Independent School Moonshot Podcast

What happens when a school experiences significant enrollment growth in a short period of time? Dr. Dan Love, superintendent of the American International School of Lagos , and Heather-Hope Joseph, the school’s director of enrollment management , have been living that question. AISL’s recent growth has been supported by an expanding US consulate presence, a stronger oil and gas sector, and a rebui...

Heads across the country are noticing the same thing: it is getting harder to find strong advancement people. Jill Goodman of Jill Goodman Consulting returns to the podcast to help us understand why and what schools can do about it. Jill has spent nearly 30 years in and around schools as a parent volunteer, trustee, and administrator before founding her consulting practice in 2017, and she now wor...

A quick note before you press play. This is one of my most popular episodes, and I share it with schools in my consulting work all the time. I'm bringing it back under a new title, The Living Endowment: How One School Turned Auxiliary Programs Into a Quarter of Its Budget, because the central idea feels more relevant now than when we first recorded it. If you've heard it before, I think you'll hea...

What does it take for a school to be named a Top Workplace in its city when it never set out to win the award? Bodo Heiliger, Head of School at the International School of Portland , leads a pre-K through fifth grade language immersion IB school of just under 400 students learning in Japanese, Mandarin, and Spanish. Roughly 80 percent of his employees grew up outside the United States, and Bodo de...

What if meaningful enrollment growth comes from getting the fundamentals right, week after week, rather than from a sweeping overhaul? Pete Moore , Head of School at Oak Hill School in Eugene, Oregon, joins me to talk about how his team grew from 134 students to nearly 200 over three years. Pete describes it as compound decision-making: small, thoughtful choices made consistently until they start...

What does it mean for a school to go fractional? After my conversation with Pete Moore of Oak Hill School, I heard from more listeners about fractional services than almost any other topic, and nearly all of them were asking some version of that question. So I invited back two people who do this work every day: Mattingly Messina, Founder of Throughline , who serves schools in advancement and fundr...

How can independent school leaders transition from fragmented departmental data to a unified system that accurately measures organizational health? In this episode, Cara Gallagher, founder of Cara Gallagher Consulting , returns to discuss how integrating behavioral science and organizational psychology allows leadership teams to build dynamic organizational health dashboards. By consolidating silo...

In this episode, Ann Snyder, Vice President for Strategic Initiatives at NAIS , joins the podcast to explore leadership longevity, board alignment, and organizational design across independent schools. With average headship tenures shrinking and roughly 20% of new leaders transitioning within their first three years, establishing proactive alignment mechanisms early in a head’s tenure has become a...

To celebrate more than a hundred episodes, I handed over the microphone. Pete Moore, head of school at Oak Hill School, reached out with an idea: flip the format and let him interview me. We covered my career supporting independent schools, the companies I started at the dawn of the internet, why I named the company MoonshotOS, and the calls I made to heads of school in the fall of 2023 that told...

A quick note before you press play. I first shared this conversation back in February. Generational questions come up in so many of my conversations with school leaders that it felt like the right one to bring back. If you missed it the first time, this one is for you. What if generational tension in the workforce isn't a problem to solve but a resource we're failing to use well? In this episode o...

Professional learning and instructional design drive institutional value, family retention, and long-term sustainability in independent schools. In this conversation, Dr. Darcie TeVault, founder of Cove and Bead Education and director of professional learning at VAIS , highlights how translating cognitive science into daily classroom practice and communicating transparently with families strengthe...

Two years after publishing Leading Through Strategy , Tom Olverson of RG175 has spent time thinking through a chapter that isn't in the book, so he's started writing it. He calls it the strategic mindset, and he argues it’s a critical skill for independent school leaders. A strategic mindset is the capacity to draw on different ways of thinking in order to recognize challenges and opportunities, g...

