As a recruiter for an educational organization, you are responsible to find and recruit students for your school. You probably have processes and methods in place to find and track your contacts with potentially interested students and you follow these as you balance many tasks involved. But, are your efforts driven by the established processes and methods or are these just the tools you use to get you to your goals? In many ways, you are an entrepreneur who is the head of a business that you run and grow. The same principles that make entrepreneurial startup companies successful in their growth and profit apply to your efforts. Learning some of the keys to the success of a startup company will also help you maximize your recruitment success. As an advisor, mentor, founder, and director of more than 200 startup and early-stage companies over the past 40 years, I’ve learned that if you want to be successful in any venture you must start by clearly deciding what you define success to be. Whenever I first start working as an advisor or mentor with a new client, typically a founder entrepreneur, I always spend our first session exploring how they define success for their venture.
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Adopt Tangible Criteria of Success and Measure them with a RealWorld Yardstick 64
NUMBER OF CUSTOMERS
PRODUCT LINES
I guide this exploration by explaining that whatever definition is developed, it has to be tangible and measurable. In other words, stating a definition of success as “we will be the world leader in our industry” doesn’t fit this requirement. If, on the other hand, the entrepreneur says “in three years we will have 4 major product lines serving at least two targeted industry niches in six countries and will have an annual revenue of $50 million or greater with double digit profitability,” this kind of definition can be easily measured.
