Imagine: a directive from your Vice Chancellor pops into your flooded inbox: the university has a new strategy of ‘operational sustainability’ and everyone needs to save money. In short, you have to do more with less.

Your heart sinks … How can we do more with less, again? I don’t even think we could do more with more. We’re already maxed out. Admissions is creaking, enquiries are going unanswered, agents are complaining, faculties are cross, staff are stressed, targets can’t be met, there’s no investment in systems, there’s endless internal meetings to attend, and now you want us to do even more stuff with less money and less people. What???

If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. This is common in universities, colleges and schools around the world. Perhaps knowing this gives you a little comfort, but it doesn’t solve the problem.

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Doing vs achieving

The first step is to reframe the idea from doing more with less, to achieving more with less. That’s really what your VC means.

Now the challenge seems ripe with possibility and sounds like a solvable problem. Can we focus our efforts, cut out unnecessary actions, remove distractions and apply fewer resources to get a better result? The answer is yes, and if you like playing with Lego, then its comeback story is for you.

In the early 2000s, LEGO was drowning, weeks away from bankruptcy. A new CEO came in and drastically cut its product range, its activities and its range of investments. He focused everything and everyone back on core business. The comeback was built entirely on subtraction, not addition. You can read more details in this excellent account by Martin Zarian: Lego’s recovery story

Lego literally achieved more with less. Less money, less staffing and less effort. Maybe you can do the same.

To help our clients in their quest for operational sustainability, we use a Prune, Prioritise, Transform framework.

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So, how does it work?

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✂️ Prune

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First you have to dispense with what no longer serves your objectives.

If you’re in student recruitment, then your objective is to hit or exceed your target. That’s it. Anything that doesn’t get you closer to the objective should be reassessed. You need to carefully trim your operations.

As a kid growing up on a pear orchard, I learnt this first-hand each year I had to prune the trees. Without pruning, they’d grow too many branches, shading each other, producing small fruit, and sometimes breaking under their own weight, damaging what was below. An unpruned tree is a perfect metaphor for an operation doing too much: inefficient and underperforming.

The answer isn’t doing more, but doing less.

Pruning means choosing which branches to cut so the strongest ones get enough sunlight. The goal is to leave just enough healthy branches, all well-lit, to grow stronger and bear better fruit.

In the end, the whole tree thrives. Less becomes more.

If this metaphor makes sense to you, you can apply it to your own operations. By ceasing actions or removing operations and functions that are taking up time and holding you back, you can assign more time and money to your more promising actions, operations and functions.

• Do you need to run an agent week every year? Cut it back to every 2 years so you can make each one you do better.
• Do you need to promote 135 MOUs? Most likely only 20% of them will generate value. Focus on those.
• Do you need to visit 150 schools? Prune that number back to 50 so you can serve them well. Then create an info kit for the rest, and send it out with a handwritten note to get their attention.
• Do you need a new brochure every year? Change the cycle so each edition lasts 2 years.
• Do you need to put out content via 10 channels? Cut back to the top 5 by impact.

You get the idea. These ideas all require less effort, and free up time and energy for more fruitful actions.

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📌 Prioritise

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Now that you’ve pruned, it’s time to prioritise.

You and your team only have a certain amount of time and energy every day, every week, every month and every year. If you max yourselves out each day, you’re not going to get the optimum results. If you allow yourself to focus on low-yield actions, you won’t get great results either. That’s why prioritising really helps.

Back on the pear farm, pear trees were laid out in rows and the trees on the outside rows were exposed to the elements. It doesn’t matter how much effort you put into the health of these outside trees, the ones in the centre will always yield more fruit.

It’s the same with your recruitment operations. Some actions will yield better results than others. Make a list of your key functions and write down the top 5 focus areas that will yield the best results.

Some examples:

• Programs: Focus investment on programs with strong conversion and completion metrics.
  Identify programs that consistently deliver high enquiry-to-enrolment conversion and strong student outcomes (e.g. retention, satisfaction, graduation rates). Prioritise these for marketing investment, resourcing, and admissions processing – but also monitor emerging programs that show potential to become future growth drivers.

• Admissions: Use performance data to prioritise strategically important markets.
  Rather than simply focusing on high-volume countries, develop a market matrix that considers volume, conversion, compliance risk, cost of acquisition and long-term potential. Prioritise markets where you can sustainably grow share and diversify risk, ensuring admissions operations are aligned to that strategy.

• Enquiries: Build triage models based on likelihood to convert.
  Use enquiry response data to build profiles of high-intent students (e.g. by channel, level of specificity, timing or region). Triage incoming enquiries using these models so that those with the highest likelihood of conversion or alignment with institutional priorities receive timely, personalised responses.

• Agents: Organise agents into tiers using a multidimensional scorecard.
  Go beyond student volume to assess agent performance by conversion rate, compliance history, student satisfaction, and alignment with target markets. Sort your agents by tier accordingly, and align your service levels – such as training, support and visits – based on their strategic value, not just volume.

• Internal stakeholders: Cultivate institutional allies who create impact.
  Identify stakeholders who actively support recruitment goals – those who engage with prospective students, contribute to conversion events or help create scalable content. Prioritise collaboration with these champions and equip them with data and insights so they can amplify your strategy across the institution.

You get the idea. Now you’re focusing on fewer things, applying less effort and achieving more.

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🚀 Transform

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Once you’re done with pruning and prioritising, it’s time to see if there’s anything you can transform.

By now, you should have some extra time to spend on this 😀

People often use the term transform, but what they really mean is evolution. Evolving is getting a bit better at something you do. Nothing wrong with this. You can achieve a lot and beat many competitors just by being a little bit better.

Some examples of evolving:

• We improved our turnaround time from 3 weeks to 2 weeks.
• We now answer all our queries within 3 days. Used to be 5.
• We increased our prices by 4%.
• We improved our conversion by 2%.
• We introduced a new course.
• We now offer a 5% bonus to agents who send students to low-demand courses.

These are all great, and each one may help a little, but they’re not likely to lead to a radical change in results.

Transforming is something completely different. Transformation is a radical shift in what you do, or how you approach things, that leads to a radical change in results. Something that has a very clear before and after.

Some examples:

• We implemented automated assessment and now our applications are processed in minutes, not days.
• We conducted a market-based pricing and scholarship project and now our revenue has gone up by $50m.
• We set up AI advisors who can chat with students in real-time on WhatsApp, giving personalised, detailed and accurate advice throughout the journey to enrolment in any language. Students love it and it saves our staff hours and hours every week.
• We created a hotline for our top agents and they’ve doubled the numbers they send us.

Transformation takes courage and effort. But once it’s done, you’ll never look back. Not everything can be transformed, but when it can be, the results can be extraordinary. Keep an open mind, scour the internet, harass your colleagues and harangue your vendors (with kindness and just enough assertiveness to get things done 😄), ask students, do whatever it takes to find something that can be transformed and then find the means to do it. Your results will literally transform.

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Are you ready to prune, prioritise and transform? If so, achieving more while doing less is your destiny. Good luck out there!

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Get in touch

Want to develop a strategy that helps your organisation avoid overburden, maintain efficiency and reduce costs?

Discuss your aspirations and challenges with us.

Mark Pettitt

Founder and CEO

mark@edified.com.au

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