From Janitor to CEO: Crafting Better Education at Scale

From Janitor to CEO: Crafting Better Education at Scale

with Bill Nance (StrataTech Education Group)

Episode Summary

This week, Myles Biggs and Patrick Patterson sat down with Bill Nance, an education operator and change leader, now the CEO of StrataTech Education Group. Bill’s journey spans art & design, IT, operations, finance, and strategy, experiences he’s used to rebuild how schools work from the student's perspective.

Bill shares why great leaders do the hard work themselves until they understand it, make the call without perfect data, and protect the brand by owning demand rather than renting it. You’ll hear how he balances quarterly pressure with long-term purpose, why referrals outperform short-term volume, and how AI can widen opportunities, from adaptive learning to securing real funding for real students, without sacrificing human connection.

If you care about student experience, sustainable growth, or pragmatic AI in higher education, this one’s for you.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• Student-first operations: How structuring programs (pricing, devices, materials) levels the playing field and frees faculty to teach.
• Own the brand, don’t rent demand: Why overreliance on pay-per-lead hurts referrals, show rates, and long-term unit economics.
• Referrals as a north star: What Bill learned when cohorts sourced from aggregators didn’t refer, and how that changes the math.
• Leadership under uncertainty: Making 50/50 calls, communicating pivots, and earning trust by explaining the “why.”
• AI as a leveler (not a chatbot gimmick): Practical use cases that improve outcomes without degrading the front-door experience.
• Adaptive learning’s moment: Why true personalization at scale finally looks feasible with modern AI.
• Funding discovery at scale: Bill’s Monday-morning AI experiment to surface grants, workforce funds, and employer sponsorships for each student.
• Skilled trades at scale: Why the next five years demand high-ROI programs that meet community and employer needs.

Featured Guest

Bill Nance – CEO, StrataTech Education Group; former executive at Delta Career Education and Ancora; operator focused on student experience, brand ownership, and technology-enabled transformation.

Bill Nance on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/billnance/

Learn more

• StrataTech Education Group - https://stratatech.com/

Takeaways for Operators & Leaders

• Start with the student, design the service: Treat curriculum as the product and everything around it as the service layer, price, materials, devices, financing, so day one is equitable and predictable.
• Brand ownership compounds: Leads you generate yourself have higher intent, higher referral rates, and better downstream economics than rented demand.
• Measure what matters (referrals): Track referral % per source; if a channel suppresses referrals, its “cheap” volume is more expensive than it looks.
• AI ≠ call-deflection: Avoid front-door chatbot traps that erode trust. Prioritize AI that adds value (adaptive learning, call summaries with human QA, funding discovery).

Connect With the Show

• Level Agency – https://www.level.agency/
• Patrick Patterson – https://www.linkedin.com/in/pattersonwork/
• Myles Biggs – https://www.linkedin.com/in/mylesjb

How to Support the Show

• Subscribe so you never miss an episode.
• Rate & review if it brought you value,

Transcript

Myles Biggs 0:00

Hey everyone, Myles here. Before we jump into today's episode, I wanted to give a quick update from the team here at Good Enough Isn't. Now, you may have noticed we've been a little bit quiet the past few weeks, and that's because things have been busy here at Level. In fact, we have just completed another acquisition, which is something we're incredibly excited about and can't wait to share more details on. Very. Soon. This move represents a big step forward for Level and for our clients, and it's gonna open up some amazing new conversations for this podcast too. All right. That's all I can say for now. So more to come soon. Until then, let's get into today's episode. Welcome back to the show. My name is Myles Biggs and I'm here once again with my co-host Patrick Patterson. What happens when the person leading an education company comes from every corner of the industry, art and design, IT, operations, strategy, then decides it's time to rebuild how schools actually work. That's the story of our guest today, Bill Nance. Most education leaders grow up inside one lane. Bill Nance built the highway over the last 20 years. He's led transformations inside some of the largest education systems in the country. From Delta career education to Ancora and now as CEO of StrataTech education group. His through line? Start with the student experience. Do the hard work yourself until you understand it and make the call even when the data isn't perfect. In this conversation, Bill and Patrick talk about leading through uncertainty, why schools should own their own brands instead of renting them. How AI can widen opportunity instead of replacing connection and what it really takes to balance quarterly pressure with long-term purpose. Because in education and in leadership, good enough isn't.

Patrick Patterson 1:46

Good to see you again.

Bill Nance 1:47

Good to see you too.

Patrick Patterson 1:48

So I'd love to hear, as you have gone through your career, maybe walk us through that story. Everyone thought when they probably started their career, it was gonna be a straight line. Yeah. Like it never is. And then it is all these twists and turns. I'd love to hear just briefly, what have been your twists and turns that have brought you hear today?

Bill Nance 2:08

Yeah. Listen my background in education is in art and design. So I would say there's definitely been some twists and turns.

Patrick Patterson 2:13

Yeah. For sure.

Bill Nance 2:14

Yeah. That's, that was the start. And then an early career in tech and development and then a shift into marketing and all around that has been education. Both in the middle before and after. Or where I'm now it's, hopefully it's not after, but,

Patrick Patterson 2:27

so when you started your career in Art what was going through your mind at that point? What was future Bill's career gonna look like? Yeah. What was the dream?

Bill Nance 2:37

I was not the best student in high school.

Patrick Patterson 2:40

Okay.

Bill Nance 2:40

But I was Okay. And I found this ROP course that was in desktop publishing, and it was my first exposure to the, essentially the Adobe suite of products. Think about Photoshop, illustrator, stuff like that. And that exposure. And the, much of my career and and what I've achieved has been the result of people helping and really pushing and supporting, and usually it's teachers and in this case it was a teacher. And he went above and beyond, I think when he saw the interest in eagerness because I finally found something that I was passionate about. And he just kept exposing me to new tools and. New options. And this is mid nineties, early nineties,

Patrick Patterson 3:24

so this is like when layers were being invented.

Bill Nance 3:26

Yeah. This is early. Yeah. And it's when, the first Mac I worked on was still black and white. Using early versions of Photoshop and Illustrator and Cork Express, if you are familiar with that product. Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Way before even I think maybe PageMaker, I don't know. But so I got that exposure. And, I'd just said, this is a path I want to go on and let's see if there's a college out there that I can go to that'll focus on this and found that. But, I came from a, not a wealthy kind of environment. So going to school and being able to afford that and focus on school, all of that was new. I, it definitely did not come from a family background that had any. Real push or interest in academics or education. So there was a new experience going to college and focusing on education and thinking about the outcome.

Patrick Patterson 4:15

Was that a hard decision to make to go or was it, for you the easiest decision?

Bill Nance 4:20

I think it was an easy decision because I didn't understand the magnitude. I didn't not only the challenge and how it was gonna be very different than experiences I'd had in the past in education.'Cause frankly, even though I was never the best student in high school it was never hard. That's just a unlucky or a lucky thing about how I learn, but college was different and it was different because. It was a level of focus and time. And also combined with that, just the cost. You get into that adulthood and life and things are expensive and you gotta have multiple jobs to afford school. You gotta have the time to commit to doing other things. You have all the distractions of growing up.

Patrick Patterson 5:04

Was there a moment in college where you were, because I had this where like maybe freshman or sophomore year, like maybe you skipped a class or you didn't you didn't turn in your homework and you were like, or whatever. You didn't do the thing. Yeah. And you were like trying to get away with it. Yeah. And then you flipped around to think. Oh, crap, I'm paying to be here. Yeah. It's like this difference from high school to college where like the professors don't care, right? Yeah. Like they're not there to pull you through like they were in high school. And then you have to you have to flip your mentality of being like, oh, this is something that I'm paying for, and therefore I'm gonna get out of it. I need to show up. Did you have that revelation?

