[00:00:00] Austin Blair: The biggest lessons coaching's given me really over the last couple of years is your talent very rarely overcomes a bad culture. You know, I've seen enrollment plans that are great and I'm like, oh my, this is awesome. And this is a great plan. And they failed because the culture wasn't ready to support it. Just like I've seen some really talented teams underperform because they weren't aligned and they weren't ready to stay together. You know, it's, it's all about keeping it together.
[00:00:31] Jeff Dillon: Welcome to welcome to another episode of the Signal. I met today's guest at a conference where he presented culture before strategy and he shared how he successfully united two unique college cultures while preserving the strengths and traditions that made each institution successful. His approach to enrollment growth emphasizes authentic relationship building, strategic marketing, and data informed decision making rather than dependence on purchased prospect lists. Austin Blair serves as Dean of Admissions and marketing for both St. Francis Medical Center College of Nursing and St. Anthony College of Nursing, part of OSF Healthcare. In this role, he leads admissions, marketing, recruitment and enrollment strategy across two distinct institutions with a focus on sustainable growth, innovation and student centered enrollment practices.
With more than a decade of experience in higher education, Austin has built a career focused on enrollment management, leadership development, and organizational transformation.
Prior to his current role, he held several positions at Eureka College, advancing from admissions counselor to Director of Admissions before joining OSF Healthcare. Beyond Higher Education, Austin serves as a high school football coach, an experience that has shaped his philosophy by on leadership, teamwork and building trust through times of change.
Austin, it is great to have you on the show. Thanks for being here.
[00:02:01] Austin Blair: Awesome. Thanks for having me. Jeff. It's a very exciting time and love to get to catch up with you and continue our talk after our wonderful conference. We got to meet at so yeah,
[00:02:11] Jeff Dillon: yeah, that was fun. I wanted to start with your background. You spent years on a football field, you're a coach, and then years in an admissions office building recruiting funnels. Do you think coaching a team and building an enrollment team work the same muscles? Are they more different than people assume?
[00:02:30] Austin Blair: That's a great question. I think, you know, the longer I've done both, the more similarities I see than differences just in coaching and enrollment leadership. They're both about creating that belief and really creating the experience before results. So show you know you're not going to have results pop up on the scoreboard. Everything starts at 00. Just like an enrollment season, everything starts at 00. Once you bring the class in, it starts over and you're just trying to build the pipeline for the future. And I think, you know, as a coach, you're preparing people for a game that they haven't yet played. In admissions, you're really kind of preparing students for a future that they haven't seen yet of themselves and achieved yet either. You know, in both cases, success comes down to a lot more than just graduating, a lot more than just winning a game. It's more about all the pieces on the road to success. Right. So culture, trust, accountability, repetition. You know, a lot of people don't like the repetitiveness of it, but this is the point of why you do what you do and why recruiters are constantly out beating the roads to meet new people. The biggest lessons coaching's given me really, over the last couple years is your talent very rarely overcomes a bad culture. You know, I've seen enrollment plans that are great, and I'm like, oh, my, this is awesome. And this is a great plan. And they fail because the culture wasn't ready to support it. Just like I've seen some really talented teams underperform because they weren't aligned and they weren't ready to stay together. You know, it's. It's all about keeping it together. So very fortunate. I've gotten to be some ground, some great football.
Loved all my opportunities at Eureka College here at East Peoria, now that I'm coaching here. And, you know, I've got a great group of guys I get to coach with. We're all alums of Eureka College, and it's a lot of fun to get to be around those guys. We built a great culture there, and we get to see that through now.
[00:04:25] Jeff Dillon: So, yeah, I love that. You know, what really stood out to me when I was at the edgy web conference where I met you was the title of your presentation was culture before strategy.
And I think it really made sense. You know, on paper, you're really bringing two organizations together. It could look like this structural exercise. You know, you're aligning teams, defining responsibilities, setting goals. But anyone who's worked in higher ed knows that two institutions can have very different histories and identities and ways of getting things done. So I'm curious, when did you first realize that org chart wasn't going to be the hard part? Again, what was the sign, going into joint leadership, that this had to be a culture conversation?
