How Does Your Independent School Prioritize Marketing & Enrollment?
What the Response to My Business Competency Survey Taught Me
Sometimes, when I send a newsletter, I can feel the conversation it's going to start before I hit send.
Other times, I'm completely wrong about what will land.
I didn't have particularly high expectations when I shared the results of a pulse survey I ran on business competencies for independent school leaders. That was probably a signal I should have paid closer attention to, because the replies came in, and some of them were passionate.
A handful of readers pushed back, clearly and thoughtfully, on where marketing and enrollment landed in the rankings. I want to unpack what they said, share my perspective, and hear from you.
How the Competencies Ranked
First, here's how the eight competencies sorted out in the survey:
Strategy & Change Management
Culture & People
Financial Acumen & Data-Informed Decision Making
Entrepreneurial Mindset
Adaptability & Continuous Learning
Advancement & Enrollment Management
Marketing Strategy
Operations
Marketing ranked seventh. Enrollment ranked sixth. Those two placements generated most of the conversation.
What the Replies Said
The emails I received were direct and well-reasoned. The writers weren't frustrated for the sake of being frustrated. They care about enrollment and marketing deeply, and they made a clear case for why the field needs to take these competencies more seriously at the leadership level.
A few themes came through consistently.
Schools Are Putting the Pressure in the Wrong Place
One reply made a point that stuck with me: schools are increasingly putting enormous pressure on their admissions and marketing teams to deliver results, while simultaneously not treating enrollment and marketing as leadership competencies that the head of school and senior administrators need to develop.
That's a structural problem. If the head doesn't understand how enrollment works, how families make decisions, what a competitive market looks like, or how marketing strategy connects to sustainability, it's very difficult to support the people doing that work or make sound decisions about resourcing it.
Word-of-Mouth Isn't Enough Anymore
Multiple respondents pushed back on the idea that schools can continue to rely heavily on reputation and referral as their primary enrollment engine. The call was clear: schools need to invest in broader, more proactive marketing strategies and stop waiting for families to come to them.
This connects to something I've been writing about for a while, particularly around how millennial families evaluate schools. They're not passively discovering schools through community networks the way prior generations did. They're doing their own research, making comparisons, and looking for values alignment. Passive marketing strategies are increasingly mismatched with how families actually make decisions.
The Case for Deeper Sales Skills
One respondent raised something that tends to make people in independent schools a little uncomfortable: the importance of cultivating actual sales skills. Not manipulation, but genuine skill in articulating value, building relationships with prospective families, and guiding them through a decision process.
It's a reframe worth sitting with.
Why I Included These as Core Competencies to Begin With
I want to be clear about something before going further. Ranking the eight competencies is a genuinely difficult exercise, and any prioritization will put something lower on the list. That doesn't mean anything at the bottom is unimportant. All eight competencies matter, and the specific ranking reflects a moment-in-time survey, not a definitive hierarchy.
That said, the people who replied are pointing at something real.
Marketing and enrollment aren't just admissions office functions. They're business model functions. Tuition revenue is the primary driver of financial sustainability for most independent schools, which means enrollment is a financial acumen question as much as it is an admissions question. It belongs in every senior leader's working vocabulary, not just the heads of admission and marketing.
When everyone in leadership has baseline fluency in how enrollment works and why marketing strategy matters, it creates alignment that the school can actually feel. The message gets sharper. The investment in admissions and marketing gets defended more intelligently at the board level. And the teams doing the work feel supported rather than siloed.
That's why both competencies are woven into everything I do at Moonshot Lab.
How Moonshot Lab Addresses This
The eight business competencies that frame Moonshot Lab include marketing strategy and enrollment management by design. They're not add-ons or special topics. They're part of the core curriculum, addressed through live coaching sessions, case studies, and advisor access that's included with membership.
Enrollment strategy, marketing positioning, and the intersection of both with financial sustainability are the kinds of challenges the Moonshot Lab community works through together, with experienced practitioners who've been on the front lines of this work.
If you want to see where you currently stand across all eight competencies, the Business Competency Self-Assessment takes about ten minutes and gives you a concrete picture of where to focus your development.
I Want to Hear From You
The replies I received after that survey were genuinely useful, and this conversation isn't finished. A few questions I'd like your perspective on:
How do you currently prioritize marketing and enrollment at the leadership level in your school? Is it treated as a shared leadership competency, or does it sit primarily with the admissions and marketing teams?
What challenges are you running into, and what kind of support would actually help?
And the bigger question: do you agree that school leaders outside the enrollment and marketing offices need to develop real fluency in these areas, or is that asking too much of an already full job?
I don't think there's a clean answer to that last question. But I do think the conversation is overdue.
