Case Study · 2004–2008
Two turnarounds, one seat.
Most operators get hired to fix one thing. At The Princeton Review I fixed two, four years apart in difficulty and discipline: first a community tutoring program that couldn’t gain traction, then an internal call center the company had already decided to close. Different problems, different playbooks — same job. Diagnose what’s actually broken, make the expensive-but-right bets other people won’t, and build the system that holds after you leave.
- 17×
- Tutoring growth in a year
- 7,000+
- Students — largest in IL
- $8M
- P&L owned
- +10%
- Company top-line revenue
Act One — the tutoring program
Context. The Princeton Review had a federally funded after-school tutoring program in Chicago — Supplemental Educational Services under No Child Left Behind, free to families in underserved communities. On paper, a real opportunity. In practice it was stalled: a handful of classes running, no traction, no momentum. The Princeton Review had been a client of mine at SolTyra and knew I was wired into Chicago with the sales, marketing, and operating range to move it. They acqui-hired me to find out whether the program was a real business or a dead end.
Mandate. Take a stalled program and find out if it could scale — then scale it. I owned the whole motion: marketing, sales, operations, community partnerships, and the field organization that ran it.
The market I walked into was rigged. Competitors won enrollment by gaming the system — promising families laptops they never delivered, running online “courses” that did nothing, treating federal dollars as a blank check. I made two bets that cost more and were the right thing to do:
Hire the community to reach the community.
Instead of spending on promotions and giveaways, I built a street team of roughly 100 parents from the neighborhoods we served. The program was free — most families simply didn’t know it existed. Parents carrying that message to other parents did what no ad buy could.
Hire the schools’ own teachers, not outside tutors.
Most providers brought in cheap, inexperienced tutors. I hired the children’s actual teachers and paid them their hourly wage to give the students they already knew more time and support. Far more expensive — and the entire point: the people who already knew the kids produced the best results, in genuine partnership with principals and school buildings.
Then I systematized all of it — the partnership model, the marketing, the sales motion, the operations — into a portable playbook and replicated it across six more cities. I also worked with nonprofits and state education departments to clean up the sector: pushing regulators to measure actual academic results instead of writing blank checks. It was the right thing for the students — and a quality operator wins when the game is scored on outcomes.
- Grew the Chicago program from roughly 400 students to 7,000+ in a single year — the largest provider in Illinois.
- Delivered the highest measured math and reading gains for students in underserved communities.
- Built and managed a field organization of 400+ teachers and a 100-parent street team.
- Expanded the model into six additional cities on a standardized playbook.
- Added roughly 10% to company top-line revenue.
Act Two — the call center
Context. With the tutoring program scaling, the company handed me a different problem — and ninety days to assess it. A 25-seat call center, slated for shutdown: inbound-only, handling support and sales inquiries, with no metrics, no management, and no idea what was happening inside it. The read in the room was that it was a cost center not worth keeping. Ninety days in, my read was the opposite: not a bad asset, an undervalued, undermanaged one. I told the CEO it was worth keeping — then set out to prove it.
Mandate. Assess a call center marked for closure; keep it alive only if it could be made into something real — then make it real. I owned a roughly $8M P&L spanning the rebuilt call center, the consolidated national tutoring sales line, and the centralized marketing operation that grew out of it.
Split a miscast team.
The staff was divided — half warm, natural support people who couldn’t sell; half with the sales spark who suffered through long support calls. Not bad. Miscast. I split the floor into dedicated support and dedicated sales: support could finally just take care of customers; sales could sell.
Rebuilt both halves.
Real training for each function, a reconfigured commission plan, a push toward higher-dollar programs, and a gut-remodel of the physical space. The center went from somewhere nobody trusted to somewhere people wanted to work.
Made a national center feel local.
I flew out to most of the local offices to understand their pain firsthand, then built the operations and technology so a caller — whether they reached a local office or came in through the internet — got an experience that felt local, backed by the best information we had.
Centralized the marketing mess.
Local offices were each running their own direct mail off inbound inquiries — slow, inconsistent. I built consensus to centralize it: any inquiry, local or web, processed and mailed the same day with local inserts, run in bulk through a DHL partnership that drove cost down.
Turned the center into the company’s listening post.
Sitting on top of every call and inquiry, I had a vantage point no one else had. I fed that intelligence to the owners and C-level — and one early signal was demand for online tutoring, which I helped guide, plan, and develop into the highest-ticket offering and a new revenue stream the company hadn’t been capturing.
- Took a center marked for shutdown and turned it into what the company came to treat as its jewel.
- Raised revenue per ticket and cut cost per support call.
- Consolidated the high-ticket national tutoring sales line and the marketing fulfillment for 30+ local offices into one same-day hub.
- Drove down fulfillment cost through a bulk DHL partnership.
- Surfaced the market intelligence that seeded a new online-tutoring revenue stream.
The pattern
Two problems that shared nothing on the surface — a community program that wouldn’t grow and an internal cost center marked for death — came down to the same work. See what’s actually there instead of what the room assumes. Make the expensive, right call when the cheap, easy one is on the table. Build the system, cast the right people into it, and leave it running better than you found it.