Bill Nance 5:46

Absolutely. Yeah. It was the first semester, first quarter. It was an art class. I completely phoned in the project. It was probably one of the worst drawings ever of a superhero. Laughably bad. And, my prior experiences were I could always get away with it. And it was not something I got away with. And it was. Enough of a shock to the system that like, oh this actually requires more than just getting by or phoning it in. Yeah. You're not just gonna be able to ride through and then take the test and ace it and, walk out with a C or B. Which had been acceptable. So I had to relearn what is acceptable relearn what is, or learn what is the, what kind of demands you have to actually get things to, to excel. And where I didn't have natural talent, it requires work. Real work. And that's something else you gotta, if there's nobody modeling that for you, it's something you either learn or you don't on your own. So I went through that process for sure. It was awakening

Patrick Patterson 6:42

when you were faced with those moments, being someone who was naturally good at things. Some things. Some things, right? Not all things for sure. Sure. None of us can be. How do you show up when you try something for the first time? Or maybe how did you show up then? And then how do you show up now? But when you tried something for the first time and you weren't immediately great at it? Yeah. My

Bill Nance 7:05

initial call it ego takes over and then it's defensive, and then you learn and you learn. That doesn't work. And people don't embrace that. They don't help you. And I feel like I learned that early enough. I don't always remember to apply it to learning, right? The natural instincts do come back. But it, I think if you're willing to say, I don't know, and you're willing to be humble and say, I'm willing to learn and do the hard work, and it's that hard work that you find is the unique thing. Not many folks. Particularly later in their career, I've found when they're challenged with something brand new, that they're willing to sit down and do the truly hard work. I'm always interested in folks that are willing to open up Excel and work the spreadsheet from scratch themselves to truly understand what's happening rather than skip to the summary that somebody else created. And that, that applied to me as well in art and design is if you're willing to do the hard work and actually understand, the, whether it's color theory or whatever it is it, it takes a lot of true in depth effort and it doesn't come naturally to everybody all the time and everything. Once I accepted that reality then I put in the work, I put in the hours and I got good at some things and I never got good at others and, just went through the process. But I was lucky to

Patrick Patterson 8:18

have had that in the first year of college. Figure that out the first year.

Bill Nance 8:22

Yeah. And again, I had a couple a couple of teachers that really went out of their way to, make it clear what I needed to do differently so they didn't have to do those things.'cause as you said, it's college, right? You're paying for it. So they don't care. Not all of them do, but the ones that do and in my case, the ones that did and helped me it's invaluable.

Patrick Patterson 8:39

So your learning color theory you're inside a Photoshop and a, at a very cool time to be in the Adobe suite. I remember that time. Where did that lead you? What was, why aren't you the best graphic designer today? You obviously you made a pivot after that at some point.

Bill Nance 8:57

Yeah, so the pivot started with multiple jobs required, in order to pay for school and not a lot of support. My very first job in education actually, and I don't think I've ever actually said this out loud to many people, certainly nobody in the industry was as a janitor at at midnight at a small private elementary school. And I was working that job and then going to school during the day and in the morning. And I was obviously becoming a bit of a night owl. And one of the effects of that was I had a few hours between the last class in the beginning of that job, so I would go to the labs and the school I was at happened to have O2 workstations, if you remember. Sun Microsystems. Oh yeah. Old soft homage, which is like a 3D modeling tool. So I had access to these systems that no one else wanted to use, and I started learning 3D modeling and teaching myself. The theory of, how to use those systems and the technology behind them and networking them together so that I could pull the resources, the multiple systems to do the rendering. And then got into the technical stuff and eventually moved into a full-time sort of lab technician in the middle of the night who was making sure the labs were open for folks that wanted to come in. So I was able to leave the other job, take a little bit of that, but again, it's, I'm basically running 18 hour days as just part of my routine plus commute.'Cause I live pretty far from the school. But the exposure to those systems and the access of not just being a student, but actually having control over the tools that got into, suddenly I want to network the whole thing together and I wanna get it on the internet and I want, oh. So it's all of that sort of tinkering and I got exposed to a few things, a couple clients, 3D modeling stuff, other photography stuff, but in the backbone of all of that was just this really high interest in the tech side of it. And then you get into scripting and then they get you into a little bit of coding. And I never really went as deep as you did into coding. You're clearly way beyond me when it comes to professional code. But never left. It still today will mess around and code and script and get into the

Patrick Patterson 11:18

details. So getting a taste of the technology side that can, that's an exciting moment. And this is when. Having access to that sort of technology as well, Yeah. Was difficult, if you weren't at a school. Yeah. And you weren't at a large corporation, you didn't have it, you probably didn't have access to that. Absolutely. It was a very cool time to be able to tinker. What was it about that, because I know I'm gonna, future, you you're a tech leader, right? You are very excited about that and that's obviously where you went in your career. But like what what about it did you like problem solving it? It

Bill Nance 11:53

felt like I almost wanted to find problems just so I could figure out if I could work a solution. And that's just not something that I understood about myself prior to that because I hadn't experienced, I've never been the person who like, goes in the garage and tinkers with the car or anything. So I just hadn't come across it. But as I look back now at what I was doing. E even as early as like Adobe Illustrator or something, I was finding ways to create things in there to solve problems that this software wasn't naturally designed to do. Always pushing as much as I could on the edge of, what it's capable of and can I make it do something it's not capable of? So once I got into seeing how you could do that even more with scripting or coding or anything else like I said, I never got fully, all the way advanced. I never had a career in code or anything, but I've always applied it in my experience. And with different clients and other projects I've been able to always find ways to solve problems. And frankly, technology is generally the path I'll start at to, to really, to what I think. I understand about a problem and look at it in different ways you can use technology to, to not just solve problems, but help you see things differently as well. So yeah,

Patrick Patterson 13:05

I think, it was a lens to focus maybe some of ur innate curiosity and problem solving. And to me it's always coding is fun, but it's just a way for me to solve problems and, yeah. I'm just infinitely curious about stuff and so that's just the tool that I have Other people, have different tools. Yeah. Maybe they are tinkering in the garage, but, with a car, I would be worthless in that scenario. Same. Yeah. Like completely worthless. Absolutely. And I think it, it speaks more to the drive that you had in inside of you to, hey, there's. There's this solution out there somewhere I can find it, and technology probably is gonna help me, enable me to get there. So you leave school and what was your first, what was your first gig?

