Business & Operations

The Business Office is charged with managing the safety and well-being of your students, teachers, staff, and community. Discover how ISM can help strengthen your school’s strategies in business and operations.

See below for examples of sessions our Consultants have presented on related to this topic.

Penny Abrahams, IAP-L
Executive Director of Advisory Services and Senior Consultant

The Strategic Partnership: How Finance and Advancement Allow for Vision Fulfillment
Alignment between your finance and advancement team is essential to fulfilling your school’s vision. Join Phil Higginson and Penny Abrahams for a three-hour session that will provide attendees with a 30,000-foot overview of strategic planning. During the session, attendees will break into groups and work together to develop strategic plan financial solutions.

Michael Christopher, IAP-L
ISM Consultant

Fraught or Fruitful: The Complex Relationship Between Business and Development
Boards, School Heads, CFOs, and Development officers all want the same thing: to create long-term financial sustainability for their schools. Despite this common goal, Business and Development offices often work at cross purposes, which results in missed opportunities and problematic staff relationships. This interactive session will explore the benefits of Business and Development working together with the Board and School Head to maximize soft income success for your school.

Phil Higginson, IAP-L
ISM Consultant

The Connection Between Your School’s Strategic Plan and Philanthropy
Does this sound familiar? Your school’s board has just approved an exciting – yet ambitious – strategic plan. Yet, the operating budget is insufficient to pay for all the desired programs, facilities, and initiatives. How, then, to turn these dreams into reality? The answer lies with philanthropy. This interactive session will explore how to translate your strategic plan into fundraising priorities. We will discuss how to identify the right type of fundraising effort for each element of your plan and how to develop a philanthropic menu of items to share with prospective donors. You’ll gain an understanding of the link between strategic plans, master plans, and endowment master plans. In addition, you’ll have the chance to immediately put what you learn to work as you engage in a strategic conversation with a colleague.

Terry Moore, BCP-E
ISM Senior Executive Consultant, Governance & Operations Department Head, Editor-in-Chief of Ideas & Perspectives

Faculty Compensation: Beginning to Manage the Teacher Shortage
In this workshop, you will learn about the developing teacher shortage and how to help your school prepare for a tight labor market. We’ll explore what faculty are looking for in teaching jobs and ISM’s latest recommendations for creating a compensation strategy based on teacher expectations.

Shannan Schuster, Ed.D.
ISM Consultant and Executive Coach

Navigating the Shifting Workforce in Schools
As schools face a looming teacher shortage and the growing demand for flexible work schedules, they may need to rethink how to attract and hire the right people. School leaders know that hiring the right “people on the bus” makes their jobs easier and optimizes the student experience. However, recruiting the right people has become more challenging with the decline in qualified candidates.

Rethinking Hiring: Systems To Yield More Qualified, Mission-Driven Employees
Hiring is THE most important role a leader has in their organization. As Jim Collins stated in his book Good to Great, it is about who is on the bus and what seat they occupy. Unfortunately, in independent schools, the people often charged with hiring come up through the academic ranks and lack formal training and research-based strategies to attract, interview, and hire the best candidates for their schools. This workshop focuses on developing and implementing a mission-informed hiring process that strengthens the diversity of applications and mitigates implicit bias through data-informed assessment.