How We Cut Spending and Still Increased Student Enrollments
Experiments I’ve run as Chief Product Officer of an alternative school in the last 56 days to increase profit, reduce costs, and better serve families.
I’m the Chief Product Officer at The Socratic Experience, the only high-touch virtual school that equips students for lifelong happiness and success through Socratic dialogue, mentoring, and creative and entrepreneurial projects.
My role spans whatever is necessary to accomplish our goal of rekindling children’s love for learning—usually through attracting them to our environment where they can thrive or creating new spaces where they can do it. Below, I’ll walk you through some experiments I’ve run to increase profit, reduce costs, and better serve families, along with the rationale and results behind each move.
Where We Started and Why We Shifted
I began this 56–day period (January 27–March 23) aiming to continue generating sales calls despite anticipating fewer inquiries in Q4. Most families wait until quarter breaks or year-end to switch schools, so I never expected to outdo our Q3 enrollment numbers. True to expectations, we began receiving more calls from families asking about the 2025–2026 school year, which led us to cut ad spending.
My founder and I also decided to end our contract with the ad agency the school had hired before my arrival, although our parting was amicable. On a smaller scale, I can handle ads on my own. If we return to higher ad spending, we plan to return them for fresh experiments.
Minimal ads made sense despite not expecting many enrollments. Families often take months to switch between skills, and I would rather remain top-of-mind than vanish. As long as my ad expenses remain below our Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)—even if we might only confirm that CAC when families enroll in the future—I’m okay with spending with no expectation of immediate financial results.
Naturally, spending less on ads reduced the number of sales calls, website visitors, and inquiries. Yet, to my surprise, we enrolled more students during this period than during the previous 56-day period, where we spent more on ads.
How I "Market": I Still Just Say What We Do Often
We communicate via six core pillars that define our program: Confidence in Their Child’s Future, Inclusive and Supportive Social Environment, Agency-Driven Education, Secure Pathway to Success, Validating Community Support, and Balanced Intellectual and Creative Environment.
These pillars stem from over ten hours of workshops I ran with leadership, sales, marketing, support, and finance. They align with our beliefs, the market needs, and the families we serve best. Now that these pillars are established, my job is to amplify how we live up to them. I rarely need special approval to say X or Y because the entire team aligns on who we are, what we stand for, and why we show up to work every day.
In the previous 56 days, I validated that these pillars resonate with our target audience. So, I kept amplifying the same ideas in thousands of different ways.
Our Founder’s Social Media Channels Remain Our Primary Marketing Channel
Michael (our founder) traveled extensively (Jordan Peterson invited him to London, events across the U.S., and Panama), reducing fresh content. Whenever I help him with content, I only share what he has said word for word, so during this period that he was out, I reposted older material to maintain my 12 LinkedIn posts per week pace. LinkedIn metrics reflect the shift from novel to old content: total engagements fell from ~2,634 to ~2,281, and comments dipped from 451 to 416, though impressions climbed from 114,345 to 155,388.
Luckily, on Twitter, where I post an almost exact copy of one LinkedIn post per day, impressions more than doubled (202K → 531K), and engagements quadrupled (4,959 → 20,300). Because Michael was out, I met with staff members to highlight parts of our program that I usually don’t discuss:
Our entrepreneurial guide
and I discussed our STEM offerings.Jayne Besjak and Chris Spetzler (Executive Director of the Decision Science Foundation) walked me through what students were doing in our Decision Science class.
Benjamin Gabbai, a homeschooling parent and educator with over 15 years of experience, taught me about turning shallow home environments into spaces where parents and students alike can learn about themselves.
I haven't posted enough to determine whether it's worth discussing these subjects, but I should know in about 60 days.
Besides posting less new content and testing new angles, I suspect our LinkedIn engagement dipped partly because I promoted our Socratic Parenting program about four times a week. People often dislike persistent sales pitches, lowering engagement. Even so, as shown earlier, we ended up with higher enrollments overall, at lower cost, and faster sales cycles. This period feels like a win, especially given the Socratic Parenting program’s potential as a new revenue line.
Socratic Parenting Course: Revenue, Trade-Offs, and Long-Term Potential
We launched a 6-week live Socratic Parenting course for parents who want to turn shallow chatter with their children into deep, thoughtful conversations that build strong family bonds, spark critical thinking, and nurture independent minds.
Ten people bought it despite us launching the course before validating demand, generating $6,590 compared to three sign-ups at $300 each in the older version. Our school’s tuition ranges from $6,000 to $16,000, so one enrollment in our school can often exceed the $6,590 I generated for the Socratic Parenting 6-week course in one swoop. So naturally, I did wonder if I was promoting the right product. Still, I feel good about investing time in this course:
It’s a lower-risk offer for parents who may transition into our main program at $6,000–$16,000 per year.
If we eventually run ten similar courses annually at about $5K each, that’s a significant revenue line with more or less fixed costs.
Additionally, I’m trialing a monthly mastermind for the course, which, if it goes well, I could offer to the public for around $25–$150.
All this reassures me that missing a school enrollment or two now won’t hurt us since the course can yield more significant rewards in the future.
Company Channels: Posting More and Seeing Gains
We increased post volume on our company's Facebook page from 22 to 54, boosting reach (4,586 → 6,068) and reactions (46 → 105). The engagement rate also edged up to about 3.64%. Meanwhile, our LinkedIn page saw impressions jump from 2,463 to 4,170, though the engagement rate slipped from 5.54% to 5.13%. I started posting on our company's Twitter on March 8 and look forward to evaluating those results.
Website & Landing Pages: Fewer Sales Calls, New Lead Magnet
Shifting to our website, we witnessed a drop in total sessions and a decline in the average time people spent on the website. GA4 metrics differ somewhat from Universal Analytics, and our lower ad budget likely meant fewer ready-to-buy visitors.
We had fewer people book sales calls and download our program overview, which I anticipated after (1) reducing ad spending and (2) marketing our Socratic Parenting course on top of our program. However, we also had 500+ people download our new lead magnet, “How to Give Your Child an Expensive Private Education for $250/Month From Home,” despite only promoting it twice. Additionally, we enrolled a higher percentage of the people we talked to on sales calls and more people overall compared to the months before reducing ad spending.
Email Campaigns: Higher Opens, Lower Clicks
Our email open rates improved, partly due to purging unengaged subscribers. The click rate slipped, likely due to encouraging people to click to download something for free rather than sign up for our new paid course on Socratic Parenting. Lower clicks but higher revenue from the increased number of enrollments can be a worthwhile trade-off, though I plan on reducing sell‐focused newsletter sends so readers see them as a source of value rather than nonstop pitches.
More Enrollments, Lower Costs, Now What?
Besides doing more of what’s working, I’ll meet the head of the school, guides, and program leaders to record short sessions that can be adapted for marketing. This keeps our content novel and feeds me new experiment ideas even if Michael, our founder, travels. I also plan to build my own Twitter presence. If I replicate Michael’s brand strategy for myself and other C-level personnel, and everything else is equal, we could feasibly at least double our pipeline.
Moreover, after months of using the same five ad creatives, I’m preparing a larger test leading into summer to identify top performers once enrollment interest spikes quickly.
