of independent school operations and to help their schools save money through group purchasing. They were way ahead of their time! “Leaders and organizations are acknowledging that even their best individual efforts can’t stack up against today’s complex and interconnected problems. They are putting aside self-interests and collaborating to build a new civic infrastructure to advance their shared objectives.