Bill Nance 13:53

So I had a lot of sort of freelance, if you will gigs in photography and as I said, 3D. And one of the folks that I really came close with and worked a lot with was a photographer who was also teaching in class. He was writing a book as well in photography and Photoshop. And he was teaching in class in Photoshop at a school. And he asked me to co-teach but a bit of a surfer, hippie not exactly a consistently reliable person. Still friends with him, so I won't say his name, but travels the world and has a lot of fun and left after a few months of that class. So suddenly I'm, very young, but teaching a college level Photoshop course and that was something I just absolutely fell in love with. But you know me fairly well. I think, my energy doesn't come from public presenting or, I don't I'm somewhat of an introvert, which is a little counter to, the typical executive leader. And teaching is similar to that and it takes energy. You're always on. And it's not something that I would ever take lightly. Because I know how powerful it can be and how much it can impact the people in the class. So I taught for almost two years, but it was, and that's not all I did, it was also working. But it took so much outta me and it's absolutely something in my retirement I'm gonna do. Oh really?'cause I loved doing it, but it is definitely, I just think it's one of the greatest professions and love to contribute to it, but know that it's not my natural that's just not where I get the energy. So I could not stay with it. And I also, in the whole problem solving and constantly looking for creative solutions moved more and more into administration and ended up running a program initially launching a new program and then taking over a few others for that school. So I, I evolved from teaching into administration and operations. But never left the side gigs creative marketing kind of area for a few years. I held onto that constantly telling myself I wasn't gonna stay in education forever. But within a few years I realized I love education. Even though I don't necessarily wanna teach all day every day I, I know ultimately I may go back there, but I can make an impact on the administrative side. I can enable what happens in the classroom to be a better experience for students. I can empower teachers that way at scale. Scale. So that's how I'm getting that at scale.

Patrick Patterson 16:11

At scale. Yeah. I, I love this idea of hey, you started really impacting students one-to-one. And then how do you take that and say, okay, how can I impact a full, a whole program, a whole campus? A whole system. It was an evolution. Yeah. Why you, why were you the one that went from teaching to administration? Why, did someone pick you? Did you apply? Did you just fall into it? Just fell into

Bill Nance 16:36

it. It's, you see a problem and you start. Coming up with solutions and you solve the problem or you or opportunities to improve something and you present the opportunity, the solution. And I just, that's been my whole career. There isn't a moment where I've wanted to apply for a job and go, and, it's been, there are challenges here where I'm at now that I need to solve and I want to get people in a room and I wanna help them see the challenges the way I'm seeing them. I wanna get their input on if I'm right and if there's different challenges that are more important and I wanna start solving them. And I always think of it as it's a customer problem. It, we all own that customer's experience. It doesn't matter what role we have and you can't solve everything, but there are enough challenges out there that you shouldn't be bored. And I like that. And it's prioritizing and maybe you don't always prioritize the right one first, but you. You just want to get through the get through the experience of improving something for your customer. And the amazing thing about education that I've found is there's always a new customer in the sense that it's either the student or the employer or the faculty member and instructor in the teacher in the classroom, that how do we improve their their experience serving? And there are so many things we can do every day to do that. And many ways technology helps. And as I've evolved in my career, it's a people and services business and impacting and helping people at the human level really does improve things across the system. And it's not always the scale of technology, it's the scale of just improving the human experience. If people are happy, they tend to make their customers happy.

Patrick Patterson 18:20

I love that. So you took that mentality and you were able to do that at a few different organizations over the past how many years? You don't have to age me. But it's been you're talking about Photoshop in the nineties. In the nineties. It's been about 25, I think you did it to yourself about 25 years, 25 years take Yeah. At a few different systems. Yeah. What were, and you don't need to, we, we don't need to talk about specific names, but like what, when you walked into that 25 years ago, 20 years ago, 15 years ago what were the things that you saw with that curiosity mindset and that problem solving mindset that you had where you were like, this can be fixed like this isn't good enough right now, and we can make it better for the faculty or the student, or whatever. What were those things that you saw?

Bill Nance 19:07

Yeah. Initially one of the first things I tackled, and it's actually a great question because what I saw was students had, it was a, an underserved community and they were joining a program and they had, there's a cost to that program, obviously. And for many of them, there was a gap in their funding. And, I had the opportunity to develop a program from scratch, and I made the choice of developing that program, not only at a price point that was reasonable for the students and their available funding, but also provided them with all of the resources they needed very early. And this is, 2000, right? Which was giving them the device, the moment they join and not tacking on the cost so that every student was equal regardless of the resources they had coming in. And obviously not the first school to do it, not the first program to do it, but innovative in the sense that there wasn't really a path already laid out for that. But most importantly, and this goes back to that hard work, and I wasn't the one that did the detailed hard work on this but I kept pushing and asking the questions of how do we structure this academic program so that it fits into what is needed from the financial aid side to, to give the student a very predictable cost and all the resources they need, including textbooks and everything so that there aren't surprises. And that even if they do have a gap because they're not fully eligible for Pell or whatever the situation is, that it's a reasonable gap and it means a reasonable payment plan. And those problems are not the ones that typically people talk about when they talk about solving retention or talk about solving. Yeah.

Patrick Patterson 20:49

But I would say that's, that, especially at that time, that's a very different way of thinking about academics.

Bill Nance 20:55

It was different. And it came from home, right? It came from my experience of how do I help, if I have the ability to develop something new? There's all kinds of expertise on the curriculum side. Let's keep pushing them to improve, but there's also an opportunity on the, call it the business side, what does the structure of the product look like? And using the term product is intentional, right? The program is the curriculum, the product is the service around it. And that's how I've tried to approach it. And there are moments in my career looking back, right? It's been a long time where I've not maintained that view. And then there are times where I've realized, I've brought it back and said, this is an important time for us to figure out how do we structure this service. Around education so that it's a better experience for every student, not just the ones that have the resources. But even the ones that have the resources get a better experience. Because one of the things I've discovered is when everyone's at the same playing field, it means that less time is spent by the instructor helping and serving students that don't have the resources and they're able to spend more time teaching and it, and you find it empowers the faculty to be more engaged.'Cause they're not solving technical problems and they're not solving resource problems, they're teaching.

Patrick Patterson 22:12

It's a really interesting, I'm curious, this idea of leveling the playing field and with technology being the great leveler, alright being, putting devices, cheap devices in everyone's hands, giving everyone access to internet now, AI and everyone, how has technology enabled that? Mentality for you.

Bill Nance 22:28

It, as the prices come down, you're able to level the playing field, right? You can get everybody the resources they need. Those resources are effective, right? Because clearly you can look back 20 years ago and a laptop is not as effective as it is today. It's battery may not last the whole class. Now it does. The improvement in technology means we can make it a more democratic environment in the classroom for all under-resourced and resourced students. Which, the really important thing there is you're just leveling the playing field for the faculty as well, where it's a simple experience for them. Everybody's got the same thing. I know it's there, it's predictable, and I'm ready to teach. The fact that day one can be built that way is meaningful for the people delivering the curriculum. And if you can do this at scale and you can empower students to. Focus on learning and not be distracted by all the things I don't have the book yet, or I can't afford the book until I get paid next week or whatever. You just you make a real impact on what's happening in the classroom experience. And when you mentioned ai today it's new and everyone's really just using it as a chat to chat tool to answer questions. And sure, maybe some of them are getting deeper into the answers and not necessarily learning, but I think the concept that it's cheating is foreign to me. I don't believe that. What I believe is it's accelerating learning, it's exposing them to the answers. And to me, the chat bot is such an early, rudimentary version of the tools that we're gonna have soon. Oh, for sure. And that's just gonna. Make the entire experience that much more valuable and in credible for people.

Patrick Patterson 24:10

We're gonna talk about AI'cause Sure. I don't let anyone leave without talking about ai, so I assumed. Yeah. But before we do that you're coming in and again, as you said, not radical ideas that you're bringing in, different ideas. Did you get any pushback from, the companies you're, the schools you were working for, the administration, the faculty? Were people like, yeah that's cute. Bill. You have some ideas, but, we've been doing this for x number of years and we know what, we understand what the Socratic method is and we understand how we're going to produce it and did you run into any of that along your career?

