The Problem Machine

A unique school helps students with emotional and behavioral issues, yet faces funding and marketing hurdles. We explore strategic grassroots and networking solutions to boost enrollment and awareness.

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of The Problem Machine Podcast.

• Neurological approach makes this campus a standout for struggling students
• Competitors undercut by securing grant funding and better marketing
• Direct-to-parent outreach is vital for this school’s growth
• Grassroots efforts and testimonials offer high-impact, low-cost marketing
• Strategic vision and metrics are needed for lasting enrollment solutions

Resources:

• DevNoodle
• PodcastChef

Connect with our hosts:

• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn
• Brian Mattocks - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 22:01 - Brian: What you do is you do a student appreciation day where you have students bring families back in. You have students bring families and friends back in. What you're looking for is network expansion, lateral expansion, the relationship expansion. of the people that have been affected positively by the school.
  Alex: When I was, when I was touring the campus, she said, if they come here for a tour, they sign up.
  Brian: So, you know, then, what do you do? You take all of the money that you're going to spend trying to go apply for grants. You throw a couple good open houses where you know to give awards to the students that went through the program. Where you incentivize them to invite folks, peers, colleagues, friends, family, to come see them get this award. Then what happens? Once they're on site, all the magical stuff.
• 14:42 - So what I'm not hearing is a channel that's direct to parents. You're going to need to get direct to the decision-maker. The schools, essentially hostile referral partners here, don't help. They're not incentivized to help. You may like to believe that they're going to some more altruistically solve the problem. But again... they've got their job on the line as well. So you are gonna need to strategically build a comms channel directly to the parents. And if you can't begin the process of building that educational program out to those folks, they're never gonna be in a position to decide positively for the better quality outcomes.
• 18:49 - Brian: But you have a better product. And so you need to get in front of the decision maker and you have no access. Find the decision makers, find out where they congregate and go.
  Alex: And it may also increase in the enrollment more because what if those behavioral issues are not at the threshold where the school would recommend that they go to a different school entirely. But the parents want that. That's where you create that bottom-up pressure to essentially drive those decisions.
• 24:43 - They're probably not hostile, but they're not incentivized. The incentives are against you. So getting those folks to come out for those things like award ceremonies and grassroots efforts and stuff like that might just turn a couple heads as well. So there's ways to potentially close that incentive gap as well. You make somebody... feel special and appreciated and the outcomes that they're able to influence and create positively have an impact both on the student and the referral partner by virtue of helping pick the right solution to the problem, you're really then starting to stack or restack the incentives in your favor. And that makes sense, especially for the parents who've attended, whose children got an award, who then potentially post in the group. the support group that they're in on Facebook or wherever it is and say, Hey, we graduated, you know, and that becomes a resource.
• 04:46 - I think if it is someone in administration for the school district, you're already on the wrong side of the fence. Because if there's a cheaper option that's going to hit your budget with significantly less, you'd probably recommend that school. over the others. On the other hand, let's say they do recommend both options to the parents and the parents ultimately have the choice. Online, the differentiation that this school has is not seen. They built an entire program that they also license and train other schools, teachers, counselors, other private schools on, they built it in-house. It's their system.

Join us as we dive into custom woodworking challenges—quoting bottlenecks, outsourcing trade-offs, and how tech, automation, and clear strategy can free business owners from overwhelm and unlock growth.

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of The Problem Machine Podcast.

• Outdated quoting eats up 40 hours per project—business growth stalls
• Outsourcing quoting: fast, but costly or risky in quality
• Automation offers hope—can AI really match a human's detail?
• Offloading tasks comes with trust and training headaches
• Small process choices can shackle—or free—your business

Resources:

• DevNoodle
• PodcastChef

Connect with our hosts:

• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn
• Brian Mattocks - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 33:37 - Quotes and estimates are a solved problem. The people that do this well don't list every single screw, they list a range of the number of screws most cabinets are ever gonna need to install, go to somewhere between the minimum and the maximum there and say, screws are 100 bucks a job, right? Whatever that conversation is, whatever that math is, you should be able to get there from here and move to the next problem. AI can do all this all day, every day. So it's not a human consideration to bring a human in the loop to do something that humans are not able to do well like it's in every way you're using the wrong tool for the job just because it's the tool we've always had doesn't mean it's the right one
• 14:31 - Do I need to go through all this effort, essentially unpaid to give them the answer they're looking for? So imagine almost like a pre-quoting process that just gives them the ballpark that, essentially they can stand behind with 100% confidence that they can get there from here. I would want to build a solution that does that. You may not be able to remove the design sort of pole in the tent, right? But you should get paid for it as opposed to do that first and then again, roll the dice on the answer. So, what intelligence do you think we would need to sort of cook up to give them that high certainty, rough order of magnitude tool?
• 18:30 - Is that one job that is underbid going to cost you 100 times over? And if that's the case, then we need to figure out, is this a Six Sigma event that we need to solve for? And if the answer is no, we don't ever have to worry about that, then great. Yeah, makes sense. This part of it, creating the initial quote. And I think you nailed it earlier. It's kind of like, this is a part of sales process that carries risk. Let's eliminate that and essentially get him his time back risk-free.
• 25:43 - And it gets worse too, because in the human-to-human exchange, particularly when you're training somebody that's working for you, you have an inherent trust problem. And it's not something that a lot of folks want to talk about, right? But the employee may have questions that they're afraid to ask because it shows that they may not know it in the same way that they were hired to do, or they may not be quite comfortable, or any of that kind of head trash that gets in the way on the employee side instantly makes them less trustworthy. This isn't that they're duplicitous. This is just that by default, because they have their human beings with human doubts and concerns, they may not be asking the questions that need to get asked to create better outcomes, because again, whatever, whatever those reasons might be.
• 27:47 - We have an estimating problem. Do you, though? Or do you have
• sales problem? Or do you have a we're working at risk problem? Because they're all different problems and they're all solved in slightly different ways. Design problem, right? Yeah, exactly. It could very well be that the entire problem here is a design problem. And it gets worse, right? So like, you know, at some point you get into this, it's like, it's turtles all the way down, where you're just, you know, chasing, chasing all of the things. But, but first things first, take the labor-intensive stuff. And if you're not getting paid for it, make sure you do. So if we can find a way to solve that problem, I think that's mission one.

Can universities survive the AI storm? We dive into art school panic, collapsing enrollment, and the creative tricks colleges need to outsmart the problem machine. Personalized education, parental subscriptions, and more—all with plenty of infotainment!

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of the Problem Machine Podcast.

• AI’s rapid rise sparks fear and uncertainty for art colleges
• Enrollment is down—YouTube and on-demand learning are huge factors
• Universities must personalize, mentor, and adapt or risk irrelevance
• Financial models for education may need full reinvention
• Parents, not just students, could be key to future university success

Resources:

• DevNoodle
• PodcastChef

Connect with our hosts:

• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn
• Brian Mattocks - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 00:13 - You've got students who are generally scared, they're watching NA AI generate videos, illustrations, design concepts, and seconds. And they're thinking, what am I doing here in class? Why am I even here? Why am I going into debt over this career that may not exist by the time I graduate? And then you've got the president who's called in the middle because the students, they want reassurance, but she can't pretend it isn't happening. At the same time, she has to figure out how the college itself is going to survive.
• 03:18 - Mostly I sensed a lot of fear not knowing, especially in a position of leadership as the president of a university, not having the answer, not knowing what to do, and without knowing all the details, it seemed like potentially she's, she's just feeling very stuck and not knowing which direction to go because there's landmines in any direction that she takes. And it's a very sensitive topic.
• 04:28 - But the reality is, for any one university succeed, somebody's gonna have to figure out the one step higher problem, which is what is the role of continuing education in a society where education's on demand? How does that work?
• 12:19 - AI has become the ultimate generalist. It may have become the ultimate specialist at some point, but until it does, the generalist spot is minimally it's taken, right? So now we need to help individuals become the specialists that they are capable of, biologically, socially, you know, all of the things that make sense, right?
• 29:24 - Children aren't buyers, parents are, I would start creating a program to engage parents to have their child go through this whatever selection process, whatever that might be, help them figure out how to set aside a Netflix level amount of money they could go into some sort of account that would essentially generate enough revenue over time that adds to the university conference. Such that, such that they're throwing off enough static investment capital that, you know, they don't have to charge meaningfully directly for per credit or any of that kind of stuff. So you never have to question that. You just, your kid's gonna get taken care of and they're gonna get whatever education for the rest of their life they're ever gonna need from us at 20 bucks a month, starting even pre-birth, right here you go, get on that drip as part of the conversation.