The Open House Podcast

It was a rough week on the internet. Railway, a hosting company we use, was broken into and told every customer to replace all their keys. Two days later, two critical flaws turned up in PHP, the language behind a huge share of the web, WordPress included. AI helped find the holes, and AI is helping patch them.

Sage and Rocky talk through what they actually did about it: a full day of Jax swapping out hundreds of keys, checking PHP on every site they manage, and asking AI to try to break into their own system. Plus why a 20-year-old password with an extra dollar sign on the end is not a plan.

The takeaway for schools, nonprofits and small businesses: you don't have to know the answers, you just have to ask the questions. Is our website patched? Where do we keep our passwords? Are we using two-factor? Did we change our keys? Ask your IT person, ask AI, or call that parent on your board who knows this stuff.

Rocky spent years refusing to do SageRock's books. She was not going to be the entrepreneur's trad wife. Eventually she did them anyway. Now AI does them, and it's more careful than anyone they ever hired.

Think about who you'd hand your QuickBooks to. A stranger from down the street who says they know it? Sure, no problem. AI? Whoa, whoa, I've heard things. Rocky and Sage walk through what actually happened when Jax got into 25 years of their books: $705 of payroll that was never owed, Amazon card autopays recorded twice, 85 old invoices still showing as unpaid, and a $3.99 YouTube movie that probably wasn't a business expense.

Then the real questions. Is it safe? Where does the risk actually live? And what could AI take off the plate of the one overwhelmed person running the money at a school or nonprofit?

Sage has ADHD. (He'll tell you.) On a recent camping trip he met a fifth grader who has it too, and who would not stop asking to be quizzed on aviation. No adult around that fire could keep up. So Sage handed him ChatGPT in voice mode, and the kid quizzed himself happily for ages.

That sets up a bigger conversation. Is ADHD actually more common, or just finally getting diagnosed? Are our phones rewiring us? Why does a school day built on sitting still for 90 minutes fit so badly with how some kids' brains work? And what happens to schools when parents start asking what school is for, now that AI can do so much?

No neat answers, but Rocky and Sage think the hyper-focused kid with an AI tutor might be a preview of the future, not a problem to manage.

Rocky and Sage are hitting the road. On November 5 and 6 they're leading "From Inquiry to Enrollment: AI for Waldorf Admissions" at the AWSNA Marketing & Admissions Symposium ("Why Waldorf? Why Now?"), November 4–7 at Mount Mary University in Milwaukee.

In this episode, Rocky walks through how AI actually rolled out at one school. It didn't start with a big audit. It started with one annoying spreadsheet. Web forms went straight into Constant Contact, tagged by grade. Then came read-only Gmail to catch phone and email leads, then FACTS and Google Analytics for a real funnel, then Google Ads, then a texting system for a school without a work phone.

The point of the workshop: this isn't a sales pitch. What used to cost thousands is now open to any school, and you'll leave with workflow documents you could hand to your IT person, a parent volunteer, or yourself.

There's still time to register through AWSNA: https://web.cvent.com/event/f1de098f-ac40-4ffb-a265-a5b1ff7a66a1/summary

Rocky

Rocky has spent two years going toe-to-toe with the AI inside Google Ads. In this episode, we walk through the battles: the words "open house" getting flagged as real estate (yes, on the Open House podcast), smart bidding quietly pulling in every old Google Analytics conversion ever created, auto-generated site links sending prospective parents to the donate page and the board roster, and Google's August update that squeezes budget-limited advertisers even harder.

We also get into why broad match is almost never your friend when your school is called Waldorf, and why a $7 lead is a bargain when a family could be worth years of tuition.

The takeaway: if you set up your Google Ads three months ago and haven't looked since, you're wasting money. Get in there and lock it down.

Stick around to the end. Rocky has an offer for the first five schools.

Rocky can’t sleep. Sage sleeps just fine.

In this episode, we wrestle with the thing we don’t hear enough people in the AI space say out loud: pushing AI adoption means helping to accelerate massive job loss — and we know it. We talk about what happened when America offshored manufacturing 50 years ago (spoiler: perpetual homelessness), why this wave is bigger and less optional, and how the consumer — not the tech — is what actually kills industries. Rocky shares the moral weight of doing this work, and Sage makes the case that maybe the comfortable class could stand to feel a little of what everyone else has been living with for decades. We get into AI running our books better than any human ever did, the awe of possibly witnessing a new species, and why you should learn to clean a chicken before it’s too late.

This one’s honest. It’s uncomfortable. It’s where we actually are.

Vicki Larson has spent over two decades in and around Waldorf and independent schools — as a development director, communications director, and now as co-founder of Alma Partners. In this episode, she and Sage get into the nitty-gritty of what “advancement” actually means, why the admissions person, the marketing person, and the fundraising person need to be telling the same story, and what happens when they’re not. They cover the enrollment funnel (awareness → interest → consideration → intent → inquiry), the courage it takes to tell your school’s real story, and Vicki’s concentric circles model — the idea that families need a relationship to their teacher, the school, and Waldorf education itself if you want them to stay. They also get into focus, systems, the myth of multitasking, and why giving yourself one intentional hour a month might be the most productive thing you do all year.

Click here for Vicki’s Advancement Team Essentials course, which starts September 28, 2026, at almapartners.net.

Every school needs a way to keep student information organized. But does that mean buying an all-in-one system, building something custom, or connecting the tools you already like?This week, Rocky brings her experience choosing and working with FACTS, and Sage asks the question she saw coming: could we build this with AI?We talk about what a student information system actually does, why even a small school needs shared access and clear permissions, and the maintenance that comes with building your own. Then we get into a practical middle ground: using AI to help connect your SIS with inquiry forms, spreadsheets, and email tools through APIs, where those integrations are available.Also in the conversation: software bloat, frustrating help desks, customization costs, and why keeping student data secure has to be part of the discussion.What does your school's SIS do well—and what still sends you back to a spreadsheet?

Every private school gets the Niche pitch. Most of us can’t figure out what it costs without getting on a sales call, which is why Rocky refused to touch it for years.

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Rocky did sign up, for one school, and she tracked everything. This episode is her real numbers side by side: $5,500 a year in Google paid search vs. $3,500 in Niche. Paid search brought 2,867 clicks. Niche brought 80. Then the conversion rates flip the story: 3.9% on paid search, 22% on Niche. And three of those Niche families enrolled, two of them relocating into the area.

We get into why Niche is worth more on the coasts than in the Midwest, why “your traffic is down 60%” might be Google’s fault and not yours, why Niche’s tracking matched GA4 to the person (rare and appreciated), and whether a free, open school directory will eventually eat Niche’s lunch.

Verdict: cancel a print ad, try Niche for a year, track it. And Niche, if you’re listening, just put the price on the website.

Full video above. Open House is Sage and Rocky Lewis from SageRock, practical help for the people running small schools.

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Rocky turns the tables and interviews Sage about AI from the ground up. We start with the basics — who’s actually making these models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and a whole world of open-source models, including the surprisingly strong ones coming out of China), which product goes with which company, and why “open” AI isn’t open at all.

From there: what the data-center arms race is really about (training, not you), why Sage would bet on Google despite everyone making fun of Gemini, and whether AI is genuinely behind the layoffs in the headlines.

Then the part that matters for schools and small nonprofits: the cheapest, lowest-risk way to start. Take the work you’d normally pay an outside contractor for — the ads, the SEO, the flyer you haven’t updated in sixteen years — and try it with a $20/month subscription first. We also get into where the line is: what you shouldn’t paste into a consumer chatbot, why the terms of service matter for your financials, and when it’s worth building something secure through the API instead.