Hello and welcome to Higher Thinking on Higher Ed. I am Charlyn Carrington of Content Strong Communications, the fractional communications and marketing leader of choice for universities, colleges and nonprofits. Today I am excited to continue diving into the trends and challenges encountered by communications and marketing leaders in higher ed. And I am honored to talk to Paul McGinnis and welcome him to the hot seat today. Paul is the Vice President of marketing and enrollment at Bethel University. 02:57 Sharlyn, Content Strong With over 25 years of leadership experience spanning higher ed, finance and tech. Paul is known for building high performing teams and driving sustainable growth. He is passionate about developing purposeful Christian leaders and advancing Bethel's mission through transformative strategy. Thank you so much again for bringing your expertise to this conversation. How are you today? 03:17 Paul McGinnis - Bethel Absolutely, thank you. I'm doing great. 03:20 Sharlyn, Content Strong That's good. That's an easy end. 03:22 Paul McGinnis - Bethel It's Minnesota summer, so it's like, you know, 75 degrees and nice, you know, And I came from Texas, so I really appreciate Minnesota summers. 03:31 Sharlyn, Content Strong Oh my goodness. I'm here in Toronto, Canada, so of course I'm freezing still for some reason. Our temperature is, it's still cold right now. And it's ideally going to get warmer by the end of the day. But I'm willing it with my summer dresses. I'm willing the sun and I'm willing the heat. I would love to borrow some of the heat across the camera if I could for. From you. 03:51 Paul McGinnis - Bethel Nice. 03:52 Sharlyn, Content Strong Okay, so let's jump right in. I mean, you know, I said a little bit about kind of what your background is, but I always, the first question, I always just kind of try and get into a little bit, you know, what your experience is and kind of what your role is in your institution. I know you obviously came into higher ed from the private sector and now you're, you know, you're kind of the chief marketing and communications officer there at Bethel. Can you tell me a little bit about kind of your role and how that outside in perspective is kind of shaping your work? 04:21 Paul McGinnis - Bethel Yeah, I Tell you what, it's been an interesting journey because I believe a lot of people in midlife get to this point where they start reflecting on deeper things. And that was me. I'm sitting in my office at Ecolab. I loved my job and my career, and Ecolab is a great place to work. But typically what I've seen is in midlife, whether it's driven by something like a tragedy or the sell of a business or a divorce, some. Some big event in your life, begin to reflect. And that was. That was me. I had a series about three years of just a lot of tragedy in my life. And it made me think, am I. What I'm doing, is it making a difference? 05:02 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 05:03 Paul McGinnis - Bethel You know, am I making a difference in the world? What kind of impact am I making? Is the grind that I was in at this company worth it? And so this reflection happened and I began to think about how can I use my skills and experience differently to make more of an impact. So I began working on figuring that out. And that led me to leaving corporate America. And I started working at a non profit called the Halftime Institute. That then eventually led me to a tech startup, which was a SaaS company that was just a blast. And then it led me to Bethel. And during my time at the nonprofit, we worked with Christian executives in transition. I met Ross Allen, who is our president. 05:52 Paul McGinnis - Bethel He started at Bethel as our president five years ago, and he had a business career his whole life. He was at Medtronic, a company here in Minneapolis, for 30 years. And so I was like, well, that's intriguing. This business guy now is in higher ed. I had never heard of Bethel. I worked in Dallas and Texas for 30 years, and so I had never even heard of Bethel and wasn't obviously in the higher ed space. And so I was intrigued. So I connected with Ross and he shared his vision of building this executive team made up of higher ed professionals and business professionals. And that was really intriguing for me because I was like, okay. I began to read about higher ed in the industry, and this was for me, about three and a half years ago. So post Covid. 06:38 Paul McGinnis - Bethel And I was like, oh my gosh, higher ed is in a state of disruption. Do I really. Do I really want to go in to this industry at its maybe low point? Didn't know if it would be a low, you know, when the bottom was, do I want to do that? That makes no financial sense. It makes no sense in my career and all that. And I just felt like, yeah, Ross is wanting to hire people for just A time like this that we can roll up our sleeves, we can be innovative, we can be forward thinking together. And that's exactly what happened. He hired a group of people, half of us from business, half of us from higher ed that were really forward looking, that had a heart to really educate and equip students to impact the world. 