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The Net Assets podcast delves into the most pressing issues in independent school business and operations. Delivered by NBOA, the only national nonprofit membership association focused exclusively on fostering financial and operational excellence among independent PK-12 schools, each episode is based on a popular article in NBOA’s Net Assets magazine. Chief financial and operational officers alongside other leaders of school business share what inspires and challenges them as well as their approaches to problem solving and innovation. In each lively exchange, host Jeff Shields, NBOA president and CEO, teases out the human stories behind the printed story.
I came to my first, it was actually NIS back then when I started, and I came to my first one and I met a group of people who really took me under their wing. I was young and new to the profession and didn't know anything, and they taught me the importance of sharing that wisdom and helping others and cooperating and doing all this. It was a valuable experience for me
Speaker 2:from the start. Welcome to the Net Assets Podcast, the official podcast of MBOA, Business Leadership for Independent Schools. This episode is provided with the generous support of FACTS. I'm your host, Jeff Shields, MBOA President and CEO. And today I am thrilled to welcome Frank Aloise, Chief Financial Officer at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy, where he has served for more than twenty five years.
Speaker 2:Are my notes correct? Yes. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Frank is a pillar of the independent school business profession.
Speaker 2:He was the 2017 recipient of the Ken White Distinguished Business Officer Award, chaired the MBLA Board of Directors from 2013 to 2015, and is a perennial presenter at the MBLA Annual Meeting, and has long been a trusted and familiar voice in Net Assets Magazine. Frank, welcome to the podcast. That's it. Thanks for having me. What took me so long?
Speaker 2:I don't know. I know. I've been thinking about my guests recently, I'm thinking, was I waiting for? Season two. I wanted to see if I got picked up before I brought you in.
Speaker 1:Hey, Troy. You had some listeners.
Speaker 2:Exactly. And that's still a question I have. We're recording this episode live at the twenty twenty six NBOA Annual Meeting in Orlando, which among many events features the return of the Fun Run, now officially the Net Assets Podcast Fun Run. Now, I know you're a runner, and I think you participated in the very first MBOA Fun Run-in your hometown of Philadelphia, up the Museum of Art steps, Rocky style, and you've been to many fun runs since then. When did running become such a big part?
Speaker 1:That's a funny story. I was never a runner or much of an ex resident, and even through school as a young person. However, after the pandemic, one of my NBOA colleagues had a pretty big heart attack. And he did a little speech on Zoom with a group of us and told us the story, and it got me thinking that maybe I should be thinking about my cardiovascular health. Do a little.
Speaker 1:And both my parents had heart attacks, that was probably a signal that I should do something. Sure. And so I went and got checked out. And then starting in June '22, I set some sights on some big challenges and went out and, chased them.
Speaker 2:Okay. Just tell us about one of those challenges.
Speaker 1:So probably the biggest one that I've done is the art museum steps. Yes. On my return to the Art Museum of Steps now two years in a row for Legacy of Hope, which is a charity in Philadelphia that raises money for people suffering from food insecurity related to cancer diagnosis. And you spend twenty four hours running up and down the steps, nonstop. Unbelievable.
Speaker 1:How do
Speaker 2:you train for something like that? I spent a lot
Speaker 1:of time on StairMasters. Wow. And a lot of time running. And actually a lot of leg exercise too, just gym workouts. And this is your passion now?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's become this crazy obsession of
Speaker 2:And do you think it's important for CFOs and COOs to have something that takes them out of the school, out of the profession? Probably goes without saying, but have you found the value in just that alone?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think one of the great things about the running that I'm doing and I do mostly do singular running. So I'm not a group person or don't have a whole bunch of friends that I go running with. My wife is a big runner too, and she is always with a group of people. And she's like, don't you wanna go running together?
Speaker 1:I'm like, you know, I go by myself. Because it it's really nice to clear my head. Right? Yeah. Our job is so complicated.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And you deal with so many different things every day, and there's always surprises. Right? So it's nice put on some headphones or not and go out in the woods. I do mostly trail running.
