Author Archives: Kevin Custer

Creating Your Business Breakthrough

All too often, executives get focused on the day-to-day or short-term plans plan of their business, looking at what they are going to do rather than what they should be doing and what would create the biggest breakthrough for their company. They fail to work with intentionality and instead just get swept along with the […]

How Much Capital You Need

CEOs and founders often say they need is $5 million to bring their company to market. In many cases, this is true, but raising that much capital for a young company is often difficult and very expensive. So, how much capital do you need to get your company to the next level?  Frequently, founders’ initial […]

What Investors Are Looking For Now

As 2012 draws to a close, education companies have seen record investments. In the first five months of 2012, more dollars were invested in the education business than in all of 2011, which was a record year itself. The first five months of 2012 saw $500 million investment, compared to $429 million in 2011 (and […]

Building a Sales Pipeline to Meet Your Targets – And Making Sure It Succeeds

With school back in session and fall in the air, most companies have turned (or should be turning) their attention to building leads and getting people engaged so that you can close deals in the winter and the spring, as our sales cycle chart to the right shows. At this point, for whatever your goal […]

Five Questions You Should Answer About Your Top Accounts

With the start of the school year just around the corner (or already underway in a few states), CEOs are most likely focused on delivery during this crucial time of year. While successful back-to-school delivery is important, what companies should really be focused on is ensuring strong implementations that will lead to renewals. Now is […]

Increasing Your Profit – Without Changing Your Product

In this economy, the idea of increasing your prices may seem suicidal – and indeed, raising them indiscriminately will probably backfire. However, it is possible to set your prices in such a way that you can increase your profits without changing your product or tinkering with your overhead. Traditionally, setting a price for a product […]

The Dual Benefit of Targeting End-of-Year Budgets

While the fiscal climate for school budgets next year remains unclear, you can be sure that every superintendent and administrator knows that their budget needs to be completely spent down by the end of this month.  Of course, many districts have long ago accounted for every penny in their FY12 budgets, but the last week […]

Working With Arc Pays Off

At the recent SIIA Ed Tech Industry Summit’s Innovation Incubator Program, we were thrilled when Arc client Language Express was selected as the winner in the Most Likely to Succeed category and the runner-up in the Most Innovative category.  Language Express was honored for its software product, The Social Express™, which is designed to give children with autism and […]

Why Education CEOs Need to Care About Autism

With April marking Autism Awareness Month, a new Centers for Disease Control study shows that the prevalence of autism continues to increase significantly, from less than 100,000 children in 2002 to a projected million-plus children by 2014. The CDC first released a study in 2007 (using numbers from 2002), which estimated that less than 100,000 […]

The Value of Spending More

As business owners, we are always looking for ways to make our companies more efficient and cost-effective. However, as any successful owner or CEO knows, “most cost-effective” does not necessarily translate to “cheapest.” This is particularly true when thinking about the professional services that any small (or large) business needs.  Certainly, you can make low […]