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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 would encourage far more schools, just do it. Just go for it. If it doesn't work, it's probably not as bad as you thought it was gonna be. And not changing anything or always doing things the same way you did them last year is a guaranteed recipe not to succeed.
Speaker 2:Thank you for joining the Net Assets Podcast. I'm Jeff Shields, MBLA president and CEO. And today, I have the opportunity to speak with Olaf Weckesser. He is the chief financial and operating officer at the Pingree School, which is a k twelve day school in Short Hills, Basking Ridge, and Pottersville, New Jersey with thirteen years of experience in this role. Welcome to the Net Assets Podcast, Olaf.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Jeff. It's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 2:It's great to have you here. And before we dive into what I might call the meat of our conversation today, I learned in preparing for our discussion that you have a reputation at Pingree for being part of school wide pranks of various kinds. Can you just share one story perhaps about a recent example of that at the Pingree School?
Speaker 1:Sure. Happy to, Jeff. I think we try here not to fit the stereotype of the CFO's office being a humorless, gray, numbers driven organization. And, we have an internal publication here that we use to it's called the Pingree Insider to communicate to our colleagues, members of our community in a more humorous manner than some of our more formal publications go. And for the April fools issue, I was featured as having come up with a new plan for the school to relieve our chronic parking problems, which was to pave the entire school And as in my own words, allow everyone that the opportunity to park their vehicle wherever they wish according to their personal preference.
Speaker 1:That sounds very
Speaker 2:liberating in a way to just say, what if Like the entire campus was concrete and you could park anywhere? So how was that received?
Speaker 1:Oh, people thought it was very funny because we spend a lot of time or I should say my team spends a lot of time in the mornings making note of people who have parked their cars wherever they would wish and and then pulling them out of class or out of meetings and such to move those cars to a location that maybe isn't quite as convenient, but also isn't gonna block traffic or endanger their fellow community members.
Speaker 2:Parking is a big issue for a lot of schools. When did you let them in on the joke? Did you Oh,
Speaker 1:we didn't. It came out in the April 1 issue of the insider, and, it depended on how quickly some people would figure it out. We've done that a few times over the years. A few years ago this is quite a while. We have two internal forms we use here.
Speaker 1:One is called a pink, and one is called a blue. They're used for expense reimbursements and other things. And a few years ago, I sent around an email again on April 1 that said that due to OSHA regulation q q q nine eight five six two for gender neutral communications, we will no longer be able to use pinks and blues, and they will be changed to oranges and greens. And, unfortunately, anyone who's previously submitted a pink will have to resubmit that form because we wanted to get people's attention.
Speaker 2:That's
Speaker 1:great. And after the initial furor died down, people thought that was pretty funny. But it did take two weeks later, there was someone who showed up in my office who was looking for an orange since he thought we had canceled the pinks and the blues.
Speaker 2:I love it. At least people are reading and listening to your communication, so I guess that's a plus. But where do business officers get this reputation about being humorless? I've worked with independent school business officers for fifteen years, and anyone who's come to an MBUA annual meeting would know that we have a really great time when we get together. What's your take on that, Olaf?
Speaker 1:Jeff, don't let the cat out of the bag. This is part of our performative doing of our job.
Speaker 2:Yay. Okay. It's a trade secret that we're really a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:That's right. And we do have to a big part of my jobs feels like it comes down to saying, hey. That's a really interesting idea, but have you thought about how we're gonna pay for that? Or the line I use a lot is, yeah, listen. The money tree hasn't grown quite as many leaves this year as that might require, and that kinda gets the point across that while we would love to do everything, we unfortunately have to pick and choose what we actually can do even at a place like the Pingree School.
Speaker 2:Where's your first two takeaways from the Net Assets Podcast on how to respond to an unbudgeted request that's made to you if you're an independent school business leader? How did you end up in this seat at the Pingree School? What's a little bit of your professional journey? Because I know no one grew up thinking they're gonna be an independent school business officer. So how did you land at the Pingree School?
Speaker 1:Oh gosh. Okay. So, Jeff, we have twenty minutes for this podcast. I'm gonna try not to have this story take that entire time because it Yes. Give us
Speaker 2:the abbreviated version, but I do think it's interesting.
Speaker 1:It's by way of background. I'm incredibly well rounded educationally. I have an undergraduate degree in business and finance, and I have a graduate degree in business and finance. In between that, I worked at Ernst and Young for four years as a chartered accountant in Canada. I am actually a CPA in not one, but two countries because I'm cool that way.
