The Category
This is not a consultant. This is not an OPM.
The Operator-in-Residence is a named role inside your institution, deliberately distinct from the categories higher education has already been burned by.
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The Consultant Delivers a plan. Exits. |
Delivers a quarter-million-dollar strategic plan, presents it to the Board, and exits. The Operator-in-Residence delivers an installed growth architecture and stays embedded long enough to operate it. |
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The OPM Contracts you. Extracts revenue. |
Contracts the institution for ten to twenty years and extracts fifty to ninety percent of gross tuition revenue. The Operator-in-Residence works on a fixed monthly retainer, builds infrastructure the institution owns outright, and engineers her own scheduled handoff. |
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The Fractional CMO Optimizes the funnel. |
Optimizes the enrollment funnel. The Operator-in-Residence redesigns what the funnel feeds: programs, pricing, transfer pathways, unit economics, retention infrastructure. The marketing problem in higher education is almost never a marketing problem. |
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The Advisor Offers counsel. |
Offers counsel. The Operator-in-Residence holds operational responsibility for the named growth outcome, sits inside the cabinet's standing meetings, prepares Board reports alongside the president on the institution's own cadence, and signs her name to the work. |
The operator who has held the seat inside a comparable institution, knows the failure modes of every alternative the market has offered, speaks the academy's vocabulary on first contact, and can be embedded inside the president's office for a defined strategic horizon, at a fraction of the cost of either a full-time hire or a consulting-firm engagement.
Who This Is For
The playbook that carried your institution to 2020 will not carry it to 2030.
The Board wants a strategic vision that counteracts the cliff, on a budget compressed by a decade of state-funding declines and rising discount rates, without diluting the brand the institution has spent its history protecting.
You have been pitched the same three solutions everyone else was pitched. You have watched at least one peer institution take one of those bets and watched the bet fail.
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The Consultant Delivered a six-figure plan, presented it to the Board, and exited. |
The OPM Promised enrollment in exchange for half your gross tuition for the next twenty years. |
The Agency Scaled ad spend without scaling yield. |
What you actually need is the operational rebuild. And the operational rebuild requires an operator inside the building.
Not another plan. An operator who has done the work once, will do it again, and will stay embedded with full accountability for the named outcome.
The Operator-in-Residence
Your last three consultants left you a plan.
You are still waiting on the growth.
Fractional growth strategy for institutions carrying a broken portfolio, a stalled growth strategy, or an enrollment model that no longer works.
The Offer Stack
Two offers. One way to begin, one way to commit.
The architecture is deliberately narrow. One entry point, one full engagement. Each stands on its own. The Diagnostic fee credits in full toward the Mandate if signed within 60 days.
Offer 01
The Open-Books Diagnostic
Strategic Entry
An operator-grade reading of where things actually stand. Three working sessions with your cabinet, a focused review of the books and the portfolio, and a written strategic memorandum delivered operator-to-cabinet, with a Board-ready presentation Maya delivers in person.
Three cabinet working sessions
Open-books financial and enrollment review
16 to 20 page written strategic memorandum
90-minute Board-ready presentation delivered in person
Thirty-day priority-action roadmap
Timeline
4 to 6 weeks
Offer 02
The Mandate
12-Month Embedded Fractional Chief Growth Strategist
Maya takes the named position of Fractional Chief Growth Strategist inside your institution, reporting to the president, sitting inside cabinet, embedded in every major growth decision through the engagement window. A 90-day Build, a nine-month Operating Cadence, and a handoff engineered from day one.
90-day Build phase
9-month Operating Cadence
Monthly cabinet sessions and Board reports
Embedded sprints for new initiatives
Continuous async partnership
Capped at three active Mandates at any time
Timeline
12 months minimum, renewed annually
The Proof
The method already shipped.
The numbers below are real, from an online turnaround, over three years. The methodology that produced them is now portable.
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77% Reduction in marketing spend |
630% Growth in new student enrollment |
87% Reduction in annual operating losses |
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2x+ Lead-to-enrollment conversion rate |
82% Fall-to-fall retention rate |
4 yrs Break-even timeline accelerated |
That is not incremental optimization. It is the operational rebuild the rest of the sector is still paying full price to avoid.
Read the Full Case Study
Maya Evans, PhD Founder, The Education Strategist Twenty years across higher education institutions Director of Growth Strategies and Internal Education Consultant, UW-Madison Online VP and General Manager, 2U/edX Creator, Learner Lifetime Value framework Host, Beyond the Ivory Tower podcast |
The Credentials Behind the Work Inside the institution. Inside the consulting practice. Inside the OPM. She has occupied every seat at this table.Most fractional consultants serving higher education have one career. Maya has three, sequenced inside a single institutional vertical. Twenty years across community colleges, liberal arts colleges, private universities, and R1 research institutions built native fluency in the academy's register. She has sat in the president's cabinet and watched a strategic plan get built by committee into something that tried to do everything and ultimately moved nothing. She has been the person inside the institution who had to clean up the damage outside consultants left behind. And she has been on the vendor side at one of the largest OPMs in the sector, which means she knows exactly how that damage happens and what it would have taken to prevent it. The institution does not need another outside opinion. It needs an operator who will still be in the room when the hard decisions have to be made. |
The Next Step
A full-time search takes nine to fourteen months. The math will not wait that long.
The Diagnostic is the structured way in. Four to six weeks to a written, defensible strategic position your cabinet can act on and your Board can evaluate.
If you are ready to move, it credits in full toward the Mandate.
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