Speaker 1:Wow. And so I go out in the woods and just run for 15 or 20 miles and just lose myself in that.
Speaker 2:You know? And it's That's crazy.
Speaker 1:I think it's really healthy. It's become sort of something that helps me clear my mind. Right?
Speaker 2:You can turn everything off or tune everything out. Yep. Now our fun run's only a mile. I would say you need to do it backwards or something. It's not gonna be challenging.
Speaker 1:I was actually this week, because I'm traveling, I usually do longer workout in the middle of the week, so I might go out early and do a little extra.
Speaker 2:The icing on the cake. I love that. When I wrote about you in 2017, you received the Ken White Award that year. I mentioned that you were my first MBLA friend. Does that happen to you a lot?
Speaker 2:Are you just, is Frank everyone's friend in this profession? It feels like you are.
Speaker 1:I think somehow I've I'm not clear maybe totally why, but I do have a lot of good friends that I've made over the almost now thirty years in the business, And I have some of, really, some of my best friends.
Speaker 2:They're lifelong friends. Is that people you vacation with and you spend a lot of time? Yeah. And that speaks to this profession, doesn't it?
Speaker 1:I think so. I think it's really an unusual profession in that we become very close because of all the things that we deal with that are very complex, unlike most people's jobs. I always say that I describe my job to people who don't understand. Say, we're producing education. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I have to deal with all the things except the producing of education. That's interesting. And so if you think of the legal issue, the HR issues, the construction, and the maintenance, and the facilities, and all the auxiliary things. So there's just every day is something different. I had a week that was just like that epitomized, and I can't really talk about all the details of those.
Speaker 1:But you could imagine. I can imagine. But there was one day where I did none of the things I expected to do that day. I spent the entire day just putting out three or four different fires that had come our way. I think also these jobs
Speaker 2:can be really lonely. You're the only CFO at your school. Right? There's only one. There's one head of school.
Speaker 2:Yep. There's one CFO, but we often say, you don't walk down the hallway and talk to another CFO. So these relationships outside of the school that you formed through Paisboa, through MBOA, become a lifeline. Right?
Speaker 1:Sure. And they did from the very start. I came to my first it was actually NIS back then when I started. And I came to my first one, I met a group of people who really took me under their wing. I was young and new to the profession and didn't know anything.
Speaker 1:And they taught me the importance of sharing that wisdom and helping others and cooperating and doing all this. It was a valuable experience for me from the start.
Speaker 2:And that's really why MBOA exists, right? To be a national organization that creates a space where you could do just that. And I close me away that the 23 business officers that founded MBOA had so much vision to see how important that was, how necessary that was, and and really built this organization, created it from Adam Nuffey, and created those opportunities for you. And it's a common theme when I talk to business officers like you who've been in the profession for so long that they talk about meeting founders, meeting the people because they're still around. They're not as active today in the association, but still around, and that they just naturally they were inclusive before inclusive was cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And those are some of the people I met and became and they really are good friends. I was just talking to Bill Hodges this Oh my gosh. This show. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So it's fascinating that that camaraderie exists in this business. And I I think it is a very unique thing. And I think it is driven by the fact that you can't walk down the hall and share all the things that you're wrestling with on any given day or that you're working with the head or the HR department or, you know, the board on investments or just this wide range of things that you're doing that a lot of people there the other people in the business in your school are not really interested in. Right? But they have their niche that they're focused on.
Speaker 1:But it's also they're a little bit abstract, some of those. Yeah. Right.
Speaker 2:For sure. I'm gonna take you back to 2011. It was a big year for you, and it was a big year for your school because you oversaw the merger between Springside School, which was all girls, and Chestnut Hill Academy, all boys, and experience and BOA did cover eventually in net assets when you had let us talk about it. I remember right afterwards, I said, Frank, this would make such a great program because mergers weren't that common back then. And you said, I'm not ready to talk about it, Jeff.
Speaker 2:But now we're fifteen years later. So is it safe to ask you about that? What was that merger like for you? Speak to that. What were the things you learned about it?
