Management: Chairman Jack Clegg, 61, joined the company in 1991. Before then, Clegg had run 21 companies in 17 industries. COO Daryl Dixon, 40, joined Nobel in 1999 from Pennsylvania health-care provider NovaCare, where he had been president of the Contract Rehabilitation Division, which had sales of $640 million
Capitalization: Nobel is publicly held, with Clegg owning about 10% of the outstanding stock, and major investors -- such as Allied Capital, Edison Venture Fund, and Knowledge Universe -- and employees owning a majority of the shares outstanding
Strategy: Cluster small, uniformly designed schools to maximize operating efficiencies, offering small class sizes and teaching flexibility. Encourage a high degree of parental involvement
Philosophy: Teach children to be independent and critical thinkers who are prepared to be lifelong achievers. Nobel emphasizes that philosophy from the get-go. Its pre-elementary schools are pointedly not day care. They introduce children as young as three to computers and to a second language
The Vision Thing
Jack Clegg's just back from China, where he signed a deal with the largest operator of for-profit schools there, which will link its schools to Nobel's through the Internet. Soon after that happens, he envisions, the two education companies will run student-exchange programs. And while he was there, Clegg wangled an audience with China's education minister, and the two men talked about setting up an international school in Beijing.
When people who work with Clegg talk about him, they may well mention his bias for action, but they invariably mention his vision. "He knows how the pieces of the puzzle go together," says Robin Eglin, executive vice-president at Nobel. "He has this innate ability to see beyond the range of most people."
It was Clegg's vision that got him into the education business to begin with when, as an investor for all seasons, he was brought in to advise Nobel's faltering predecessor, Rocking Horse Childcare Centers, on a turnaround strategy. So what exactly did he see at Rocking Horse? First, many of the schools were operating just fine. "The problems were at the corporate level," says Clegg, "and those are the easiest to fix." Second, he noticed that Rocking Horse had one stepchild school in California, a combination pre-elementary and elementary school. That lone school, which had been largely neglected by the parent company, was actually, in Clegg's eyes, the chain's most promising school. It became the model for all of Nobel's future schools.
"Jack is very good at thinking in a businesslike way within a human-services environment," says Nancy Lavelle, chairman of Total Education Solutions. Clegg, she says, is a man always mindful of what he must deliver -- and to whom. Virtually all of Nobel's competitors are not profitable, notes Lavelle. But Nobel is. Most of those companies also don't publish their students' test scores. But Nobel does.
How Clegg gets those bottom-line and performance results is simple: he gets the best managers he can find and doesn't overwhelm them. Typically, Nobel managers have no more than three goals they must hit each year.
"He's a no-nonsense person," Eglin says of Clegg. "When he makes a decision he wants it executed right away, but he's also patient when it comes to getting a result."
Best Practices
Stay on top of the numbers. "We are really planners," says Jack Clegg when pressed to define the essence of his work at Nobel Learning Communities. Every Friday morning he convenes a quick meeting of his top managers. The grist for that meeting is a "flash report" on the recent performance of each school compared with goals in the company plan. "That means that every single week I know how every single school is doing," says Clegg. "This allows us to make adjustments within the month, not after it." He says most managers get tripped up by not clearly defining their goals, not keeping track of them on an ongoing basis, and worst of all, adjusting the numbers after the fact to jibe with performance.
Ease in, then roll it out. "We hope that everything we do has the name 'roll out' on it," says Yvonne DeAngelo, Nobel's chief financial officer. The company constantly looks around for new markets where it believes it can replicate a sound business model. But it always measures its risk by first taking small initiatives. Nobel, for example, has entered a range of markets such as teaching learning-disabled and emotionally troubled children; running specialty high schools for immigrant children, many of whom have part-time jobs; and operating public charter schools. In each instance, Nobel made an acquisition of one or two schools or took a minority position in another company in that market to assess what it was getting into. "All of these schools have different operating dynamics," explains Robin Eglin, Nobel's executive vice-president. "It's important that we first learn the business and figure out a successful model."
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