Collegewise

A networking idea for private counselors

It’s nice to have coworkers in our Collegewise offices.  There’s always someone there to high-five when a student gets into his first choice, or to ask an opinion when we need some college suggestions.  Even Katie, who runs her own Collegewise shop near Seattle, still has regular meetings with us via Skype.  And she loves to regularly talk smack to us about just how many interesting, cool and quirky colleges her kids are willing to consider.

That kind of professional camaraderie isn’t just good for morale; it makes us better counselors, too.  We can learn from each other's challenges and successes.  And if one of us faces a situation with a student we haven’t seen before, someone in our office probably has and can tell us how to handle it. 

If you’re a private counselor who runs your own solo shop, here’s an idea.  Start a monthly pancake breakfast, or an evening round of drinks, or something in between when you and your competitors get together and talk shop.  How are things going?  Where are your kids getting in?  How do you handle a parent who keeps rewriting her kid's essays?  What surprised you about your admissions results this season?  Compare notes and bond over your pancakes or beers. 

A lot of small business owners are reluctant to associate with their competitors like this.  I’ve never understood why.  Your competitors are there whether or not you reach out.  So why not make nice?  You’ll find that you share a lot of the same joys, challenges and frustrations.  You’ll learn from each other.  You’ll be able to refer each other business when you meet a family who’s not right for you, but might be right for a competitor.  And I’ll bet you like each other, too. 

Just send an email out to three or five or ten local competitors and invite them to break some bread together.  You’ll probably enjoy your jobs even more and be better counselors for it.

The Collegewise Workshop for Counselors: exploratory committee

We’re trying to gauge interest in a new full-day session to be offered at our Irvine, CA office this summer for high school and independent counselors called “College Counseling 201 with Collegewise.”  Some of the topics included would be:

• Best practices for advising younger students just starting their high school years
• Helping juniors select appropriate colleges
• Guiding seniors through the applications, essays, and interviews
• Financial aid and scholarships
• Handling difficult students/parents
• How to manage a large caseload
• Recent changes in admissions and how they affect your kids
• Case studies of real students and what we learned from them

I’d run the session myself, though if there were enough interest, I’d invite Arun to join, too.   Enrollment would be limited to about 30 counselors so we could leave plenty of time for your questions, your challenges, and any other issue you’re facing in your job.

We’d price the full day session between $295 and $495 and we’d probably hold it in late July.  If you think this might be something you’d be interested in attending, please email me or post a comment here.  Thanks.

Accounting tips for private counselors

During the first two years of Collegewise, I tried to track all our income and expenses on a spreadsheet.  I was an English and history major in college so you can guess how well that went.  Here’s how I solved the problem, and what I’d recommend for any new private counselor in handling your accounting. 

1. Buy a copy of QuickBooks accounting software and install it on your computer.

Now you can print invoices and statements for customers and keep track of all your incoming/outgoing money.  You can also add their merchant services option to accept credit cards if you want to.  But before you get too deep into all those things, do #2.

2. Find a “QuickBooks ProAdvisor” in your area here (preferably one who also does bookkeeping).    

Back in the day, I paid $150 for one to come to my office for 2 hours.  She customized QuicBooks to our products and services, explained how to categorize our expenses, and showed me how to use the software to track every penny that came in—and went out—of our business. Totally worth the $150.

3. Consider using that same advisor to do your books once a quarter. 

He or she will already be familiar with your business, and since they set up the QuickBooks for you, they’ll know exactly how to interpret your data.  They’ll get it done faster and cheaper than if you brought in a different accountant.  And your taxes will be a snap. 

I’m all for bootstrapping and doing things yourself before you hire someone else to do it.  But accounting is too important to leave to chance.  If you’re spending more time on your accounting than you are servicing your customers, it might be time for a change.

For private counselors: A faster way to get your website up and running

Collegewise was in business for five years (1999-2004) before we ever had a website.  It was too much money to hire a designer to do it.  It would take too much time to write the content and approve the layout and test it.  And (ironically), we just had too many students to focus properly on it.