[00:05:04] Austin Blair: Yeah, so it was a very funny story. I started with our interim president at the time was Dr. Shannon Lizer, and she was. Came to me and a couple other members of our college, Kevin Stevens and Dr. Beth Harp and Kevin's Dean of Student Services, and Beth is dean of Institutional Effectiveness. And she was like, I think the three of you will be great going across the two campuses. It's a great opportunity for us to align some of our staffing and some of the way we do things. And there's great strategy and you're strong in your areas. And day one, to answer your question, day one, the first time I went to St. Anthony, I was like, oh, I am in for a fun one, because enrollment matters, but also what matters is the academic rigor, similar to St. Francis. Not saying St. Francis doesn't have a very rigorous program either, but at the same time, we were very enrollment driven the entire time I've been there so far. I'd only been at St Francis for a couple of years, and we were just trying to Drive enrollment. And St. Anthony was very high pass rates, very high pass rates at the graduate level. Phenomenal institution academically.
But that was one of the things where I quickly learned a lot about culture of this is how we do things in Rockford, Illinois versus how we do things in Peoria, Illinois. And they're two and a half hours away. So there's not like a right down the street. There are sister institutions right there. There's sister institutions that are split between Central Illinois and Northern Illinois. So really trying to push myself to reimagine the demographic that we poll is totally different at each institution. St. Francis, we were trying to grow our ethnic diversity and other underrepresented populations. And St. Anthony, that wasn't quite the issue. We didn't have to worry about that. We had to worry about are we going to continue to provide opportunities for those that needed those opportunities, if that makes sense. And I think that was one of the things that was really cool to see. It's very tough. But I think day one, I was immediately like, oh, boy. I think I was driving home that night on that two and a half hour drive, and I was on the phone with my wife and I was like, honey, I don't know that I'm cut out for this. And she goes, well, it's just like football. You just have two different teams.
You know, you're just trying to manage two different playbooks. And I think that's where it's gotten really fun, is we're trying to teach each other the best parts about our institutions. You know, we were just talking about it today with one of my recruiters. You know, somebody may know this, but they don't know this about the system. So how do we connect and bridge the two? And we've even gotten to see that across our faculty with the curriculum redesign coming out this fall. You know, there's a lot of faculty that I'm in, sitting in our meetings with and I'm like, oh, this is really cool to see you guys bring your ideas together of how to teach a student to give that holistic experience of competency based education. And it, it's going to spill over. And if that makes sense, it's going to continue to flow. And it's hard now, but you got to lean into those hard moments. You really got to say, that's okay. Let's, let's see if we can do this. This is going to be fun. Challenge.
[00:08:16] Jeff Dillon: Yeah. I really like that distinction, this culture versus strategy distinction, because buy in can still have. It can still mean the decision has already been made, and now we're trying to convince everyone to support it. But shared ownership really says, you know, people and they have some role in, or had some role in shaping the decision in the first place. In higher ed, where people can spot a predetermined outcome from miles away, I think that difference really matters. When I watched you give your presentation, you framed it as like, buy in is too small of a goal and it's really shared ownership instead. What's the difference in practice, in actual meaning, between asking for buy in and building? Building shared ownership.
[00:09:00] Austin Blair: Yeah, I'm laughing because I just had it this morning. And it's the same thing. It's just, it's constant. You know, to me, buy in usually means we've already made the decision. Now I need you to agree. Like you said, kind of, here's where we're going. You already know what's happening. Shared ownership means we're going to shape this together. We're going to make this decision as a unit and as a leader. You got to understand, hey, I know where I'm going, but I need my team to see where we're going. And they need to help me map it from point A to point Z, because if they don't, we're in trouble. I'm not the ones executing the day to day. If I was, then, I would still be in their role, right? But now as a leader, it's totally different. It's funny, our president, our intern president right now made the comment, you know, you guys are my evaluators and my biggest evaluators. So I need you guys to tell me, are we getting to point Z and ownership? You know, in practice, buy in sounds like, here's the plan. What do you think? Right. But then when I'm in the meeting, it really is. Okay, Jeff, here's our problem. How are we trying to solve this, and how do we do it together?