Speaker 1:And then after business school here in The US, I worked at as a management consultant for a while, then I worked at a major financial institution, and then I worked at a tech startup in the fashion industry. And it's a funny thing, but all of the skills I developed in all those places, I feel like I use as a school business officer basically every day in unpredictable order in in ways, but they do all come in handy. But, specifically, how I ended up in the school world was when I was working at the startup, we were very fortunate, and we had raised several rounds of money funding, including one from a real venture fund where we were part of a real venture capital portfolio. And that happened early right over around Christmas time. So early January, we got back to business, and our CEO was sitting in his office, and I was sitting in his office with some of the other folks there.
Speaker 1:And he said, hey, guys. Last year, we doubled sales. We've grown the company massively. Now we've raised all this funding. Now we're gonna grow the business and double it again this year.
Speaker 1:We're off to the races. This is awesome. And I remember sitting there thinking, oh, double the business again. Woo. Yay.
Speaker 1:And I literally did a double take because up until that point, I had never really cared all that much about what I did in business as long as it was lucrative and successful. And that got me thinking, I maybe need to do something a little bit more meaningful and fulfilling with my life. And I was in my very late thirties, early forties at the time. And coincidentally, a good friend of mine, also from business school, had a similar experience a few years earlier and had gotten into school, actually, university business administration. And one day, he sent me the job posting from Pingree.
Speaker 1:And he said, we said you wanted to get into this, and, coincidentally, my daughter was we were applying my daughter to kindergarten at the time. And he said, so what better fit than this? You should apply. So I did. 32 interviews later, I got the job.
Speaker 1:And That's the educational interview process, Olaf. Oh, yeah. Oh, it wasn't they weren't all individual, but they were I met 32 people in one day. Got home about 07:00 at night, slept for twelve hours straight. I was completely exhausted, but turned out to be a great decision and a great fit, and I've been here ever since.
Speaker 2:Don't you think they were testing your endurance? I think an independent school CFO, COO, CFOO needs endurance, don't you think? They
Speaker 1:were do. You need patience. So, yeah, I would agree. The all day interview day was actually a great introduction to what the day here might be like because often people will ask me, so what do you got on the schedule today? I'm like, what I have on the schedule are these three things.
Speaker 1:What I'm gonna end up doing is anyone's guess.
Speaker 2:And I know the feeling. I know your colleagues
Speaker 1:do too. Yeah. We will see what comes down the pipe once I sit down, and we'll go from there.
Speaker 2:I have to ask you briefly. What goes on in New Jersey? So many amazing independent school business officers that are nationally recognized come from New Jersey. I would include you in that group, Tracy Fudge, Rose Newbert, Cindy Stadula, Sam Goldfisher. New Jersey was one of my first opportunities to speak in front of a group of independent school business officers, and it was a fantastic experience.
Speaker 2:But that collegiality is really powerful in New Jersey among the business officers.
Speaker 1:Jeff, I remember that. I think that was one of my first NJIS events that I went to.
Speaker 2:And Oh, there you go. It was about the same time. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right. That's right. I remember that day. I think what one of the biggest factors is we have real competition here. We have collegiality with each other, but the public schools in New Jersey are by and large pretty good.
Speaker 1:Obviously, not in every city and not everywhere. But in large parts of New Jersey, the public schools are frankly excellent. The property taxes are also, as I think anyone who knows anything about New Jersey knows, are also very high. And and so the value proposition for an independent school around here is particularly challenging. At times, I would love to trade places with my colleagues in Manhattan or in Philadelphia, just up and down the road here, where they're not really competing with free.
Speaker 1:Whereas for us, not only do we have to justify why someone might wanna send their child to the Pingree School as opposed to one of the other excellent independent school alternatives, but also why they shouldn't just send them to their local public lower, middle, or high school for which they have already paid and are not getting any credits for.
Speaker 2:What's the Pingree School's value prop? I often say that competing with free, and you're competing with free and, in your own words, high quality public school offerings. How does the Pingree School break through that type of market?
Speaker 1:Well, I would refer you to my colleagues across the hall here who are in our blood management, but I'm actually going to a prospective student event tonight. I'm gonna see if I can hone my message a little bit. First of all and, Jeff, I think you may have heard me say this, and some of my colleagues hate this, but it's my catchphrase. I try to remind folks that I work with that we're in the Ferrari business or we're in the being awesome business. Our tuition is now over $50,000 a year.