Capital project planning in independent schools often begins with architectural drawings rather than capital structure analytics. In this conversation, Robert Ryan, Director at First Tryon Advisors , discusses how school leadership teams and boards can strengthen their financial positioning, navigate capital markets, and align debt strategies with long-term institutional sustainability. Drawing fr...

A resume tells you what someone says they can do, and Rich Boerner built TruFit Talent because he spent three decades watching how often that falls short. After serving as a teacher, principal, and head of school, most recently at Graded in São Paulo, he and his co-founder kept circling the same honest reflection on weekend calls. When a hire flourished, they took the credit. When one did not, the...

How can independent schools effectively articulate their value proposition in an increasingly complex and transparent educational market? In this conversation, Simon Jones , Founder of the Bonjour Agency , explores how school leaders can move beyond traditional, corporate-style marketing to build authentic engagement through strategic storytelling and distributed brand stewardship. Rather than tre...

What happens when the playbook that built your international enrollment pipeline stops working? For twenty-six years, Josh Clark has recruited students across the globe, first from US boarding schools and now as Director of Enrollment and Marketing at TASIS England . In this conversation, he walks through why the old approach to international recruitment, essentially showing up in a country and ex...

What would it look like for independent schools to treat faculty well-being as a strategic design problem, not a staffing challenge? In this episode, Autumn Graves, Head of School at St. Anne's Belfield in Charlottesville, Virginia, explains how schools can respond to rising housing costs and childcare pressures through intentional choices that strengthen their institutions. Instead of accepting t...

I'm bringing this episode back this summer because of a pattern I keep noticing. In conversation after conversation with heads of school lately, enrollment pressure keeps coming up. It isn't isolated to one type of school. Some feel it more sharply than others, but very few leaders are immune right now. When enrollment gets tight, our instinct is often to reach for something new: a program, an ini...

A quick note before you press play. I first shared this conversation back in January, and it has stayed with me. I've had more conversations about this topic than I ever expected, and school leaders keep leaning in, so it felt like the right one to bring back this summer. If you missed it the first time, this one is for you. In this episode, I sit down with business coach Amol Tripathi of Focal Po...

What if the most powerful thing an independent school can offer is the one thing modern life is working hardest to eliminate? Jonathan Strecker, Head of School at Valley School of Ligonier and author of Emergence: How Modern Convenience Is Dumbing Down Our Children , makes a compelling case that friction, the productive struggle children experience when things are genuinely hard, is not a design f...

What does a truly high-functioning board look like, and how does a school get there? In this episode, Staci Williams Seeley, Principal at DRG Talent , brings 35 years of experience as a faculty member, senior administrator, board trustee, board chair, and leadership search consultant to a conversation that is as clarifying as it is energizing. She walks through what governance actually requires of...

When someone burns out in a school, the instinct is to look inward -- at resilience, habits, self-care. Dr. Derek Porter invites a different question: What if the structure around them is the real source of the strain? In this episode, Dr. Derek Porter, Assistant Head of Middle School at Green Hill Schoo l in Dallas, Texas, explores the critical intersections of leadership, culture, and organizati...

What if the traditional "hire for every need" model is quietly costing your school more than it saves? Pete Moore, Head of School at Oak Hill School in Eugene, Oregon, didn't set out to build an unconventional staffing model. He arrived at a school with limited resources and a clear mandate to build something better. What he found was that the answer wasn't just working harder or cutting deeper. I...

What does it actually cost a school when student life is treated as overhead instead of infrastructure? Bridget Johnson, founder of Dean's Roundtable , returns to the podcast to make a case that most school leaders have not fully reckoned with: student life is not a support function sitting beneath academics and operations. It is the connective tissue that holds a school's culture, community, and...

What does it look like to run a school with a truly diversified revenue model? In this conversation, Gardner Barrier, founder of Gardner Barrier Consulting, breaks down the difference between viewing spending as an expense and as an investment, and why that shift opens an entirely different set of financial decisions for school leaders and boards. The conversation covers how to identify and activa...