And how do we create where everybody feels like they've got pieces of this and it's not a.
Well, this person has to own the entire process.
You're creating compliance, really, by creating that culture of commitment that this is where I'm going to succeed and I'm going to do my job right. That's why I say football is the greatest Sport, because it's 11 people not doing everything. It's 11 people doing the one job they're asked to do for the overall good of the team. So kind of crazy to think about that, but that's kind of how I look at it. And I also. I think I said at the conference, people support what they build. My team has helped build what we've got going. It's not me. I've got great people. I really hope nobody tries to come and steal them, but at the same time, if they do, they're going to know what the process is, which is find great people to help build it.
[00:10:59] Jeff Dillon: Yeah. This whole idea about shared ownership is made me think of back when I was managing a web team, and it took me years to figure this out because I always thought, you know, there's several ways to do something right, and I didn't quite get that yet. But there's several ways to do something wrong. And really I'm trying to protect that part of it. Like, we don't want to go the wrong direction. There's many ways to go wrong and right. But if a developer came to me and had an idea of how to solve something, even after a while, even if it wasn't the way I thought was the best way, if it was possible, and I would often just say, you got it, go for it. Because if you don't, then it's always going to come back and bite you. Like, hey, look, they had an idea, a solution, you know, and if they own it, they're going to make it work.
[00:11:39] Austin Blair: Right.
[00:11:39] Jeff Dillon: But there's just such a simplistic way to look at it. But you have a framework. You know, I like frameworks. In practice, I think leaders are really under pressure to move, and there's a deadline, there's an enrollment target, or there's a reason to get to execute quickly. And that's when the early listening and understanding work gets really compressed or kind of Skilled skipped. So I'd love for you to talk about your culture framework, the why, the understanding this terrain. Talk about the culture, this acronym you've created for the word culture, and what these steps are and what happens if you skip one of these steps.
[00:12:13] Austin Blair: Yeah. So it's funny you say the listening before launching, because I. I always say that's where you find who your arrogant leaders are, because you really.
They think they've got it solved and everything. So our. Our culture concept, though, just so that way everybody that's listening can understand a little, is clarify the why. Understand the terrain is the you. So the clarify the why. I guess I should start clarifying it. Basically, we're explaining the purpose before the plan, how we're going to help people with the problem and connect them to what our ultimate experience or goal is, whether it's for our students or the outcome for the organizational betterment, you know, trying to get through that area. The understanding the terrain for us is really assessing what the history is, understanding the politics, understanding the culture, the tradition, the relationships, and really what is already currently existing. And then where does it not exist? Like you said, how. How do we keep from going backward and down below the line where we want to be and keep us going forward? So really identify who your supporters, skeptics and influencers are going to be. That's key for leaders.
Then you, like you said, the Ellis, they're listening before launching. That gets really skinny sometimes. You want as much of that time as you can because you really. I always say you got to conduct listening tours and you got to say, hey, I'm here to. I'm here to understand. Help me understand where you're at and help me understand the concerns you have before you finalize everything.
It really gives you the opportunity to create a chance for them to contribute and take some of that ownership of here's what I'm doing. I see this as a problem, but I know I can fix it if we do xyz. So really kind of in that area, I turned the committees into collations. That one's a fun one for me. That was not my.
Like I said, this is not anything I created. I'm just stealing it from people. But at the end of the day, you got to move beyond lists. You got to move beyond.
You're on this. So that means you've got a piece of it, of what's happening. No. Who's the credibility carriers? Who's the work people? Who's the constructive skeptics? All those people matter. You got to have them all, because you know what, we're all in this world, they're going to be everywhere. So if you deny it or excuse it, that's even worse. You're not involving those people for the decision making skills. Every voice matters and that's the only way you get to shared ownership is giving everybody that representation. Because alone we won't get there. Together we will, we'll have a shot at least anyways. And it's going to take a lot to get there. But really, you know, that's always a fun one to go through because everybody's like, well, how do you, how do you get away from committees and buying and getting the right buy in? Well, you don't, you're not always going to get everybody's buy in. You're going to have the skeptics and the naysayers and you got to, you got to listen to them because eventually they're going to have something that could be useful for you and your team. And then the you part is using data. You got to use data.