07:24 Paul McGinnis - Bethel And this has led to really bold strategies of repositioning our tuition last fall and rigorously evaluating all of our programs and having a financial discipline that in my short time in higher ed, in three and a half years, I haven't seen a lot of financial discipline. And so it's just been really good to bring those things together. And it's worked. It's working really well. 07:49 Sharlyn, Content Strong Well, you've touched on so many things there that I want to bring up because I know the audience doesn't know what I know and I know we're going to talk about it in a second. But you know, you did touch a little bit on this, the shifts in the sector, right? Like this shifting sector that we're in right now. From your vantage point, what are the biggest shifts or blind spots even in higher ed marketing today? And how is kind of Bethel approaching this differently, really understanding that you have this kind of amazing a team that's bringing in all these different skills from higher ed and then from the outside world. 08:22 Paul McGinnis - Bethel I think the biggest shift for me was my first 90 days. I was just listening, right? I met with 100 different people and I just asked them so many questions. And I think for me, and understanding that higher ed marketing tends to be what I've seen, people that create print pieces or social media posts or alumni newsletters, I was not used to that. Where I came from. In my career, marketing was the brains of the organization. They were one of, if not the most strategic area in the organization. They were product developers in conjunction with, you know, R and D. They were owners of the price, they own the brand, they were responsible for our reputation, they know where we should go next and where we shouldn't go. And it was all data backed. 09:13 Paul McGinnis - Bethel And to come and see, especially as I talked to other universities, that wasn't the case at all. It actually was here to an extent. And I was like, okay, I think we have something to work with here. Marketing had become more and more strategic here. We had a, we have a. Still do have a great leader here and I think that was part of it. And then for me to come and say, no, we have to elevate the function of marketing and it's beyond Marcom and then strict promotion. It's the other pieces of marketing as well. And so we've been shifting that paradigm of the reputation and purpose of marketing. And so it's been really practical from a, we had to restructure the org chart for that to happen and change expectations on the team. 10:03 Paul McGinnis - Bethel But more than anything it's stepping into projects, initiatives and decisions with data informed ideas, with technology solutions and with a mindset that we're here to help from a strategic focus. Now I don't know if that happened had we not had a president that came from business, right. Because he got it immediately and he was like, well of course marketing is going to help us with this and of course marketing is going to help us with that. And so we've had to make some adjustments too of do we have the right team to be able to help that be an elevated function within the university. 10:39 Paul McGinnis - Bethel And over these last three years we've been able to do this and it's really been to a place where we've been not in an arrogant way, but marketing has been elevated and is given the resources to the university to help make better decisions. 10:54 Sharlyn, Content Strong Well, I have so many questions to add to that, but I want to just tie what you've just said into what you're seeing broadly across the industry because clearly there's a shift I think happening and clearly there is, I don't want to say there's more of a need for market this marketing communications function because I think there was always a very critical, vital need for this function. But as we see the conversation shifting around the value of higher ed as a whole, are you seeing that impacted in your work or what it is that you do or how it is that you do it, your work? And then of course broadly across the sector. 11:28 Paul McGinnis - Bethel Yeah, I think it's really interesting you bring up value, right? So it's not only the value to me and if this gets off tangent just bring me back, but the value thing has been probably the biggest thing on my mind and heart since I've come into it. Because when I came in it was really, I think it had been way before I came in, but what's the value of a college degree? And it seemed to just be going down further and further and I'm like college changed my life in so many different ways and I'm like, what? Why is that the case? And as I dug into it more, one of the reasons that stuck out was our pricing Strategy, especially among regional privates. I was just like. 12:15 Paul McGinnis - Bethel It took me a while, first of all, to grasp the concept of it and this high price, high aid. I was like, it's complex. It's frustrating to families. We spend marketing dollars communicating that nobody pays this, so don't worry about it. And I'm like, well, I think we could spend these dollars and these resources around communications on much better things like our great academics and the faith formation that happens here and the sense of belonging and all the things. Then, hey, don't worry about the sticker price. Nobody pays that. And so that's really why we launched into the. One of the first things when I see the data saying the number one reason people don't attend Bethel that say, no, it's price. All right, well, what can we do better on price? 