Bill Nance 24:44

There's always things that take longer or more conversations. But it's really hard when. Somebody is just saying, this will improve this for the customer. Tell me why it won't improve this for the customer. It's like the

Patrick Patterson 24:59

Trump card, right? It's yeah. It's like you can't you can't argue with it,

Bill Nance 25:02

That doesn't mean there's never been, I don't even know if pushback is the word I would use. It's just more questions and understanding. And a lot of what I described a minute ago, when you think about the financial aid and the structure of the program or the product in that sense, right?'cause it's not the curriculum of the program. A lot of that is oh great, you guys do whatever you need to do. I just wanna teach. And then when they realize that it enables them to teach more effectively and more consistently and predictable and experience, then they love it. But they may not even know what they love. They just know yeah, all this stuff is better. These students are less distracted. They don't see the other side of it when you're thinking about the classroom experience. And on, on the administration level, I very early in my career. I didn't mention this, but I was exposed to true financial experts in this space who were working through, CFO controller and giving me exposure to how the business of education actually runs in the background. And that's where the understanding of financial aid and packaging and revenue recognition and how, if you can really make that a better product and service for the students, you're actually empowering the institution to have more predictable financials and more predictable investments. It's not about profit, it's about reinvesting back into the experience. It doesn't matter what the tax status the institution is when you are struggling to maintain cash flow or there's unpredictable cash flow because the structure of the program is wrong. It makes it difficult to make a consistent experience. So once you solve those problems, suddenly everybody's more empowered to tackle the things that they think are important and that maybe they are important, right? The stuff in the classroom, the experience improving the equipment, whatever, it's, and it's never all at the same time. All perfect. But that, that was one element of my early career in addition to technology, which is, I probably have an understanding of the financial structure of this space that high. Also, not one that I'd like to admit to. I just like to

Patrick Patterson 27:07

I think it's, I think it's important and I think it can get lost in academia how important it is, and I think you've proven in your career and the success in your career that it is important. But I also can say in working, with you over the past three or four years now, you take a very long game approach. To the decisions that you're making.'Cause I think, you think about finance and you think about, okay, I'm gonna cut corners, or I'm gonna do this or do that. And, you understood the system and could see how that was gonna impact, the graduation rate. Right? And so how can I give a, a better system, a solution for the student, the end user, whatever it is. This is very applicable to, and outside of EDU as well, right? Yeah. And then made decisions three, four or five years ago that took three or four years to pay off. And that's really difficult. And it speaks to you as a leader, I think, and being able to, a, get people on the same page as you, right? Hey, this is going to happen, and get them to believe you. But then show the receipts over time. But I've always respected that about you. I can remember conversations with you three or four years ago where you were like, we're gonna do it this way. And that may not be for the institution the best thing in the next quarter, but it's gonna be the best thing in three years.

Bill Nance 28:29

Yeah. Which is hard. I appreciate you noticing. But what's interesting about it is that you have to have a practical application as well, which is, oh, but the next quarter does matter, right? And some of what you're building is that incremental consistency and predictability. And in the case of a turnaround, which you're referring to it is really, you gotta have the short winds in order to maintain credibility and resource allocation, but you have to have the long-term plan. It has to fit together. You can't walk in, frankly, unrealistically, assuming that everybody's gonna buy a long-term plan and no matter what happens tomorrow. So you have to balance those things and. What I found to be the the thing that made it the most, you said convincing people and showing them, and getting them to believe the future is if you can bring it back to what you're doing to improve the student experience, the customer experience, no matter what industry you're in, you're making an impact that they'll understand. Yeah. They may not understand the structure or the technology or the whatever, but they understand this is gonna be better for the student and ultimately if it's better for them, it will pay the dividends downstream. I love that.

Patrick Patterson 29:39

When we first met and we were talking about the marketing for EDU, now I'm dating myself. I've been in marketing for EDU for 20 years and. I can't believe we've only worked together three or four years, but it feels like a lot longer. I know, right? And I remember our first conversation very candidly. You were saying to me, Hey, like this is the mix of marketing that I think is going to work for a long term sustainable marketing program for the, for this system. And that mix didn't include a very large portion of the EDU world, which is called Paper Lead. And what I've noticed in my career is there's a, the growth of education has allowed paper lead companies to come and, generate information, generate leads, and sell that to schools. And a lot of institutions rely on that for. In, in place of marketing. And I think that was the point you were making, which is we're outsourcing our brand. Yeah. We're outsourcing the message of what makes us unique to someone else, and we're losing control. And so while I may be able to get the short term win, make the quarter what am I giving up in the long term? Talk to me a little bit about if you're comfortable. Sure. What was going through your mind at that time?'cause I was I will tell you, and we work with lots of institutions there, there weren't a lot of executive leaders telling us this is the direction we want to go. So that was a unique perspective in my thought, in, in my opinion.

Bill Nance 31:26

Well, unique is not always right. For sure. That's a good lesson right there. Yeah. Yeah. Thankfully we're gonna be able to edit this'cause you're about to get some free thought association here. How you'll help me clean it up. Okay, sure. But you mentioned your, you're outsourcing your marketing, which to put it into where my mind is on this subject. You're outsourcing your branding and the second side of that coin is the math behind that decision. So there's the, call it intangible outsourcing your branding. What does that really mean? If the students are hearing about our institution from somebody else, or they're not even hearing about our institution, they're just getting called by us because somebody filled out a form and then we're telling them about us. That's the outsourcing of branding. It's pretty logical. But what does it really do? Because you're still getting the student engaged and starting the awareness cycle. The other side of the coin that I have always tried to think about that I struggle to hear from others is there's a math there, which is if I'm spending a hundred dollars to acquire a lead and somebody selling me that at a margin, I could have acquired the lead minus the margin. But not only that, because I'm spending that a hundred dollars, I'm increasing the cost of lead acquisition in that market. So I am getting double hit because I'm not exclusively buying leads in that market from that source. I'm also marketing for myself in that market, but I'm raising the price of marketing in that market by spending a hundred dollars sure on somebody else that also has margin. I am not gonna pretend anything I just said makes sense because it's a scramble in my head of there's no way this makes sense.

Patrick Patterson 33:26

Was there like a specific moment or metric that made you think we can't keep doing this? Do you remember? Like

Bill Nance 33:32

I do. It was referrals. We went deep into and you, it's really difficult data to get into trust predictably. So you have to get enough of a, we got enough of a sort of, sample size that we trusted it, which is the students that come from those sources do not refer other students.

Patrick Patterson 33:52

Interesting.

Bill Nance 33:53

And I believe in the referral as an impact to the business where 25% is the standards should be higher. And even if you're at 10%, you have another 15% you can get before you should be doing better. When you take out referrals from a large portion of your base because they do not refer there's an impact. It's going back to NPS, right? Yeah. Ultimately all of that feeds, but you're increasing the cost of your own marketing in a market, and you're ultimately paying somebody margin that you could be saving or reinvesting into marketing. All of that is fairly logical on a whole, but when you see the difference in referrals, you now know you're hurting your business again, there's another tick. And then downstream, I think most systems have seen this data, which is they see the same thing in their data, which is the show rate of those students as lower. So you're ultimately spending more on processing and all that stuff. And if you can get. The management consultants and analysts to come in and do the cost of transactions for everything from contact to package to enroll and all that. It, it starts to really tick down the value of that student. And if instead you're more patient and you begin the awareness cycle and the investment in marketing in your markets to raise awareness yourself instead of be dependent on others you're gonna realize a higher return per student and a higher referral rate per student and a higher student,

Patrick Patterson 35:29

and more ability to invest in systems and better programs for those students. It's a cycle, right? Yeah. But it's a long

Bill Nance 35:34

term cycle and you can't flip the switch overnight or you end up in a situation where you're missing that quarter, like the description we gave her earlier, then you gotta, You have to have the long term and combined with the short term. And you're gonna find that right moment where flipping the switch works. But to me, it's a per market conversation. I also find folks get really lost in like the bigger picture of all the places they operate. Like you could do that in one market, just stop and see where you go. And a lot of schools did this, by the way, a long time ago. A lot of schools are in the five, 10% mix range. It's about right for them. There's nothing wrong with that. But there were many systems that were heavily weighted to

Patrick Patterson 36:13

the some over 50%. Yeah. And that's a scary proposition to be in, I think. Yeah. When you're relying on, you talk about paid, rented, and owned audiences you're relying on a paid audience that someone else, a vendor can raise the price off. Yeah. Change your whole business overnight. Correct. So I thought, I respected that decision a lot. And you made that decision very early into your leader. Position. And did you get any pushback from the team the industry at all when you made that decision?