Speaker 2:And what has changed in the M and A space fifteen years later since you went through that process?
Speaker 1:That's a really good question. Yeah. Good question. It was very hard at the it was very nerve racking because you're caught in this moment of change. There was a really interesting consultant who'd done some work with us on personality stuff, the predictive index.
Speaker 1:Right? And he had done mine in May of that year, right when the board was making all these decisions. And there's this graph that shows your drives, your motivations, and how you're behaving. Sure. And mine was completely vertical.
Speaker 1:And that's not my normal behavior. My normal behavior is very extreme. So my chart is these lines that go from one end of the graph to the other. And here I was at this vertical point. And he came to me in the head after he'd done this survey, and he looked at the head and he said, what is going on right now in Frank's work?
Speaker 1:Because if you don't let him loose, he's going to explode. Wow. Wow. And it was because I just couldn't do any. I had to wait and wait, and the decision making was very slow.
Speaker 1:And I'm a person who likes to go and get things done, and they're fix it. Yeah. Let's move some nice find the problem, get it done, and or sign it to someone, and move on. Right? So I was really struggling with that that sort of moment of stop everything, and you have to make all these new decisions.
Speaker 1:But then it was really exciting. There was a lot of work to do to bring. I ran three corporations for three years because there was a parent corp and then the two super high schoolies. And we had to do that because of all the bond issues and financial issues and legal issues and name changes and property exchanges and all these yeah. There's just so many things to do in the background, that most people didn't care about, didn't know about, but really some fascinating sort of business machinations that happened behind the scenes.
Speaker 1:A very interesting experience because of the sort of the legacy of these people who've gone to these schools, who feel so passionate about the brand and their name school, and trying to bring them along on this journey of what we believed was going to be a better school, an improvement for everybody for the future, a modern version of what we've been doing. But everyone has
Speaker 2:to give something up in a merger. Right? And that and it's hard to get to that place. It's Or maybe find the right thing that you're willing to give up, but you also have to buy into the greater good. You have to buy into what's on the other side too.
Speaker 1:And that was hard because it was all about the people. Schools are about people. And getting the people to make those decisions and those choices, some people chose to leave. Both parents who didn't believe in the brand or thought we were doing something wrong, and even employees who, you this isn't the place that I wanna work. But today, we see some really interesting phenomenon of these people coming back, alums who are now really proud of what we've built over these fifteen years and donors who've come back in pretty big ways to support this new school out of two schools that were about 175 years old at the time.
Speaker 2:Was merging two single gender schools, did that make it harder or easier? Because a lot of folks could see that here's an opportunity, right, to change our program, but educate both boys and girls. And then some people will say we're committed to all girls education or all boys education. So what did you experience?
Speaker 1:We did both. Yeah. Okay. So we kept it pre K, eight single sex, pre co ed high school. Okay.
Speaker 1:We'd had a coordinate program in the high school for many years, fifty years. I I call it the longest courtship ever before we got married. But we brought it together but kept students separate. So to this day, we have we're a school we built that has a boys wing and a girls wing. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And we educate boys separately from girls in in the classes. There's some overlap as they get into middle school, some lunch or recess time or drama. Of course, yeah, all the drama in middle school is even the real drama is. But in band and orchestra, things like that make sense. But, otherwise, it's single sex classrooms.
Speaker 1:So a kind of interesting model, very different. And that was a very conscious choice as we looked at the future and tried to distinguish ourselves and keep a little bit of that, making those decisions of what do you keep and what do
Speaker 2:you give up. Today's episode is brought to you by our longtime partners at FACS. As a committed member of the MBOA corporate circle, FACS has spent forty years helping independent school leaders run smarter, more connected operations. FACS provides intelligence technology that brings together enrollment, financial management, family engagement, and student information into one data driven framework so school leaders can move from reactive decisions to confident, proactive ones. It's not just a set of tools, it's a connected intelligence layer designed around the way your school works.
Speaker 2:To learn how facts intelligence can help your school anticipate change and elevate the family experience, visit factsmgt.com. What's the best advice you could give to a school that's considering a merger? The single best advice based on your experience.
