From Janitor to CEO: Crafting Better Education at Scale
with Bill Nance (StrataTech Education Group)
Episode Summary
This week, Myles Biggs and Patrick Patterson sat down with Bill Nance, an education operator and change leader, now the CEO of StrataTech Education Group. Bill’s journey spans art & design, IT, operations, finance, and strategy, experiences he’s used to rebuild how schools work from the student's perspective.
Bill shares why great leaders do the hard work themselves until they understand it, make the call without perfect data, and protect the brand by owning demand rather than renting it. You’ll hear how he balances quarterly pressure with long-term purpose, why referrals outperform short-term volume, and how AI can widen opportunities, from adaptive learning to securing real funding for real students, without sacrificing human connection.
If you care about student experience, sustainable growth, or pragmatic AI in higher education, this one’s for you.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode
- Student-first operations: How structuring programs (pricing, devices, materials) levels the playing field and frees faculty to teach.
- Own the brand, don’t rent demand: Why overreliance on pay-per-lead hurts referrals, show rates, and long-term unit economics.
- Referrals as a north star: What Bill learned when cohorts sourced from aggregators didn’t refer, and how that changes the math.
- Leadership under uncertainty: Making 50/50 calls, communicating pivots, and earning trust by explaining the “why.”
- AI as a leveler (not a chatbot gimmick): Practical use cases that improve outcomes without degrading the front-door experience.
- Adaptive learning’s moment: Why true personalization at scale finally looks feasible with modern AI.
- Funding discovery at scale: Bill’s Monday-morning AI experiment to surface grants, workforce funds, and employer sponsorships for each student.
- Skilled trades at scale: Why the next five years demand high-ROI programs that meet community and employer needs.
Featured Guest
Bill Nance – CEO, StrataTech Education Group; former executive at Delta Career Education and Ancora; operator focused on student experience, brand ownership, and technology-enabled transformation.
Bill Nance on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/billnance/
Learn more
Takeaways for Operators & Leaders
- Start with the student, design the service: Treat curriculum as the product and everything around it as the service layer, price, materials, devices, financing, so day one is equitable and predictable.
- Brand ownership compounds: Leads you generate yourself have higher intent, higher referral rates, and better downstream economics than rented demand.
- Measure what matters (referrals): Track referral % per source; if a channel suppresses referrals, its “cheap” volume is more expensive than it looks.
- AI ≠ call-deflection: Avoid front-door chatbot traps that erode trust. Prioritize AI that adds value (adaptive learning, call summaries with human QA, funding discovery).
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