Bill Nance 36:44

Yeah. I look I got pushback from my marketing agency. I don't know who those guys were and I got pushback from the team. But they all agreed, it's just the execution is the pushback rise. How do we do it? When do we do it? How far do we go at a time? And, there were many times where the demand wasn't generated at the level we needed to offset the, the choice we made, the scales didn't balance as fast as we wanted, type thing. So yeah, these were difficult, structural changes. But it's not the first time I've been through the same experience with another school group. You. Over a decade ago that had a very similar challenge. And it was it was a longer term transition back then. Not quite as fast a decision as we ended up making recently, but but it was, it's ultimately the right one because then you start to see the change at the campus where there are more students who are familiar with the school before they show up and are excited about going there. It's not just the one that called them back first, right?

Patrick Patterson 37:51

Yeah. Where they're, I know it took probably longer than you wanted in your head and. Everything does, but were there were times where you questioned whether it was the right call?

Bill Nance 37:59

Oh, yeah. I absolutely live my life questioning every decision I make every day. So yeah,

Patrick Patterson 38:04

it was every day. How do you live with that? How do you, what I, what, like what's the framework? The mental model that you use to Yeah. To process that. That's fair.

Bill Nance 38:10

Like my opinion. And somebody could hear that and think it's, it's a lack of, I don't know. I

Patrick Patterson 38:15

think it's healthy to question.

Bill Nance 38:16

Yeah. That, that's how I approach it, is you need to keep an open mind and you need to be willing to say, I was wrong, or I need to change this, or things have changed that I didn't predict. So now we need to go in a different direction. If you walk in with any belief that you know, you're absolutely right and not willing to listen to new data or new ideas you're gonna fail at some point. Pretty heavy. So I just have always believed, I don't have all the information. I don't have all the answers, but a decision has to be made. And

Patrick Patterson 38:46

typically at the executive level, you're not, you don't get to make the easy decisions the decisions that were 90 10 Yeah. Someone else made. Yeah. And so the decisions that are getting to your desk are typically the 50 50 decisions. Yeah.

Bill Nance 38:59

Oh, yeah.

Patrick Patterson 39:00

And you also don't have the benefit of having all of the data, right? Because it's impossible for you to go as deep as you possibly can to have all the data to make the decisions. But a decision has to be made,

Bill Nance 39:12

has to be made, and it's not fair to rely to push your team to give you a hundred percent answers of data. They don't have they's. I've seen that certainly I've also been on the side experiencing as I was moving through my career, like there's no way I can give you all of the information to make this decision. And at some point you just have to make the decision as the leader. I've had that conversation with people where I've said, this is why I'm making the decision. And I've had it saying, this is why you need to make the decision, like something has to happen here because you'll. If I look back at the things that have truly been something to be proud of and a change that has happened, it's always been a decision that was made without perfect data, without perfect answers, and with folks in the room disagreeing. And that's okay. As long as I believe I, I have been open enough and folks understand that if I turn out to be wrong, it's gonna be on me, not gonna blame them. And if I turn out to be wrong, I'm gonna hopefully recognize it soon enough with their help that we can pivot and change. And definitely done that. Not afraid to change the, I love the quote, the stakes happen.

Patrick Patterson 40:26

I think it's Steve Jobs. It was like, I don't need to be right. I just need to get it right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I don't know how much Steve Jobs embodied that, but I think that came from Apple. I think he just got it right. Most of the time. I think he just got it right. But this idea of a decision needs to be made. It's a 50 50 decision, that means probably 50% of the time it's the wrong decision.

Bill Nance 40:44

Yeah.

Patrick Patterson 40:44

But then the ability to then look at the data as it comes in the next day, the next week, the next month, the next quarter, and make a different decision. Yeah. I have found that to be difficult in not, I'm willing to make a different decision very easily. But then what I'm met with on the other side is, man, you're flip flopping. Yeah. Oh, sure. You just convinced us that this was the best thing a month ago, and now we're doing this. I was like, oh yeah. I have a month worth of new data. Sure. And now this is the best decision. And I would've still made that same decision a month ago with the data that I had. Yep. But if I keep doing that's silly. Based on the new information, have you been met with similar?

Bill Nance 41:28

Yeah. And actually I think everybody experiences that, whether it's like in your own family or in the example you're giving sounds like, like a boardroom kind of decision or a management team decision. But what I find really fascinating about that problem is when you do it at scale across an institution with thousands of employees across multiple locations they aren't privy to the fact that there's new data necessarily, and there isn't a mechanism to communicate all of that all the time, all their context. There's so much noise out there, it's hard to get everybody's attention and say, listen, I know we talked about doing this, now we're gonna do this, and here's why. Sometimes you get that opportunity to get into everybody's ear and have them understand why there might be a pivot. But from. From a, call it a student or an instructor's viewpoint, sometimes it's just they change their mind and they're, oh, we don't know why. And it's so hard to think about the scale of change and the process of change and how, communication at the edge is so critical so that people trust that even if they don't know why you changed it, they know that you don't do those things flippantly and that there's some confidence. And what's weird about that is one of the ways I have learned to maybe impact that positively is you slow down as much as you can, everything. So the people see that decisions are deliberate, even if they're not big decisions, even if they seem like simple things, they can see that you went through a process of change so that you respect change. And if you work for me what I've heard from folks constantly is it's never fast enough. And he's always, pushing. So it's probably foreign to hear me say slow down, but that truly does make an impact at the edge, from what I've heard from people is like, there's a respect for change. They don't just do things flippantly. So even if they change their mind, there's a reason, even if I don't understand what it is or they haven't been able to tell me yet, it makes sense. Yeah. That they're doing it. There's trust and that trust is hard to build.'cause you also have to change fast in this space.

Patrick Patterson 43:32

Yeah. Hard to build. Easy to destroy. Easy. So easy. It

Bill Nance 43:35

just takes

Patrick Patterson 43:36

one. Yeah. You have to show up every day. Yeah. Being that person. It's interesting. I am a, I push as well. Nothing's ever fast enough. I'm very impatient. I think that has to, that, that is a trait of a, an, of a leader that is necessary in what we're doing today. But this idea of slowing down I think is really interesting. And respecting the change process. There was a large change at level and it looked like, we made a decision a year ago and then we're completely reversing our position

Bill Nance 44:11

and

Patrick Patterson 44:12

And I explained to everyone, hey yes, that is true, but I've also spent six months doing X, Y, or Z. And let me walk you through all of the different iterations we tried, all the different things that we did all, and after six months it looks like we're making an overnight decision. Yeah. But there was a lot of background and if you can continually do that, people start to give you the benefit of the doubt that is the process that you're going through. Yeah. Yeah. But you have to show up that way every time.