Speaker 1:Rip the Band Aid off. Oh, just do it. Sister. Wow. And that's based on?
Speaker 1:The challenges we had where we had two division heads running one division or two department chairs running a department. Not a good idea.
Speaker 2:Just move to the new model and fix it as you evolve.
Speaker 1:Pick one. Pick somebody. Yeah. And they so there were a couple departments where that happened organically. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because someone left. Someone left. In my case, the CFO from the other the boys' school left, and I was put in charge. That made it so much easier because I just built the office I needed. I assigned the jobs, created the job descriptions I needed, and I could start building from day one.
Speaker 1:Here, it took three years or four years for that other person to leave in a department. It was so complicated because you're worrying about stepping on toes. This is not how business is done, right? If you go look at the business world. And my daughter, my youngest daughter, is in mergers and acquisitions working for RSM in New York, ironically.
Speaker 1:Isn't that something? And so we chat sometimes about this, and one of her jobs is to help companies choose who's gonna be
Speaker 2:in charge. I love that.
Speaker 1:And listening to her talk about the challenges of that and how important it is, it resonates with me for sure.
Speaker 2:Oh, so Apple didn't fall far from the tree. Fifteen years later, it was the right decision. And you said people really celebrate it now, it's a source of pride for both of the individual schools that are now merging.
Speaker 1:I'll I'll talk a little bit about that in my my panel discussion. I have an example of an alum who wrote an article, scathing article to the local paper about how horrible this was. And back in 2011, he now comes and speaks to
Speaker 2:our students. He's the champion of it. That is so amazing. What do you think the future holds for independent schools and mergers and acquisitions? I'll tell you that I was just recently on a panel myself, and someone was lumping mergers and closings together.
Speaker 2:And I said, I don't think that's entirely fair. I think closing is really a sad situation for any school, but merging is a legitimate business decision that may be in the best interest of both schools and what they're creating. So what do you see is gonna happen in the future for independent schools and MergeUs in particular?
Speaker 1:I absolutely see this as a future of coming at us. I see it in the college level. Yeah. I'm hearing there and closures of There's a few in Philly that just went from one day to the next. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I interestingly, this week, got a note from a school in Philadelphia. Yeah. It's just They just announced their merger Wow. On two schools on the main line who had been talking about it and came and spoke with me three different times with their board chairs and their heads of school. And years ago, it's been eight years they've been Wow.
Speaker 1:Working on this.
Speaker 2:Doing the dance. Yeah. I for folks that don't know, Philadelphia is a very competitive market with a lot of independent schools in the market. So in your immediate market, you see this as really the future for a lot of schools.
Speaker 1:In particular, our business is so complicated and hard to operate as we talk about all the time at all our sessions here about the financial Business model. Model. And, yeah, it's just a kind of bizarre business that we run. And I have a new thing that I talk about, maybe I'll share it with you. But I see the opportunity is probably for some of these smaller feeder schools and pre K, the 8s and 6s and stuff.
Speaker 1:Operating those things with a head of school and a business office and a development, it just doesn't make a lot of sense.
Speaker 2:The economies of scale aren't there. You need so many students and families just to support the basic infrastructure of a new dynamic.
Speaker 1:Androst is just going to Albina Bayhmal's cost disease example that we talk about all the time. Yeah. It's just there is a huge opportunity for consolidation and and simplification of the market, and Philadelphia is ripe for it. There's 250 schools within 30 miles of City Hall, and it's just it's wild how many. And I don't think they can all survive.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And that's a common thing to happen when there is a contraction of the number of students and families that are pursuing this and the number of providers. Right? It's really basic economics Yeah. When there's a misalignment there.
Speaker 2:I want to ask you, how much has the profession changed since you walked into your into the school or walked into your first MBA or, I mean, twenty five years ago? How different is it? Are you doing a completely different job?
