From Non-profit To IPO: The Turnaround Of Grand Canyon University: Brent Richardson (Part 5)

SM: What have been some of the key points of your more recent strategy?

BR: Last summer we ended up hiring the CEO, COO and CFO from the University of Phoenix, the Apollo Group, to help us run Grand Canyon because we did not have any public experience. We had decided to go public so they came in and started running the university and I moved to the position of chairman in the fall.The strategies have been similar. In terms of growth we are now, as last reported, at 28,000 students. That is based on April, when we reported our last quarter.

SM: Tell me more about who you recruited from the University of Phoenix to run the company when you stepped up to chairman. What were the prerequisites you were looking for?

BR: Obviously public company experience was one. The guy we got, whom I was most interested in, was Brian Mueller. He is the CEO now. He was really the one who built the University of Phoenix’s online diversity. I knew that he had a lot of online experience and I really liked that about him.

The other thing that is interesting in this space is that when a lot of universities get to 25,000 to 30,000 students they start to have a lot of problems. I was really interested in their experience because they had gone through that before. They had the experience of scaling to 180,000 students. That was a major criterion.

Going public involved a lot more compliance issues. We knew that the CFO would have experience with SEC reporting. The CFO we hired was an Arthur Andersen and Deloitte person, and he had been at the University of Phoenix for seven years. That was another issue.

Marketing is another big area for us. Recruiting students is very important. The COO from the University of Phoenix, who ran all their marketing, had a lot of expertise in continually getting students into their programs.

Those were really the major skills or experience sets that we needed to get, and ones that we actually got, when we picked up that management team.

SM: What drove Brian to leave and join Grand Canyon University?

BR: I don’t know the answer to that. I am still digging around.

SM: Could it be that Apollo stock was not producing, and Grand Canyon was a young company with an upcoming IPO and a lot of stock growth ahead?

BR: I certainly think that has something to do with it. My opinion is that the University of Phoenix, while it is a public company, has all voting stock owned by one person, which can make it a difficult environment in which to work in some respects. Brian had also worked at a small college and taught there, and he liked the traditional side of our story. He is interested in the sports, which we are continuing to grow; plus, we are in Phoenix.

This segment is part 5 in the series : From Non-profit To IPO: The Turnaround Of Grand Canyon University: Brent Richardson
1 2 3 4 5 6 7