Bill Nance 44:38

Yeah. Every time. Yeah. You gotta do the hard work.

Patrick Patterson 44:41

Yeah. It, there's a lot of different threads here, but your background in technology and change management and it is obviously, really powerful to your career and the trajectory and the leadership that you've had. But how have you found that in the education system that is heavily regulated, that is adverse to change? How have you navigated that being that change agent that I know that you are and that technology leader that you are at your heart, it had to be sometimes really difficult to be in EDU and have those thoughts in your head fail a lot,

Bill Nance 45:20

right? Yeah. And always have folks that. The people throughout my career that have just done truly amazing things I've been incredibly lucky to work with some of the brightest people I've ever met. That will just keep pushing until we get it right. And it's that, it's, it doesn't have to be right, right away, but we'll get there and I encourage folks to just tell me what's really happening and what's really on their mind. And I'm not afraid to admit when I'm wrong. That helps.'Cause I am wrong a lot. And when people are empowered and they're part of the process, you eventually get to the right solution, even if it's not immediate. I think, you're very aware. I've been through a couple of systems that have had a lot of challenges. And fixing things in those environments. There's, cash flow issues. There's, experience issues, prioritizing, not always prioritizing the right thing first, not always getting the right order and pivoting and all that. It requires a lot of trust amongst the team. It requires a lot of commitment to just, eventually we will get it right and we will improve the experience. But what's what has always worked for me, even when you get it wrong and you have to change, is that, you were trying to do it right for the student or the customer and eventually the impact will be positive for them. That is the thing that keeps, I think people following the path, like we will eventually get there and improve this for the student. We may initially deploy some technology that doesn't improve it overnight for them. But it didn't get worse. And here's what we're gonna do to make it better the next time. And it's just that, that relentless we gotta keep doing this on behalf of our students. There's a trust they're putting in place. So even if education resists change, and it's hard if you respect the change process and you constantly reinforce that this is to improve things at the student level. Again, even if you're changing something for administration, you're ultimately helping the people at a campus, for example, spend more time with students instead of working on some other thing in the background. That over push for this has got to, we as a sector just got to keep trying to do better because frankly there's a lot of opportunity to do better.

Patrick Patterson 47:46

So I think that's a great transition to a new transformation that's happening inside of BDU. With ai. And you said something earlier about some of the changes that you made earlier in your career where people didn't really understand them, but it ended up making their lives better, and so they liked them. And I feel like that's very similar in some ways to what I've seen with ai. There's pushback, there's, I'm not really fully understanding it, but then as soon as I get in and I start using it, and your eyes are open to it, you're like, oh

Bill Nance 48:20

yeah,

Patrick Patterson 48:20

this is making my life better. So before we get into kind of the career side of implementing ai, where, how have you found it? Like what, how what's your level of excitement and terror right now when it comes to ai? From your vantage point?

Bill Nance 48:34

So personally I've used this phrase a few times and. Some folks are tired of it, but I just believe you are wasting your time today If you open up a blank piece of paper and a blank page and start typing, like you can begin now so much further down the line. Doesn't matter what it's I'm as irritated as anybody when I get an email that was clearly written by AI and the person could have just said thank you, but instead it's three sentences, right? We all know we can see it. So that stuff has to improve. We're not far from one AI talking to the other in our inboxes before anybody actually reads it. So I hope we don't go there and we're able to fix it. But I do absolutely know everything is so much faster and more accessible now from a data standpoint and a usability standpoint when you just begin with one of those tools in place. But you can't shortchange it. If somebody sends you a. A memo or a spreadsheet and all you do is dump it in there and take the output and you don't read the output and understand it. I've seen that. I've seen folks just regurgitate, and that's not the answer. That is not what the tool is for. So there's a balance that we've gotta find. But I am, I think it is probably one of the top tools humanity has ever developed, and it is incredibly the potential for where we're going next. And my own personal usage of it, it is just simplified and accelerated in many areas of my life personally. Do you have an example

Patrick Patterson 50:08

of a use case?

Bill Nance 50:09

You go on vacation now and you don't ask three different chat bots to tell you everywhere to go and to dig a little deeper, summarizing contracts. Yeah. Read the contract, make sure you don't understand it all, but also you can. A cheat sheet before you send it to the lawyer so you understand. Healthcare, if you go and I had a health incident with a family member recently, very detailed, complicated stuff, words as I've never heard before, to be able to pull the tests up, pop it into one of those platforms, read all of the details, and understand before you go and talk to the doctor, it just, it's not that you're asking it to replace the doctor's opinion, you're just walking in far more informed than you were about the options and understanding. And it puts you and the doctor not anywhere near level playing field, but closer to bridging the gap of knowledge so that you're more empowered about the choice you're gonna make. Because ultimately it is healthcare is gonna be your choice. The doctor can only tell you to go so far. It, there's been no resource that could come anywhere close to that, and it ha you can. Up to speed in a fraction of the time than even just a few years ago. Yeah. And those things open up and level the playing field for so many topics and tools. And when you think about education, it is absolutely mind boggling what we can do in this space.

Patrick Patterson 51:34

Yeah. So what are you excited about in the education space

Bill Nance 51:40

with ai? The promise of adaptive learning has been there for decades, has only been partially. And what do you mean

Patrick Patterson 51:48

by adaptive learning?

Bill Nance 51:49

I'm coming in with a base level of knowledge in, let's say a language, right? I've been to Mexico a couple times. I know a couple words. Somebody else is coming into a Spanish class with significantly more because maybe a family member speaks Spanish. We should not start at the same place and. That is not scalable in an environment that is not empowered by ai. It's a great buzzword and it's great to talk about adaptive learning, but when you actually try and implement at scale without a tool like ai, you it's not

Patrick Patterson 52:25

achievable.

Bill Nance 52:25

Yeah.

Patrick Patterson 52:26

We've all learned that. You look at, this was the promise of Khan Academy. Yes. The whole reason Khan Academy was invented was adaptive learning. Yeah. And man, that was, what was that, 15 years ago? Yeah, it was a long time ago. Long time ago. Yeah. Before we had any of these tools. It was very difficult. Very difficult. They had to create a platform. They had to do a lot of things, and they still, didn't succeed. Yeah. As much as they wanted to. They

Bill Nance 52:48

absolutely succeeded in a lot of things and should fully be commended for the success for sure. And what they've done to open up accessibility for students and make things more accessible for everybody. But it's not, I don't believe in the definition that I would have of what a true adaptive, scalable platform is. Cause you just can't do that cost effectively. Yeah. I don't think they, I don't think they failed. I think they were early. Yeah, exactly. I think they have now probably they probably have quite a bit cooking in the background. That's gonna be impressive, I would imagine. So to me, adaptive learning is the most exciting thing about what can be done in education.

Patrick Patterson 53:24

So if leaders aren't thinking like that and the old way is good enough what's gonna

Bill Nance 53:31

break? I think what leaders are thinking about and this is where I'm a bit of a, I don't know, counter to this is a. All I hear often is about efficiency in administrative process or service. So a chat bot on the front end versus a a true experience with a customer service or admissions person. There are efficiencies, no doubt. There are gonna be things I think that schools are gonna be able to deploy that, lower the cost of administration. I hope that falls back down into lower tuition, that would be the ideal situation. But what I know is when I am exposed to skip AI for, let's just move away from AI for a second and go to like people deploying phone trees, the IVRs when you call your bank. No one has ever had a good experience.

