Blinded by the Light

Understand your school’s real niche

In August 2009, the U.S. Congressional Budget Office acknowledged that the American budget deficit estimate had soared to $1.6 trillion (U.S.) and that the current recession is now “the most severe since World War II.”

Unlike those “Mad Hatters” in Washington, or their Canadian counterparts in Ottawa, private schools don’t have the luxury of repeatedly underestimating lurking disasters and repeatedly spending beyond their means.

Private schools are on their own.

These days, the recessionary economy is not our only problem. During the 1995–1996 year, there were only 561 private schools in Ontario. As of the 2009–2010 academic year, there are 941 private schools in Ontario. Meanwhile, the number of school-age children has decreased to less than two million since 2003. Recession or not, the private school system will need much bigger pieces and many more pieces of a steadily shrinking pie in order to maintain student numbers.

Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop, equates entrepreneurship with survival. Roddick, who pioneered the concept of cruelty-free beauty products in 1976, argues that the essence of entrepreneurial survival was and is drawn from creative thinking. Bill Gates cautions his Microsoft workers that the corporation is “always just 18 months away from failure.” He sees lackadaisical inertia, absent of any creative thinking, as the heavy anchor that, if not lifted, will defeat even the fullest sails.

For many of us, this sort of out-of-the-box creative thinking is intimidating and risky. How do we embark upon that very risky creative-thinking process, so necessary to ensure school survival? It’s a two-step process: discover your school’s own core competencies and, by doing so, understand your own market niche.

A core competency is, simply, something that you do particularly well. Such a competency benefits your students, is prohibitive for your competitors to mimic because of what’s typically called a “higher entry bar,” and can be leveraged across your school programming. A core competency can involve specifically developed technical or subject know-how, or a highly skilled educational process or even just well-developed and highly personal commitments to and from students, staff, families and other stakeholders to your school’s well-being. Such core competencies, if sustained, become cornerstones of school culture and ensure school survival.

It is important to distinguish between core school competencies and individual staff competencies. Individual staff competencies, although valuable, are dangerously portable, and often walk out the door, literally, just when you least expect it. Core school competencies are what are left when all else (staff included) is stripped away. Greek philosophers used the example of the sailing Ship of Theseus. During the vessel’s long voyage, damaged timbers and crew members were replaced at each port. It returned to its home port possessing none of its original timbers and manned by none of its original crew. For your school to survive, just as the Ship of Theseus did, you’ll need to discover those core competencies, hidden well beneath your staff, your bricks and your mortar.

Once you’ve discovered those core competencies, you need to identify the market niche that naturally follows. Many of us really have no idea of our school’s market niche. The more foolish try to be everything to everybody and end up being anything but. There’s a fairly easy way to discover your market niche. Just take a good look around. Who are your students? What are the specific common needs and wants that sent them to your school? Why are these students at your school and not somewhere else? By answering these questions, you’ll have discovered your own school niche, the programming activities for which your school is now, like it or not, best fitted. Your actual niche may not be your desired niche. We can never be sure how our school programming will morph over the years, and which students we will ultimately come to best serve.

Once identified, how do we continue to strengthen our core competencies and maintain our market niche? Counterintuitively, by letting our guard down and asking those who really matter—our families and our students. They’ll be flattered by the consultation. Ed Koch, the popular former mayor of New York City, used to walk the city streets and ask citizens, “How am I doing?” He didn’t always hear praise. But he remained popular because he asked, he listened and he responded.

If all else fails and you’re still at a loss, try an even simpler strategy. Sit down with your smartest friends, buy them dinner and try to persuade them over a bottle of wine that your school should stay open this upcoming academic year—they’ll bluntly tell you where to go and even where not to go. If they don’t, you can always ask the Cheshire Cat.

Alice came to a fork in the road.
“Which one will I take?” she asked.
“Where do you want to go?” responded the Cheshire Cat.
“I don’t know,” Alice answered.
“Then,” said the cat, “it doesn’t much matter.”
—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, 1865