Speaker 1:And as I always remind everyone, it'll go up forever, and that doesn't mean we're stupid. But for that price, no one's coming here because they have to. We're in a luxury good business where people are using some of their discretionary spending that they might spend on a Ferrari to send their child or children here. And people do that because of what we offer is outstanding in whatever area it is they care about. That's number one.
Speaker 1:So, obviously, we provide an excellent academic education. Our college counseling folks can read you the statistics of where our graduates go. It's very impressive. We would put that up with anybody. But we try to make going to Pingree about being at Pingree, not about getting into whatever you need to get into after Pingree.
Speaker 1:What I think we do a very good job at, even though we're a large school, we have 1,200 students, is allowing every child to find what they want to do. And then it also will say that. Again, it's The best version of the version of themselves. It's a horribly overused phrase. But I would say and, you know, I'm I don't know if I mentioned this, but I'm also a member of a parent of a thirteen year Pingree student who's gonna graduate next month.
Speaker 1:Wow. So I have seen that, and my child is going off to do film production at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England, which makes her the first Pinker graduate to go to that particular university and not the kind of thing that one would typically associate. But having seen this firsthand but my child is completely different from me. She wants to make movies. She has actually made movies.
Speaker 1:She sings beautifully. She does drama, and she's a performer and an artist. And Pingree has really helped her and helped her find herself and helped her grow from the little kid that showed up here as a five year old, and now she's a young woman going off into the world. I'm sure she'll do spectacular things. That's a pretty great
Speaker 2:message for tonight.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And at the same time, we have students here who, you know, did BC calc as their as sophomores and are doing math that I don't understand. One of my advisees just came back. Actually, yesterday, I used to be an adviser as well. She's about to be a senior at Yale.
Speaker 1:Oh my god. And she's going off for her third summer of being an intern at Microsoft. And I I said to her, they're probably gonna make you an offer when you're done this summer. She said, they are? But why would they do that?
Speaker 1:I won't have graduated yet. And it's just because you're a genius, and you're super smart. So the point being, at a school like Pingree, at least for us, we can help the students. We don't make them. They do it themselves.
Speaker 1:We just enable it.
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 1:We enable the students to find what it is they really want to do, what their passion is, and to really make it work, not just in that sort of condescending, oh, that's nice. Yes. Follow your passion, but in a truly professional, like, next level kind of way.
Speaker 2:That's really exciting, and that's a really great testimonial about your school. I've used similar language when I talk about the independent school business model and it being a premium service. And sometimes you never know in an audience. There could be some pushback on that because it's education, and I really do believe in education as a vocation for individuals. And I understand that higher purpose.
Speaker 2:But when it gets right down to it, it is a premium service, and it would have to be if you could avail yourself of the same service for free down the street. Just like the Ferrari or the BMW has four wheels, has a steering wheel, has a motor, but why do you gravitate towards a Ferrari or a BMW and not the insert your more reasonably or differently cost item there? So you're preaching to the choir on that one, and I think it's a healthy perspective to have to advance our school's value proposition and why we're unique and different.
Speaker 1:And, Jeff, it's interesting too. And, again, I'm acutely aware that sometimes I speak from a perspective of a school that has resources. Are we resource constrained? Yes. Everyone is resource constrained, but we're less constrained than some.
Speaker 1:But when we think about how we spend money and with CFO's office, I don't necessarily decide these things, but I certainly have influence and strategic input direction, I have to constantly remind my colleagues that if we're gonna do something, we need to do it awesomely, not okay or mediocre or good enough. Either don't do it or if you do it awesome because no one's looking to have something associated with Pingree that's just okay. That doesn't help our brand. And I would argue that a lot more independent schools should approach things that way because I think not all. Again, there are certainly schools that do great work in underserved communities and in in cities where public schools aren't really a good option.
Speaker 1:But for many of us, we have to embrace the fact that what we do here has to have a certain standard in order to justify its cost. And I think we like to pretend that our product is more widely appealing than it actually is than it actually can be because of how much it costs. And I have yet to figure out how to do it better and do it cheaper but as good.
Speaker 2:Let's talk about how you've been spending some of that money with some of your resources, we should say. And in 2021, when many of us were still reeling from the pandemic, Pingree acquired Pernell School. And I wanna hear more about that because that's really a hot topic for a lot of our schools thinking about their path towards long term financial health or financial sustainability. They think about mergers, acquisitions as potentially a business strategy for them. Can you tell me what was your school's thinking and strategy behind that acquisition?
Speaker 1:So, Jeff, first of all, I need to clarify because otherwise our lawyers will call me up. We did not acquire the Pernell School. We acquired the campus of the Pernell School. We Excellent. We bought some real estate from that particularly legal entity.