Patrick Patterson 54:29

Yeah. No one has walked away from an IVR said, I really enjoyed that. Yeah. I really enjoyed hitting,

Bill Nance 54:33

Pound eight times until I could talk to a person. And I believe that there is a not quantifiable amount of, value lost between the customer and the bank in that example, or the airline or whatever that ultimately is probably not paying back. I get it. Somebody could say yeah, I have less customer service reps. That's real dollars. Yeah. But you, how do you measure the dollar of, I just, I don't even want to call for the upgrade because, my app's not working and they're never gonna let me, I'm never gonna speak to a human. So I'm just, I'm against that idea of you can eliminate the customer and, interaction all the time and always save money. When I look at what the early implementations of AI are, that's all anyone is really, that's the majority of the focus is let's, let's answer their questions with a chat bot. And some of these early implementations were frankly irresponsible. Yeah. You could tell the chat bot to, we all

Patrick Patterson 55:30

saw the stories,

Bill Nance 55:31

right? Yeah.

Patrick Patterson 55:32

And that's, and that's increasingly scarier for a regulated industry like EDU. Yeah. Yeah.

Bill Nance 55:37

And so I've been a, at the very beginning of saying, this is just not gonna happen. We're not gonna put a chatbot at the front of the experience because I don't think the ROI is gonna be there, and we're not here to experience with our customer's experience. I'm not here to, I don't want to implement something that's gonna make a student choose not to move forward with their academic career. I don't want to be responsible for the frustration or the confusion that might be created simply because I wanted to deploy some new technology. On the other side of it there are efficiencies I think, in the background that don't affect or touch the edge of the customer experience that you can move into the platform, but they're not necessarily scalable yet. They're not necessarily predictable in the outcome. I've been involved in tests of, let's take all of the scripting or all of the recording of calls and the conversations and let's use AI to find opportunities to summarize calls so that when it's exposed to the next agent, they get a summary and it's, you eliminate the agent's need to go and write that summary, right? So that somebody could be more informed about what the customer needs the next time they call in because AI was able to summarize it more effectively. That is not a hundred percent and that is something you want to be pretty close to a hundred percent. I think that'll be there sooner than some of the other stuff, but, and it will reduce cost and it will ultimately drive a better customer experience. I haven't seen an example yet of where it's there but that's something that if you could do it, you're, you are driving more efficiency through the platform and you're not affecting customer service directly, but it's not transformative in education. Like adaptive would be like true adaptive.

Patrick Patterson 57:18

Yeah. It's an exciting time to be watching that and be able to influence it and be a part of it. As a technology forward executive in this space, what would be one experiment or change that you would challenge your peers, the other leaders in the space to test next Monday? Next Monday, to future proof themselves or their university. Yeah. For what's coming. What would you what would be the one thing that, that you would suggest?

Bill Nance 57:46

I fundamentally believe the biggest challenge in education is funding and students choosing and finding ways to fund their education and to fully understand what they're funding with and all of the options. So I what I believe is a highly valuable use of that type of tool that I haven't seen an example of yet is go and learn everything about me as a student, potential student, and go and find the resources available to me out there. Go to the Workforce Investment Office in my local community and tell me if the program is approved or not. That's a really interesting

Patrick Patterson 58:23

idea.

Bill Nance 58:23

Go to the scholarship websites and everything else and go to my local high school and find out if there are partnership, that I went to, and find out if there are people go to local employers and see if there are options to handle funding. These are things we don't do at scale in education. We, we do really good scale Title IV funding, whether it's doesn't matter your tax status. You're really good in this space at pointing'em to the fafsa, processing the ir, selecting the loans and grants that are available through Title IV through federal funding. We're not really scalable at the state level or the community or the workforce level. And that, that is something AI can help us get

Patrick Patterson 59:08

better at and faster at. I think that's, I think that's great. Personal story my nephew's going to college next year. And looking for, different grant options and scholarship options and all of those things. And, jumped onto ChatGPT and did some deep research and found three or four different programs and was like, Hey, you're working with your guidance counselor as your guidance counselor suggested any of these. And the answer was no. Yeah. That's exactly what I'm saying. And that can scale with the tools that exist today. And I think, to summarize what you've been saying, if you can think about those improvements in technology and process or whatever, through the lens of the end user, the consumer, the client, the student in the EDU space. And not focus on the bottom line. The, then the lessons you've learned that's the investment you wanna make.

Bill Nance 1:00:00

Yeah. What's interesting about what you just described too, is that's an additive tool to the student experience. You're not suggesting a change that drives efficiency. Because if your goal is to drive efficiency or to change a current process then you're risking and potentially testing something that might change the experience to the negative. And you may or may not get a payback on it. It's that IVR example of I'm just not gonna be your customer anymore. But if you're able to add something that you could not be added because it can't be scaled any other way, like for example, exposing them to all of the different grants or scholarships and reducing their debt, now you've created a student that sees incredible value in your institution versus the other one they may be looking at. And we'll refer friends and we'll do the other things that you want a great successful student to do. They'll probably stay because that's why they're eligible for all the discount or the, for the grants or scholarships or whatever. So it's cheaper to go to your institution. Those things are. Impactful in a real meaningful way, not reducing 1% of administrative time on task.

Patrick Patterson 1:01:06

You've been very successful in your career and just a great partner as well. It's been great to work with you through level. As you look back and you look at all of those things you were able to do and all of those transformations you were able to undertake was there ever a point where your success cost you too much?

Bill Nance 1:01:29

That's an interesting question. I want to shift a little what you said. So I've been incredibly lucky. And I've worked with, as I said, some really bright people. It's hard to. Not succeed when you're surrounded by some of the folks that I've been lucky enough to work with. And I hope I'm continue to be that lucky. It's like the gift to, to be

Patrick Patterson 1:01:52

challenged by folks on a regular basis. But success comes when hard work meets opportunity. You started this right? Saying Jan, worked as a janitor, worked my way through college. You put in the hard work. You're working 18 hours a day and you need both Sure. To be successful. Sure. You need the luck and it is, and I have not met a leader who didn't have, I am here because of luck, but I'm also here because I worked hard. Sure. And I put in the hours and I put in the time and I went through the muck. That hard work even back then when you were a janitor, came with sacrifice.

Bill Nance 1:02:30

Yeah. It did. For me the cost has been time with kids, right? So I have three kids and I would kill to have more time, right? But travel, mental load. And I've learned over the years, like being present is far more valuable than any anything else. And shutting off the phone and, picking, knowing the times when you need to be present versus need to be thinking, right?'Cause I think you've, you share this, which is you're solving a problem in your head even when you're like having dinner, like it's just things are going through your mind. So choosing and knowing when to be present that, that is a lesson that took time for me. And, the first few years it it's a transition I think a lot of people go through is understanding. And you know that's a cost and I it's irreplaceable time. How do you cope with that? You just, it is what it is. You, you look at it's like any, whether you think of it as a mistake or a lesson learned or whatever it is you understand it and you change, you adapt. You commit to doing it differently. You learn a new way. You look at, it's the way I look at any failure, right? I don't, you can't look at the, a mistake as something that, is something you gotta dwell on. You learn from it and you move on. And I have a great relationship with my kids. I love them and they're the world. But there are times where I realize ah, wow, it's, I haven't really connected with this kid in a couple of days, or, whatever the case is. Yeah. So it's a constant involving, adapting learning thing of this is just part of the thing that I think you give up when you push for success if, as you call it

Patrick Patterson 1:04:13

You're pushing for

Bill Nance 1:04:16

the

Patrick Patterson 1:04:16

idea of better. Yeah. I don't want them to work, 18

Bill Nance 1:04:19

hours a day when they're going to school. So that's part of it.

