Now I’m Doing the Work.

For about ten years, our institution’s strategic plan has included “develop a strategic enrollment management plan.” It gets about five minutes of group thought every year at our annual strategic plan review-o-rama – that and the 27 other strategic priorities.

SEM plan progress update? Anyone? No?

Next item.

To be fair, we had a good reason. We rode the COVID rebound for five straight years. Semester after semester, year after year of enrollment growth. We were busy building, investing, expanding. The work was real and it mattered.

But the enrollment cliff was coming whether we liked it or not. I’d known that since 2022. So while we were growing, I was doing homework nobody asked me to do in a quasi-cover marcomm opps move. Researching demographics. Pulling data. Watching webinars. Attending breakouts. Getting ready for work nobody had officially started.

I was secretly hoping someone would eventually point at me and say “you’re on this.”

That never happened. So I stopped waiting.

The problem underneath the problem

We didn’t have a specific enrollment goal. The only stated target was “increase enrollment.” No number. No timeline. No shared definition of what success looked like (sound familiar?).

It was basically dealer’s choice. Admissions ran their play. Academic affairs ran theirs. I tried to connect my marketing plans to both without a clear target or a shared game plan.

Nobody was wrong exactly. That’s what happens when a big institutional priority lives in a document but never gets operationalized. Everyone manages that pressure differently. What starts out as nearly parallel motion that looks like progress slowly diverges until you’ve got football field-size gaps.

That very pressure created a perfect diamond at a board meeting.

Our CFO presented the proposed budget. Flat enrollment, hedging for a small decrease, and a tuition increase double the previous four annual increases. After a vigorous discussion, the board approved it. The quote of the night: “I’ve never heard of a college that cut its way to prosperity.”

I grabbed a slot on my president’s calendar the next day.

What I brought and what I didn’t

I didn’t walk in with a finished plan. I walked in with a framework and some good questions.

I asked him: what would the cuts look like if the board had pushed back and asked for a lower tuition increase? What would go? What would we protect?

He hadn’t fully sat with those questions yet. The framing landed. And because I’d been doing the homework, I had something to put in front of him when he was ready to look.

That was deliberate. A project like this doesn’t succeed because one person has the right answers. It succeeds because the right people get to shape it. The data team needs to feel like co-owners. Academics needed to see their priorities reflected. Admissions had to share what they experience on the front lines. Administrative affairs needed the context of the priorities behind the dollars.

If I’d walked in with a finished plan, I might have gotten the green light from my president and a slow roll from everyone else.

A good framework and honest questions surface what people don’t agree on without requiring anyone to admit publicly that they’re not aligned.

Buy-in isn’t a step at the end. It’s built into how you start.

What I gave up

I stopped picking up new projects. I handed things to my team I normally did. Some things slowed down. There was friction.

That was the cost. I paid it deliberately.

Making room isn’t a productivity strategy. It’s a tradeoff with real consequences. If you’re not willing to name what you’re stopping, you’re not making room. You’re just adding. And that shiny new thing dies a slow death as a forgettable line on a well-intended priorities list.

Where it stands

My president went on record that we’re moving forward with planning. The data team is onboard. Early conversations are happening with the right people across the institution.

I don’t know how it fully lands yet. The real work is still ahead. But I know it only happened because I stopped waiting for the assignment and simply decided to start.

Five things that made this work

1. Do the homework before you have permission. The work I did while waiting made the plan credible when I finally had an audience. Don’t wait for the assignment to prepare. Do what you can now so you’re ready when the opening comes. That doesn’t mean building an elaborate framework nobody asked for. It means minimum viable preparation. Read, gather, listen, organize. Enough to be credible when the moment arrives. Not so much that you’ve overbuilt the plan before you even start.

2. Use someone else’s data as your opening. The CFO’s budget presentation did more work than anything I could have said on my own. When you anchor a conversation in data your audience already trusts, you’re not selling. You’re helping them see something they already half-knew.

3. Connect the work to priorities above your own. If this reads like a pet project, you’re toast. The SEM plan mattered to the institution long before I touched it. I was picking up something we had already decided was important. That’s a different ask than “here’s something I want us to work on.”

4. Come in with a structure, not a prescription. Big institutional projects require exploration. Walk in with all the answers and you’ve already lost the room. A framework and honest questions do more work than a finished plan. They surface misalignment early before it calcifies into resistance.

5. Make room by stopping things, not by working harder. You cannot add a project of this scale without removing something else. Name what you’re stopping. Do it deliberately. The friction is real and worth paying, but only if you’ve actually made the tradeoff.

Would I have done anything different? Sure. I’d have started the whole thing a lot sooner. Looked for my in sooner. More conversations with key players sooner. Aligned my workload and active projects sooner.

But I’m here now. And we’re moving forward.

One more thing

Deciding to lead before you’re asked. Connecting your marketing priorities to institutional strategy. Building the case from data instead of opinion.

That’s the work I guide marketing leaders through in the Marketing Leader Performance Accelerator. If you’re ready to stop waiting for the assignment, join the waitlist for the next cohort or email me to learn more.