13:01 Paul McGinnis - Bethel And one of the things is we can just actually communicate the price they're actually going to pay. And that is interesting to me because it was viewed as very courageous. And I get it because I think most universities and colleges are worried about the value. It will see that your value is going down if you get rid of that aid. Right, I get it. But we really had to. When we formed our work group to start talking about tuition repositioning specifically, we got a bunch of smart people in the room and we started with value mapping exercises. We didn't start about affordability and how much could we afford to drop the price or anything. We started about value mapping. Where are we? Where do we want to be? We looked at the four P's of marketing. 13:49 Paul McGinnis - Bethel I mean, it was marketing driven from the beginning. And the two things we learned from that was we have excellent academics, we have great student experience, we have higher than normal outcomes for the industry. But our sticker price, that outpaced our value. And that was a sobering assessment. I mean, this was with faculty and staff and. And it wasn't that our value was bad. It's not. It wasn't. And it hasn't changed even though our prices. It was that when you have this sticker price that was 60k, are you. That there's no way. And you wonder why people are questioning the value of college. We're part of the problem. I really believe that us in the higher ed of continuing to have this high sticker price are part of the problem in people questioning is college worth it? And so we viewed it as missional. 14:43 Paul McGinnis - Bethel This was we're financially healthy as an institution. I think a lot of people see when they people reset tuition, it's a Hail Mary because they're about to go under right. At all. We felt like the further sticker price was getting from reality of what families were paying. We felt disingenuous and we're like, it's causing so much frustration. And, and the results of just, there's actual quantitative results I'm sure we'll talk about, but qualitatively, the families that have been through the college search process and the game are so thankful. And we have gotten countless emails and conversations and everything saying thank you for getting rid of this used car model that higher ed has and those kind of things. So the value has been just tremendous outwardly. And then the value. 15:34 Paul McGinnis - Bethel Having marketing lead through this tuition repositioning really helped establish the value of the marketing function. So now we're working on some other really critical things and they're like marketing added so much value in this tuition repositioning project. Of course we have to involve them in this project as well. So it's been really good for us. 15:54 Sharlyn, Content Strong Well, oh my goodness. There's so many things like I have taken away from that and want to apply to the 15 other different questions I have in my brain for you. But the first one I'll get to is really just nailing down, talking a little bit more about that big adjustment, you name that big recent tuition reset really was kind of a bold values aligned move, that kind of challenge. The traditional model exactly as you say it. I mean, what's been working? I really want to know what has been working really well in communicating that shift. And then from the other perspective, what hasn't been working so well, what has been challenging after you guys made that big decision and that big shift? If there is anything. 16:32 Paul McGinnis - Bethel Oh yeah, no, I mean I'm one that always have to be careful. Right. Because I'm always, we can get better. And so I have to make sure I pause and celebrate what's going well. 16:40 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 16:41 Paul McGinnis - Bethel I can go to what's not working well so quickly. And I'd say what's working well is our messaging was spot on. It was around clear and simple transparent pricing. It was not about affordability. Affordability is so relative. And there's still a $30,000 price tag that's still significant. Now fortunately though, people looked at the 60k and go, well, there's no way, no matter how many scholarships I get because they didn't know the game and that just affected students. First gen students, underrepresented groups. They just didn't know that we had a dad call the Day we announced, he called the front. The admissions center and said, hey, I just wanted you guys to know I think your email got hacked. And we're like, what? He goes, I just got an email saying that your tuition dropped $18,000. 17:33 Sharlyn, Content Strong You're like, oh, no, that's real. That really. 17:36 Paul McGinnis - Bethel Fortunately, the. The front desk coordinator was part of all of our training and everything. And so she explained it, and he got real emotional, and he. He was a dad of a senior in high school, right? And he said, my son has wanted to go to Bethel since he was in seventh grade. He came to a camp here. And he goes, we knew. And we've told him Bethel's a great school, but we can't afford it. So you need to get your mind wrapped around that. He goes, he's applying tonight and he's coming in the fall. 18:02 Sharlyn, Content Strong Oh, that's great. 