Patrick Patterson 1:04:22

So let's break that down because my, my next question is gonna be, was gonna be how have you, how did that realization has that changed your definition of success over the past 25 years? Now that you're coming out on the other side and and I'm not, you're not putting you out to pasture. Like I know you still have, a lot of success left in your career. Thank you. I appreciate that. But i'm sure your definition of what success looks like today is different than it was 20 years ago.

Bill Nance 1:04:48

So I think that happens to everybody as they get older, right? You realize, happy and healthy. That's really all I want for my kids. And I want to still be happy and healthy as they're growing older and I can participate in, in, in what they're doing. Watch them grow up and go to college and all that stuff. So I'm so lucky to be there and to have them there and to me if they can I don't want them to not understand the value of hard work. So they will have jobs when they go to college, for example. It's not gonna be a free ride. They will have to work, right? They have to work now. And that's just because I believe there's a value of time and money that people have to be able to. To understand very early in life. But it, if, to me, the definition of success that's shifted is time is the most important thing. It is the thing that you can't ever replace. So you, you start making that equation a little differently as you get older and as you, see your children get older you want more of that time. Absolutely.

Patrick Patterson 1:05:57

Yeah. So next stage, your next stage for you, what is the next five, 10 years of your success or maybe new definition of success look like for you?

Bill Nance 1:06:10

So I've, I've been really lucky, as you mentioned, to do some things that I think were impactful and helped people. And the next step is, I think I can take a lot of what I've done and, bring it to a new place that is already doing amazing things and I think is positioned. And one of the, one of the things I'm most excited about is the skilled trade need in this, in, in this country's not gonna go down. It's gonna, the need increase is gonna continue to increase. And I think, there are a lot of communities where that needs to be served effectively. And where we need to give everybody the opportunity if they want it to go to a school locally that can give them the skills they need to get a career and deliver what this country needs. And we can do it in a way that's got a great return on investment for the student and for the community itself. And we can help employers serve a gap that they have today. So I believe that there's a, there's an opportunity for me to really make an impact doing that at scale. And I think I found a really great group that's ready to do that. They're already doing it very effectively. And, we can scale that out and and deliver that to places that need it really bad. And I'm excited about that. I'm excited about it in a way that I haven't been excited in a while here because it's so fresh. And it's highly focused, it is skilled traits and that is the thing that this country absolutely needs in the next five years. Yeah. As you said. Yeah I'm super excited about that is, I left a place I was at recently after getting it to a spot where I was trying to get it and, i'm really proud of what, what was accomplished by the team there. But when I look at what I wanna do next it's take something that is, has this raw material and this opportunity and really expanding it across places that need it most. So yeah, looking forward to doing that right now. I'm in this break here for a couple weeks, but yeah, get started and get,

Patrick Patterson 1:08:08

spend some time with your kids. A

Bill Nance 1:08:10

lot of time

Patrick Patterson 1:08:10

with

Bill Nance 1:08:10

the

Patrick Patterson 1:08:10

kids. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. At some point are they gonna say, dad, this has been great, but you need to go back to work.

Bill Nance 1:08:17

Yeah, I got that the other day actually from one of'em, yeah.

Patrick Patterson 1:08:19

I love this. I love that vision of the next five years. The, I dunno if you've ever heard the story, it's the inventor of the caps on dynamite.

Bill Nance 1:08:27

No.

Patrick Patterson 1:08:28

He invented the dynamite cap or whatever and because of that, tons of people. Used dynamite and it was great, but it was also like very destructive. Yeah. What an interesting, right? This is very interesting. This is about legacy, right? Yeah. Yeah. And so he became very wealthy and at some point his brother died and the newspaper had the obituary pre-written for him and his brother. Oh. So that they could just run it. And in the paper the next day was his obituary. Oh, they got it wrong. Yeah. They picked the wrong brother, so he got to read his obituary. Oh God. I can't imagine, think about that moment. Yeah. And the title was, I think it was like angel of Death or something like that. It was like, oh my God. It was like something like, whatever it was. Yeah. And he had this moment, and we don't get this in our careers. We had this moment where he got to see what the world thought of him. Yeah. Like out in the open. That's invaluable, but scary. Scary. And so he went on and he changed what he wanted his legacy to be always thinking about, what do I want that headline to be? Yeah. And that person was Arthur Nobel. Oh, it's amazing. Created the Nobel Prize. Yeah. I've never heard that. How did I never hear that? It's an amazing story. So when you, every, everybody listening to this is like, how does Bill not know that story? I'm, I, you've probably read it in a book somewhere, but but so when you think about that and you think about, I think a lot about when I make decisions what do I wanna show up on that, the headline the next day. Yeah. What is the thing that you are hoping shows up on that headline? Oh, what's the legacy you're trying to leave?

Bill Nance 1:10:03

The, honestly, it's, the thing I think about, try to remind myself to think about and encourage people around me to think about is what is the experience you're creating for people? It's not necessarily your job, right? It could be your home life. What experience do people have when they walk in the door? That, if you take that out of career and you move it into home, it's like when your kids walk in the house after a long day at school, what does it feel like? Is it noisy and high pressure and chaos and, or is it a moment of relaxing, for them because they've been dealing with the pressure of school and social and academic all day, and do they have a minute to breathe before they get, have you done the chores? Do you have your homework? Is that, and do I always get that experience right? No. There are times where they didn't clean their room in the morning, and that's the first thing they hear from me when they walk in the door. But do I want it to be better every time? Absolutely. And at work, do I want it to be better for the folks that are either on the team or at the campus that are just dealing with the change that's coming their way? For the students in the classroom and the instructor, is it an environment that we can impact at all to make it better? And if anybody said I was focused on that more than money or whatever, that to me is a win, relentless pursuit of better. It doesn't matter what it is, it just has to be better. And there are ways to do it through technology, of course, through just plain focus on service through fundamental things like take the structure of the program and the way it's, delivered. Not the curriculum, but the other stuff and make it better. And if you can do that stuff, maybe more people finish school and get that career and don't give up. Maybe your kids. Enjoy coming home more, whatever it is. That's the stuff that to me is it's, that's the only thing that really matters is is it a better

Patrick Patterson 1:12:09

experience? This was awesome. Thank you so much. I know you're a pretty private person. Yeah. And so I appreciate you taking the time to, to chat with me. I'm

Bill Nance 1:12:17

not gonna say I get asked to do podcasts a lot, but I will say the first person I said yes to

Patrick Patterson 1:12:22

I know I was doing the re I was trying to do the research and I was like, there's not a lot of,

Bill Nance 1:12:25

I'm hard to find. Yeah, you are. By design. But listen, I appreciate it. Enjoyed it. Don't enjoy talking about myself, but you made it somewhat painless, so thank you. And I feel like, oh yeah, this has been a great experience the last few years working with you guys. You've pushed me personally you've listened you guys have adapted, I just think you guys are a great partner, so thank you. Ditto, and looking forward to the next stage in the journey. Yeah, absolutely.

Patrick Pattersonpatrick-patterson_1_08-27-2025_092727 1:12:51

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