Speaker 1:We have no legal affiliation with the Pernell School as well.
Speaker 2:An important distinction, so I'm glad you clarified it. What was the school's business strategy with acquiring that campus, that physical space?
Speaker 1:Sure. So I would say flat out, it was somewhat opportunistic. We know some of the folks who are involved with Purnell and its sort of decision to cease operations. And so they called us up and said, hey. Would you guys maybe be interested in buying our campus and continuing to run it as a school?
Speaker 1:I think there was a desire amongst the folks. This was the final trustees of Purdue for the legacy of the school to continue in some way and to continue as an educational institution as opposed to being redeveloped or turned into some other kind of
Speaker 2:That makes sense to me.
Speaker 1:And so we were we, of course, were very happy to do that. And we have been developing what we use this campus for because we don't house students there on a daily basis. It's more of we call it our experiential education campus, and so we use it for a combination of things. One, it is actually a place where we now have a significant amount of employee housing. Housing in New Jersey is extremely expensive.
Speaker 1:It's actually, since we acquired Pernell, has gotten even more expensive. And we are very fortunate that there are 21 housing units there that we can use to house some of our employees, not just faculty, a broad cross section of our employees, and not for free, but at a a more cost effective way than they could on their own. And it really helps us with recruiting and bringing folks in from other parts of the country that might be unfamiliar with New Jersey. It feel can feel like a gigantic suburb with no obvious center. And when you first move here, it can be very daunting to try to decide where am I gonna live.
Speaker 1:The neighborhood's very different. It provides them with
Speaker 2:a nice comfortable landing space initially. So that's really another challenge, the faculty and staff housing issue that many schools experience wanting their faculty or staff to live in close proximity to the school, but sometimes the market in that area that is near our school prohibits that or makes it more of a challenge than we would like for our faculty and staff.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And in in our case, one, our existing Short Hills and Baskin Ridge campuses are in fairly well-to-do areas of New Jersey. We're also out in the burbs. If you are a young single faculty member or employee coming to Pingree, living close to the school is not gonna be very appealing because there's not much fun stuff to do. There's fun things to do for married couples with children.
Speaker 1:Sure. But many of our younger faculty live quite far away in Hoboken or Jersey City or even Morristown because that's where it's fun to be young and single. And by having a campus with a broad cross section of folks, including other young single people, They come in with a kind of premade community and a certain level of familiarity, and they potentially don't have to commute as far every day, which in turn gives them incentive to stay on campus longer, to stay involved with the activities of the school more outside of the regular school day. It just helps build community.
Speaker 2:So are you suggesting that the opportunity presented itself, you seized the opportunity, and then once you made the acquisition, is that when the wheels started to turn as far as we could use it for this? We could use it
Speaker 1:for this. That's really bold. Yes. The housing we had is an idea right away. The other two ideas we had pretty quickly were to use it for auxiliary programs.
Speaker 1:We have a fairly extensive auxiliary programs operation here, both for summer camps and for camps in general, and also to rent some of the facilities to third parties, especially athletic facilities in New Jersey are always in in short supply, so very high demand. And then we also wanted to use it to create additional programming on that campus. So that goes outside of the typical classroom experience that the Pingree School offers. And I'll be honest. The housing worked out exactly as we wanted to, perhaps better than we thought.
Speaker 1:The rentals program has worked out very well. The summer camp has been more of a challenge, partially because it's a bit far away from where a lot of our families are. And summer camp is a tricky market here, especially generic summer camp. So many of our kids wanna do lacrosse camp or science camp or very specific programming. And the academic programming was probably the hardest to create because, again, it's the campus is about twenty minutes away from our current campus, so it's moving students back and forth is a bit challenging.
Speaker 1:But what we've gradually focused on is creating sort of immersive experiences that perhaps involve staying overnight with a group of people for a few days, almost like an internal conference center, like our own little version of a team overnight or a music team overnight. We had a a music club here that does Japanese drumming. They were there. They spent a weekend there recently where they did a composition workshop, and they both practiced, and they actually composed their own pieces that they then performed in the school the next day. So it it gives us a place where we can go relatively easily to have experiences that we can't do in the classroom or that would require us renting a great expensive rent.
Speaker 1:It's go somewhere, transport the kids. We can now do that there. We have some partnerships with outside institutions. We're working on a partnership, and environmental science camp with Swarthmore University. I'm not sure if you've heard of the Stanley King Institute.