If you’re a new private counselor or one who’s looking to start, here’s what I’d do (and what I should have done in retrospect).

Build a simple, no-frills, one page website.  List the name of your business, your name (a lot of counselors leave that out and just refer to themselves as “We…) your address, a short description of what you do and who you do it for, your hours, your phone number, and a specific first step people can take if they want to find out more. Now people who’ve heard about you can find you on Google and get in touch with you.  One page.  Done.

If you don’t have the design skills or can’t afford a designer, start a blog.  Use one of the preexisting templates that looks professional.  Then write a post with all of the above information.  And if you intend to actually write blog entries (a great idea, by the way), use the option most blogs offer to “feature” the first post, which will keep it at the top of your blog and make it the first thing people see. Now your blog does everything you need a website to do.

You need a website to make it easy for people to find and contact you--that's it.  In the early stages of your business, you need to spend your time learning more about college admissions and taking great care of the people who’ve already hired you.  You can build a fancy site later after you get the basics right.

It might feel like you’re not giving visitors enough information.  But nobody makes an important decision like which private counselor to hire based on a website.  And if you’re really good at what you do, people will hire you no matter how simple your website is.

Here’s a previous post with more advice. 

For private counselors: When a competitor’s customer comes to you

Families occasionally call us who are unhappy with the private counselor they’ve hired and want to meet with us to see if we’d be a better fit.  It’s important to help those families make a good decision while at the same time maintaining good professional decorum.  So here’s what we do. 

1. Express our regrets.
We genuinely feel bad for a family that’s unhappy with their current private counselor; so we tell them we’re sorry things haven’t gone well.  The family is frustrated and that’s never a good thing for them or our profession, no matter who’s doing the counseling.  And expressing our regret lets them know that we want things to get better for them, whether or not they decide to join us.

2.  Do an anonymous autopsy. 
We need to find out what’s gone wrong so the experience won’t repeat itself if the family joins Collegewise.  So we usually say:

“I know you don’t want to have this problem again, so could you tell me more about why you’re unhappy with your counselor?  I don’t need to know who it is.”

This does a couple of things.  First, most families don’t want to badmouth another person, no matter how unhappy they might be.  So we separate the counselor from the experience and let the family tell us what happened without naming names.  They’ll usually be a lot more forthright about what they think went wrong, and we can tell them honestly if they can expect something different with us.

We also don’t necessarily know that this problem was entirely (or at all) their counselor’s fault.  And we need to get a sense of that before we agree to work with them and promise things will be better.  If a family tells us that the student hasn’t made any progress in his applications, we know from experience that we can’t do the work for our own students.  So we’ll need to find out if the counselor didn’t guide them, or if the student just didn’t do the work.  The former, we can fix at Collegewise.  The latter, we can’t.

An anonymous autopsy lets the family be more open about what’s gone wrong.  And it helps us evaluate if we can do a better job.

3. Don’t criticize the other counselor’s work.
No matter what a family tells us another counselor did or didn’t do, we won’t criticize it.  We’ll tell the family we’re sorry, and we’ll be honest about whether or not we’ll do things differently.  But criticizing another counselor is bad form.  You’ll never look good doing it.  It’s bad karma, too.  We want to handle this situation the way we’d want it handled if the roles were reversed and one of our Collegewise families were unhappy with us.  And finally, while being critical might feel like you’re supporting the family, you’re also emphasizing what they already know—that they made a decision that didn’t work.  Making that even more apparent is only going to embarrass them.

Sometimes a family who's unhappy with one of our competitors can expect a different experience at Collegewise, but not always.  We want to enroll families who are predisposed to be happy with what we do and how we do it.  And handling these situations right lets us invite the right people in to our program, or refer them to someone else who can give them what they’re looking for.

