Role

As a co-founder at ChatENG, I led client engagement for our World Language Program, which provides live, online language classes to high schoolers in the U.S. My role involved overseeing relationships with school partners and facilitating regular feedback loops with school partners and the Department of Education to strengthen partnerships.

Evolution

Staffing high school world language classes is challenging for many school districts. A high number of languages are in high demand but schools struggle to recruit qualified local teachers. Our solution was affordable online classes taught by a qualified teacher based abroad. This was all before the pandemic. My objective was to ensure a successful pilot that would set us up to grow to more schools. 

One important key to our program’s success was seeking to understand stakeholders before engaging in solutioning. Because this program was new for both our team and the cooperating schools, I met with numerous stakeholders at the state and school level to learn about their goals and identify early champions along the way. Being client-driven ultimately shaped the way we structured our program and managed expectations. As we shared early positive feedback from students, those quick wins built trust. We relied on this trust to make improvements over time.

Evolution

• Increased student participation from 15 to over 150 in 2 years.

• 2 additional schools in the region joined in year 2 via word of mouth.

• Maintained 100% renewal rate resulting in $200K ARR by year 3.

Key Takeaways

• I can be comfortable in ambiguous environments in which interpersonal skills and creativity are needed to bring about progress.

• The importance of getting early wins in order to instill stakeholder belief in the long term success of the project.

• Know who the gatekeepers, decision makers, and influencers are to appropriately tailor your communication -for example, our decision maker was a risk taker and therefore offering clarity on the big picture increased tolerance of some short term unknowns.

• How to handle feedback gracefully and embrace challenges as the basis for improvement.