Speaker 1:We're now their new host for their summer programs at our campus. We've hosted actually some NJIS events there. That has evolved. But, yeah, when we first bought it, it was a bit of a, hey. This is too good of a deal to pass up, and there are enough opportunities for us to do great things here that we should go for it.
Speaker 1:So the outcome is programmatic enhancement.
Speaker 2:How about nontuition revenue? Is it paying off in that regard?
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. Absolutely. In the campus, it pays for itself already. There's just from the housing, frankly, pays for itself.
Speaker 2:Gotcha.
Speaker 1:And pays for the operating cost of the campus. Summer camps and especially the the auxiliary rentals make a nice contribution to the overall cost of the of operating the school. And our academic and cocurricular programs, and it's a little early to say how profitable they're gonna be. Yes. They're not costing us anything, but we're not making huge money.
Speaker 1:Those are probably more in the area of expanding the quality and prestige for our program and the opportunities for our students to do things that they couldn't just do at their local public school or couldn't do really do anywhere else.
Speaker 2:So as we wrap up, what advice would you give to a school that has a similar opportunity to acquire an additional physical space and to make that type of move with their limited resources. What advice would you give to a colleague about how they approach that?
Speaker 1:Two thoughts on that. I personally think very Jeff, this is probably a broader topic for NBA one of these days. I personally believe that successful independent schools is a scale game, and in order to thrive long term, most of our schools have to get bigger in whatever way they feel that is appropriate. That could
Speaker 2:be Interesting.
Speaker 1:Growing enrollment, if they can merging with someone else, growing their capacity, whatever it is. And so in general, if your resources allow at all, I would say go for it. I would also, again, point out for many schools, I think we have, as an industry, such a tendency to come up with a great idea, and we say to ourselves, yeah. This is gonna work really well. Then someone will ask a question like, but what would we do during a total eclipse on a Tuesday?
Speaker 1:And then we're like, we're not sure. And then suddenly everyone goes, well, then we don't. Then we better not do it because there was some uncertainty here.
Speaker 2:Great ideas being questioned to death. And because we don't have all the answers, we can't move forward.
Speaker 1:That the whole concept of yeah, but or what about, or I just have this one. I would encourage far more schools, just do it. Just go for it. If it doesn't work, it's probably not as bad as you thought it was gonna be. And not changing anything or always doing things the same way you did them last year is a guaranteed recipe not to succeed and not to be relevant in the future.
Speaker 1:And step off that ledge. Jump jump into that unknown puddle of water and give it a shot.
Speaker 2:I I really wanna add to that because I think great leaders have a certain appetite for ambiguity, can operate at a certain level of ambiguity. And people may not see independent school business officers as being able to do that. But you just gave a great case study on how you seize an opportunity. You don't have all the answers, but you see it as we'll figure that out. We're 80% there.
Speaker 2:We've got it figured out. The other 20%, we'll do it when we can. I think that's really exciting, and I think more independent school leaders at large could really learn from that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I think part of it is too because we think in the period of years. Right? I have this conversation with our trustees a lot, those from the business world, where they'll occasionally especially someone who's new will be like, woah. How do our results prepare to last months?
Speaker 1:I'm like, I don't care. It doesn't matter. That our business runs in yearly cycles. Right? We can compare how we did this year to how we did last year, but how we did in February to how we did in January is just not relevant.
Speaker 1:And that's, on one hand, a good thing. But it does make us so slow to do anything. Right? Because it so quickly becomes tempting to say, we'll deal with that next year. Whereas no, quote, unquote, real business thinks that way.
Speaker 1:Right? They might say, okay. We'll deal with that tomorrow if you couldn't do it today. And I think as an industry, and this is true of us too plenty of times, by the way, we need to be more comfortable with just moving ahead and making the change and not always making every change based on a year cycle that we do six months in advance. It's just sometimes we just do stuff now in the year even though we weren't planning on doing it when we talked about this three months ago.
Speaker 1:I think that would make us all happier in the long
Speaker 2:run. I would agree, and and I knew this was gonna be an enjoyable conversation. Unfortunately, that's all the time we have. So I wanna thank you for being a guest on the Net Assets Podcast, and I want to thank everyone for listening. So much appreciated, Olaf.
Speaker 1:Jeff, thanks for having me. It's been a real pleasure, and the time went very quickly. So thank you.
Speaker 2:Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. For more information on MBOA, visit us online at mboa.org. I'm Jeff Shields, MBOA President and CEO and your NetAssets Podcast host. Tune in next time.