More tips for teachers writing letters of recommendation

For teachers in the throes of recommendation-writing, it's sometimes hard to know what colleges are looking for and how you can best help your students.  Here are a few tips:

1. Keep the focus on academics.
Colleges ask students to submit letters from teachers to get a glimpse at what this student is like in the classroom.  Give colleges that glimpse.  Does the student seem genuinely interested in the material?  Does she ask questions?  Do you and the other students enjoy having her in class?  What are some examples of the student’s best work or contributions that you can recall?  What do you think the student will be like in a college classroom?  Those are the questions colleges are hoping you can help them answer, not whether or not the student is involved on campus or well-liked by her peers. 

2. Be honest. 
Yes, you want your letters to be positive and actually help a student’s chances of admission.  But that doesn’t mean you should lavish undeserved praise, or even worse, rely on positive generalities rather than admit a student’s shortcomings.  Remember, the more honest you are, the more likely the reader will be to believe you.  If a student earned B’s both semesters in your class, she’s obviously not the top student in the course.  And giving faint praise like this won’t be helpful:

“Kristen showed consistent effort in my class and was always polite and respectful.  In addition, her lab work was always completed on time, and she worked well with her assigned lab partners.”

But what if you were honest and said,

“I think Kristen could be an ‘A’ student in chemistry if she wanted to be.  But I can tell that chemistry just isn’t what lights her up.  As a chemistry teacher, I’ve accepted that it’s the rare student who loves the periodic table as much as I do, and I’ve learned to appreciate the kids who still bring me a good attitude and a respectful effort in spite of their lack of attraction to chemistry.  Kristen is one of those kids.”

I’m more likely to believe that teacher, and to like that student, in the second example.

3. Be specific.
Use examples to illustrate your points.  It’s much more effective to say, “William is one of the few students who stops by after class to just talk to me about math,” than it is to say, “William shows a sincere interest in math.”  Even if the example you’re sharing was one of the rare bright spots for this student in your course, share it.  You don’t have to give examples that represent the entirety of the student’s work.  Instead, you can build on the idea of potential or bright spots by relying on specific examples.

4. Don’t be afraid to be brief.
You would likely never hear a college admissions officer say, “I just wish I had more to read in this job!”  It’s not necessary to ramble on for two pages if you can honestly and specifically recommend a student in just a few paragraphs.  If you have more to say, say it.  But don’t write more just to fill the space.

5. Be clear.
The most important thing you can do in a letter of recommendation is be clear.  Don’t allow length, flowery language or faint praise to make the reader have to translate what you mean.   When a teacher says something like, “I’m sure that the right college will provide a wonderful environment for Jenna to grow and mature so that she may realize her potential,” what are you actually saying?  Are you saying she’s not mature now?  Are you saying she’s not realizing her potential now?  Or are you saying that she’s uniquely suited for the college environment?  Be clear.  Come right out and say it.  Following all four of the tips above will help you to do this.

Spamming gets your small business nowhere

I attended a conference in Texas last May.  A week later, I got an unsolicited email from a college tour company in Texas that obviously harvested my email address (and probably over a hundred others) from the conference attendee list.   There was no advice or helpful information—just a tour schedule and a notice that they were taking reservations.  The first thing I did was unsubscribe (from a list I never subscribed to) and delete the email.

With one unsolicited email, they made me write them off and take steps to make sure I never heard from them again.  It’s hard to imagine anybody else having a much better reaction.  I’m sure that’s not the outcome they were hoping for.  That's no way to grow a small business.

If you email people without permission and try to sell them something, you’re a spammer.  The fact that you get someone’s email address and can get away with using it for free doesn’t make it a good idea.  The entire interaction is a selfish one because you’re taking people's time and attention without giving anything in return. 

Here’s what I would have done if I were that company.

1. Do a presentation at the conference, like, “How to help students plan college visits,” or “How to see colleges on a tight budget.”  Show people you know what you’re talking about by giving away some of your expertise.  And make the session so good that people rave about it afterwards. 

2. At the end of the session, offer people the chance to sign up for your newsletter list, and promise them something valuable in return, like monthly college visit tips their students can use, or links to campus videos you’ve shot that only newsletter subscribers get to view, or detailed write-ups of the campuses you’ve taken groups to see.  Make it appealing so they want to sign up.