I always say use it as a mirror. If your data doesn't match, you can't be using it to blame either. It's got to match to where you're trying to head. It's got to be discussion on improvement. You will always find data points to prove your point, but you got to find data points to help lead you where you need to go. And it's not about defensiveness, it's about building trust within what you're trying to do. Right? Like I can find a million reasons why you shouldn't do xyz, but now it's, here's why my team thinks we should be going this direction because it's the best experience, right? Reinforcing relationships, that's another one I think. I think it's reinforcing through relationships. It's not just the announcements, it's making sure people celebrate everything.
I sound weird when I say this, but like coffee on Fridays? Yeah, sure, that's great. Let's have coffee on Fridays. We need to celebrate the little wins we got through the end of the week. Communication has to go long, long after the launching of it, right? Like communication should never stop. And the second communication stops, that's when everybody kind of stops as well. We freeze. You know, it's just like you look at military, if you're not talking, you're probably watching, you're trying to see where you're going and that's when things aren't getting done.
So basically creating that consistency and then E is really empowering, that shared ownership. You got to give it to them. You got to give that to where it's not just buy in. Here's what we're doing. It's, here's your role and here's how you're going to help create this solution and really help them see themselves in the future. State.
[00:16:55] Jeff Dillon: I want to ask you about enrollment growth specifically because one of the points from your session that really stood out to me was you're not buying names. You know, you're not relying on purchase prospect lists, and this is shocking to a lot of people. I think you're ahead of your time on this because I'm not sure I'd like to know how long you've been not buying names. What does that strategy actually look like day to day? What made you move away from the traditional name buying approach?
[00:17:22] Austin Blair: Yeah, so really what moved me away from it was when I first started here, our budget for marketing at St. Francis was $40,000.
I didn't have the money to go do it. I really didn't want to move away from it. If I'm being very frank, I enjoyed having that opportunity when I was at Eureka College and I made that transition and it was really hard. But as I started going, I started realizing here I was less interested in the volume and I was more interested in how relevant those people actually are.
Instead of purchasing the large pools of names and focusing on building better funnels so they get through the authentic engagement and the student voice and all the cultural things you have within your college, let's stop that and let's start focusing on the specific student and not make it so drowning of here's an automated conflict. Here's this, here's another drip campaign for you that you're not going to interact with unless it helps maybe move you to the next stage. Right.
It's not how many names can we generate, it's how many students can we genuinely help find the right school.
And that sounds crazy to anybody that sits in my chair. I know it does. But I didn't have the money to do it. So now it's like, okay, every single relationship matters because we're a small institution, we're tuition driven, we're trying to balance a budget too. And then I started realizing it was more than just how we were building names here within the college. It was how are we building names within the community? So when somebody thinks of us, we're a local community and we own about that 50 mile radius. There's another institution that we compete with. And they're a great school too. Right down the road, when you think of nursing, you think of the two of us, and that's what we want right in. We know where our lane is, and we know what we're good at, and we don't veer from that. That's probably why I'm a little bit ahead of that. I don't want to skew this because I know there's a lot of private liberal arts colleges that are like, oh, maybe this is the way to go. It depends. Your population is what you need. If I was at Eureka or another small liberal arts college, I would definitely evaluate what's the benefit. How many of those students are we actually getting from a name by that weren't already in our system? And that's where after year two, I was like, listen, more names doesn't automatically get us enrollment.
We got to win the people that are at the plate right now raising their hand, and we weren't doing that anyways. And that's where we had to go and win at the. Win at the fields we were at with the people we had.