Speaker 1:Yes. Tell me how speak. I walked into the first and I came from tech. Right? Not tech, but high-tech banking.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I was a derivatives trader in a pretty high-tech office in in the banking world, and I came into the office at the Haverford School. And there was the accountant who was working there, who was really the business officer, old school accountant, practically had a green eye shade. He was using very little in the way of computers. Wow.
Speaker 1:And I had all this green lined paper and these dot matrix printers that he sharpened Pencils. And tons of pencils sitting. They were lined up next to him. Not joking. This was true old school and downing, and he'd been there for a long time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I came in, and I had donned computers in banking world and had used all kinds of Did you say, what have I done? A little bit. It was a little nerve wracking at first. But I also saw lots of opportunity.
Speaker 1:First, had to learn the business, and then I had to see what could how could I help? And that's just continued. Now with AI and some of the things I've seen, I've used a little bit of it. We're using some of our tech team is using it more efficiently, but it's just analysis of things. It was just incredible.
Speaker 1:I recently took our investment report, and I dropped it into an AI tool that we have Yeah. And it created a podcast Oh my gosh. So that the board members could listen to the twenty minute podcast, which was the report in a podcast while they were driving to work.
Speaker 2:Before they came to the end to discuss it. They didn't have
Speaker 1:to read this 80 page document that Comma Fund had created. I love it. And it was pretty darn accurate. So that was just fascinating how and it did in seconds, right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:In seconds. So there's a huge opportunity for us to continue to change how we look at things and how we do our analysis.
Speaker 2:But you've done practically everything you can do in this profession from an association perspective. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You've chaired Paisboa, MBLA. You've won awards from both. You give back all the time. No one's gonna do this forever. I'm not saying you're ready to make any change, but no one's gonna do this forever.
Speaker 2:I don't think so. What do you want your legacy to be? How do you want them to remember Frank Aloise and this profession and this association? That's interesting. I think there's sort of two things.
Speaker 2:One, there's a very personal sort of niche to that, and that is on the
Speaker 1:campus where I've worked twenty now six years. I walk around that campus, and I have touched every piece of draw on that campus, every building. It's not done. It will never be done. Right?
Speaker 1:But it's in really pretty good shape in the sense of a structure. Now we have to take care of the deferred maintenance and keep going and upkeep. But there is this feeling for me that, literally, I planted hundreds of trees. Right? I can walk around the campus and say, well, I thought about that with the architect.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I laid out that sidewalk. And so that there's that physical piece that I can come back over and see that or other people. They probably no one will remember me in ten years. But for me, from my personal experience of having worked on that, because that's something I did enjoy.
Speaker 1:And then the other piece is just the way you talked about a little bit earlier is sharing knowledge and sharing the things that I learned and helping others. I've just really enjoyed that. And that's why I volunteered on the boards that I've been on to help move things along and help others learn some of the things I learned. If I get a piece of information from one person, if I can pass that on to someone else, that's just a great opportunity to share wisdom and what I've learned. And so I feel that would be something important to be remembered of.
Speaker 2:Can you believe how much the profession has changed? The things we're talking about, the things we're dealing with? And I was reflecting on my career and the things from the Great Recession to fast forward, then it was COVID, and now it's AI. It really makes you marvel at how many recent world events happened and how they impacted this profession in particular in such a unique way.
Speaker 1:I feel like so many things do. Yeah. It's really interesting. You look at the economy, you look at demographics, all these different things. They all hit us in some way, and we have to respond and And we we have have to grow to keep our institutions moving forward.
Speaker 2:A 100%. That's a great note to end on. Frank, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for your leadership, your generosity to me personally and professionally, and most of all, the friendship you brought to MBOA and to the independent school community over many years. To our listeners, be sure to take advantage of the learning, connections, and inspiration available through MBOA.
Speaker 2:Frank, I'm gonna look for you Tuesday morning at the Fun Run, and I won't try and keep up with you. I know better, but I'm glad you're gonna be there. And remember, MBLA is your partner in leading the business of independent schools. Thank you again to FAQs for supporting this episode of the Net Assets Podcast, technology with heart, powered by data. So until next time, thanks for listening to the Net Assets Podcast.