3. Send only what you promised, when you promised to send it.  Give away information so good that they would be disappointed if the newsletter stopped showing up in their inboxes.  Make it easy for people to share it, and have an easy, obvious opt-out function if they decide they don’t want it anymore.   You don’t have to hide what you do for a living—there can always be clear links to more information about your services.  You can even occasionally send them an announcement about your business because you've given them a lot to earn that right.  But don’t abuse the trust by promising one thing and giving them something else.

Now look what happens.  Instead of sending one email to 100 people who didn’t ask for it, most of whom will delete it and never think about you again, you send one email to 25 people who want it.  If it’s good, they’ll keep coming back to read your future issues.  They’ll share it with their students and colleagues.  They'll help you grow a list full of people who want to hear what you have to say.

And best of all, if any of your subscribers need a college tour provider in the future, they’re not going to shop around.  They’ll already be sold.

Sure, that’s a lot more work than sending spam email.  But wouldn’t it be worth it?

How to succeed in small business

Jason Fried of 37Signals, when asked about how he created his company's uniqueness: 

So for us [our point of view] is:  let’s be honest about who we are, what we believe in, and let’s share those opinions and be open about it — because it’s going to turn off certain people and turn on others.  And the ones it turns on are going to be really loyal.  They’re going to be the ones behind you, who will fight for you.  And the ones you turn off, you don’t want anyway because they’re not the kind of people you want to do business with.  By being clear about what you believe in, you’re going to attract the right kind of employee, the right kind of customer, the right kind of media coverage, a bunch of things that are going to work really well for you.”

It's not just good advice for counselors trying to grow a practice; it's good advice for students trying to find, apply to, and get into the right colleges.

You can read the full article here.

Ask Collegewise: How can I get a speaking engagement at a high school?

Melinda asks,

I’m a private counselor trying to get my name out there to people.  I’ve called the counselors at my local high schools and offered to do free workshops on campus for their students but they barely take my calls.  I don’t understand why they’re so reluctant to let me in when I’m not even going to charge anything.  Isn’t that a win-win?  How can I get them to see that I'm not a scam artist?”

It’s a fair question, Melinda.  But think of it this way.  If you got a call from someone you’d never met who said,

“My name is Kevin, and I’m a great cook.  Really, I am.  How about you invite 20 of your closest friends over to your house for a dinner party and I’ll cook the meal.  No charge.”

Would you do it?

Most people wouldn’t let a stranger into their house to cook for their friends.  What if the cook never shows up?  What if the meal is terrible?  What if he’s rude to your guests, or leaves the kitchen a mess, or undercooks the chicken and everybody gets sick?  Sure, it could be great.  But it could also be a disaster that would make you look bad to all your friends.  And while you didn’t pay any money, you did invest your time and reputation.  That’s just too much risk to take on a stranger.  And that’s how high school counselors feel about inviting their student community to a workshop given by someone they’ve never met.

But why do you need to do the workshop at a high school?  You could take an ad out in a local community paper and organize the workshop yourself.  You could ask your closest friends who know and trust you to pass along the invitation to their friends with high school kids.  If it worked, you could do a series of workshops covering different topics so the people who’d seen and enjoyed your presentations could come back for more.

If your workshops are *great*, people will tell their friends.  And if you eventually presented at an annual conference in your area, your local high school counselors could see you in action.  You could introduce yourself and enjoy some mediocre conference food together.  Then you wouldn’t be a stranger anymore.  And then they’d take your calls.

Thanks for your question, Melinda.  If you've got a question of your own, email me at blog [at] collegewise [dot] com.  If I pick yours, I'll answer it here on our blog.

Duane gets it right

The clothing they sell isn’t my style (I don’t dress well enough to even use the word “style”), but if it were, I’d feel comfortable buying from Duane.

You get to the home page and there he is, talking to us honestly about what they do and how they do it.  He's not trying to sound like something he's not.  In fact, he wants you to know that his store isn't one of the big guys.  He's reveling in being small.  Makes them seem more trustworthy to me.  I feel like I can count on Duane.

Not a bad way to write a website…or a college application.