[00:20:11] Jeff Dillon: I don't have hard data on this, but I work with a lot of colleges here and even some in the uk And I swear, anecdotally, I see nursing as the top result on college search pages everywhere in the world right now. It's an interesting enrollment challenge because the demand for nurses is enormous. But it doesn't automatically make recruiting students into nursing programs easy. You're competing for prospective students, clinical opportunities, and eventually talent in a very constrained pipeline. And I imagine that changes the role technology should play and maybe even what you expect it to accomplish. How has that pressure changed the way you think about marketing and emissions technology compared to a more general undergraduate program?
[00:20:54] Austin Blair: Yeah, I would tell you, just from nursing point of view, it changes everything. I'm used to my background before here was private liberal arts, small college niche of we've got all these traditions, we've got all these people that are alums, and they send their kids to the same school. And, you know, that's fine and dandy. But nursing recruitment isn't just enrollment. That was probably the biggest hurdle I had to overcome in the first two years. It's workforce development. You know, we place at a very high rate back within our workforce. That OSF, healthcare, we place really high at St. Francis. It's over. Almost over 90% each year, you know, and that's huge. That's awesome. OSF loves that for us, and we get A lot of benefits from working with OSF as well. Right. But then the other piece is it's the students not just choosing the college, they're choosing a profession, they're choosing a ton of responsibility, and they're also choosing a lot of opportunity because, yeah, you're right. This is probably the number one looked at profession right now, just in the sense of, well, there's great opportunity to grow, there's great opportunity to do lots of things. Nursing is not just bedside nursing anymore. There's telehealth, there's, you know, ed. There's all sorts of different things. And nursing's not just what it used to be, which was primarily female driven. We're starting to see our male enrollments go up. We're starting to see our underrepresented populations at both of our institutions go up. And I think that's where the access is probably the most critical. Jeff, you talk about that. How do we get the right people? I think it's getting to where our community is. Here at our colleges are looking like our communities that we're serving. And I think we're getting to that point. We're not there and we'll never really truly be there, but we need to continue to strive towards that. Right. That should be the mission that was set forth by the founders of OSF and the Colleges of nursing, to be very frank, is to continue to serve those that are in our community.
[00:22:56] Jeff Dillon: I think your progression from counselor to director gives you a perspective you don't get if you enter leadership from somewhere else. As a counselor, you're close to the students, you can see pretty clearly what isn't working, then suddenly you're in the role where you have to convince an entire institution to change it. And as you've moved up, I imagine you learned pretty quickly that being right about an idea isn't enough.
What did you learn in that climb about the gap between having a good enrollment idea and actually getting it adopted across the campus?
[00:23:34] Austin Blair: Yeah, I learned very quickly that good ideas don't spread just because they're good. Like you said, they spread because people trust who's behind it. They understand that idea and they see themselves in it. And early on in my career, I could tell you about 100 different ideas that I thought were great ideas.
But leadership really taught me that the implementation is more about the relationship and what is the execution of the idea more than the idea itself.
It has very little to do with the actual, hey, this melt box would be amazing.
Let's do it because it looks awesome. It's going to be great on social media.
Okay, Jeff, that's an awesome idea. But now the problem is who's mailing them, who's stuffing them, what pieces are going to go in there? Why are we going to say that they're in there? Who gets them? You know, is everybody getting one? Because that's an expensive task too. So it's great ideas, but it's also, you know, a good idea without adoption is just a recommendation and people got recommendations, but people don't have ideas that they can follow through on. I think that was probably the number one thing in my time at Eureka too, was, that's fine and dandy to have a great idea, but if you can't follow through on it and you can't make it an actual item, it doesn't matter. And just kind of going back to that. You talked a little bit about my background and being an admissions counselor. I thought I knew a lot about recruitment. And then when you get into those leadership roles, woof, you find a lot out about the back end of all those people that are supporting your admissions counselors that you never even thought were a piece that would even matter. But every tweak matters, every little thing you do in your database matters, and everything you do in your CRM matters. And I always like to say, yeah, I could train a recruiter pretty easily, but if you ask me to train somebody that's some back end person, I'm going to be in a lot of trouble because I better have some really good processes figured out so that way we can make sure they're taken care of.
[00:25:36] Jeff Dillon: I think scale changes the rules more than we sometimes acknowledge in higher ed. At a small college, a handful of people might carry years of history and relationships and knowledge about why things work the way they do. And that can be a huge strength. But it also means a change that looks minor on paper can have a very different impact than it would at a large university.
So I'm curious how different you advise those two environments with small colleges running on relationships and this institutional memory in a, in a way large universities sometimes do not. What's a piece of advice you would never give a small college that you might give a large one or, or vice versa?
[00:26:20] Austin Blair: Yeah, I think, you know, that's a great, that's a great call out. And kind of as I'm thinking about that question, Jeff, you know, one of the things is owning who you are as an institution and knowing what you're trying to be. I think small colleges, you know, we're headed into a very difficult time right now. A lot of small colleges are having to figure out what are they really good at, balancing budgets and everything. You got to make sure that what you're spending isn't overspending. But also, is this a necessary program or a necessary evil for our institution because it's part of our identity and sticking to your brand, I think, as a small institution is really hard. A lot of people don't. They want to try to scale up. They want to move to the next step. Right. I think that's where larger universities. Their goal really is probably to maximize the intimacy, to give the students the opportunity within a larger institution like smaller schools do. But really they're two totally different. I've never worked at a larger institution. So, you know, small schools, they create that community and responsiveness. I think that's the same thing as larger institutions are trying to help students see the pathway through, just like smaller schools. But it's a different type of pathway. Right. You're going to have significantly more student life opportunities. You're going to have significantly more.
And at larger schools, you may have more athletic opportunities. As far as a student going to attend those games, maybe not playing anymore. Right. So I think that's where you see a lot of schools trying to own who they are. You know, high research institutions that are large schools, they're owning those pieces more than they probably were back 20 years ago. And small schools really have to take that and not imitate scale, but truly maximize intimacy within the small institutions, like you said, and own their traditions. Eureka College, private liberal arts institution. And I would tell you right now, my education was second to none. And I know that because that's how it was sold to me when I went there. Right. And I know that it's a great education. Is it the Harvard of the Midwest? No. But I have lifelong friendships and I have lifelong learning that I'm always going to hang my hat on from Eureka College. And that's one of the best things. You know, small colleges win by being human and not acting bigger than what they are. I can't say that enough, like, just be who you are, because the world is going to try to hate on all of the things you do if you try to continue to be something you're not and just own that piece. Right. I'm a football guy. You look at me. I've not missed many meals, so I own that fact. You know, I'm going to enjoy my Thanksgiving dinner every year, so.
[00:28:56] Jeff Dillon: Well, I love the perspective, Austin. I want to wrap this up with one final question for you. If a college president called you tomorrow and said their enrollment strategy. Keep stalling. No matter how good the plan looks on paper, what's the first question you'd ask them?
[00:29:09] Austin Blair: What's your culture?
Who's your biggest leader? It doesn't have to be your VP of enrollment management. And you know, I've really come to think that as, as leaders and presidents continue to have to go through, the turmoil they have to go through is our enrollment strategy isn't working. Why is your culture and are you embracing who you are? I think that really goes back to that last question is, are you truly embracing who you are? Are you trying to be something you're not? And if you can do that, that's great. You know, enrollment problems rarely stem from enrollment challenges. Most of the time they're cultural, they're communication. Trust, really Clarity is the other piece.
As a president, have you really said, this is where I want to go with my enrollment numbers? And this, this is why I focus on culture first.
Strategy tells people what we're going to do. Culture determines whether they'll actually get there. You've got to understand those two pieces.
[00:30:05] Jeff Dillon: Well, thank you, Austin. It's been a great conversation. I appreciate the reminder that sometimes when strategy isn't working, the answer isn't another tactic or another piece of tech. It's getting the people and the culture right first. So thanks for sharing your experience and joining me on the Signal. Thanks for everyone for listening. We'll put links to Austin's OSF Healthcare organization and his LinkedIn in the show notes. And thanks again, Austin.
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