18:03 Paul McGinnis - Bethel He didn't know the game, that nobody pays, that it's 50 to 55% off. Nobody. They don't know that. And so that's worked really well, is it's clear and simple and that it's helped our reputation. It's helped. We had to. We had to change what was hard about it. It's working well now. But in the beginning, what was a challenge is because we said it was clear and simple, we had to explain how it was complex before, and now it's simple. So for people with their first kid coming in, they didn't know the game. And so when they go to another school and they get a $30,000 scholarship and they only get a $2,000 win from Bethel, they're like, well, they must value my daughter more, right? No, it's a net price game. And let's talk about it. 18:54 Paul McGinnis - Bethel So we literally had blocks that we use that piled up that said, here's the sticker price and here's all these feel good discounts, and here's a scholarship that's legit, and here's the net price. We've taken out all these feel good discounts. We had to have some very tangible things for our counselors to be able to talk to families about. So that worked really well is the messaging. We got tremendous earned media coverage. And what we had done before is we worked really hard nine months before the announcement to build value. And so we average. We partnered with a PR firm. That's phenomenal. And were in the news coverage locally, statewide, and regionally on average, two times a month for 12 months leading up to the announcement. It might have been an athletic accomplishment, might have Been academic. 19:46 Paul McGinnis - Bethel It might have been a cool faculty research story. It was a ton of different things, but it was all positive. And then all of a sudden when the announcement came, they're like, here goes Bethel again. It was, it was a rolling thunder that we wanted to have in the marketplace. And what's been nice is from a metrics perspective, our website over those next 60 days went up 30% in visits. Our inquiries went up in every school. And so obviously this was a traditional undergrad strategy, but our, we had increase over 30% increase to our grad school, into our seminary, into our adult online. It was just an awareness, right. High engagement across social media channels. The only negative thing, and I wouldn't call it necessarily that negative, every once in a while on social media you'd see, can I get a refund? 20:37 Paul McGinnis - Bethel I was an alum from years ago, those kind of things. And then you'd have people though, chime in, go, no, don't you understand they're getting out of the game. And then they would explain the game and we didn't even have to, you know, get into it. 20:49 Sharlyn, Content Strong Yes, the ambassadors of your brand are doing it for you. 20:51 Paul McGinnis - Bethel Yeah, it was great. We had a news channel here locally that we thought they were going to do something negative on it and it ended up being a seven minute piece on how bad higher ed pricing is and how Bethel now has solved that. And we didn't, were interviewed for it, but we didn't. You never know, right? You never know the angle. It was, it was beautiful. And so it was, overall has gone really well. We're going to have a really healthy incoming class and those kind of things. So, so that's good. And parents deeply appreciate it, especially the new ones that now have gone through five or six college visits and the whole thing. And then they've seen the difference in what we do, what's not working. 21:39 Paul McGinnis - Bethel I, I think one thing that comes to mind is will other schools respond and do something similar, not, not only in our market, but in higher ed. When we did the research for 18 months, we worked with a ton of really smart people. We have an alum at McKinsey and Company that did pro bono work for us. We forecasted out things, we did so much data and analysis and one of the things we assumed was that higher ed pricing is going to change in the next five to 10 years. I think it will be either mandated, which by the federal government or state government, which I would not like to see. I would rather us be in charge of that. 22:23 Paul McGinnis - Bethel Narrative or you could see a flywheel just because people, more people do it as a strategic move to try to fight this thing about the value of college again, which I think we've been a part of that problem. And so I think that's been what's. I don't know if it's going to work or not. We're very confident we did the right thing for us. Our mission and why we did was meant to be missional. And if it increased enrollment, that's great, right? Our purpose was to make sure it's missional. And I just, I'm just anxious to see because if anybody does those kind of price adjustments, it's usually in September. So we kind of have to wait to see is, are more people going to do it. 23:09 Paul McGinnis - Bethel And, and I hope they do because I think it's the right thing to do for what we're trying to sell. 23:15 Sharlyn, Content Strong How do you think that will impact. This is not even a question I had on my brain. But as you say that, how do you think that will impact your storytelling if you see more institutions starting to jump on the bandwagon? Or will it? Do you think it will? I mean, you've set that tone very clearly. Like this is a mission that we've set out to do. This is more than, you know, we're an institution trying to make money. We are here and this is part of our mission. And in that sense, that's part of your brand as well, is what I'm gathering. Right? Yeah. How do you think them. Sorry, you go ahead. 23:43 Paul McGinnis - Bethel No, no, it's a great question. I think as I envision it, I think we would talk about, we led the way, right? We were, were on the front edge of this. And, and some reasons for that is, you know, in our vision statement, it's talking about we want to be a forward looking university. 24:02 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 24:03 Paul McGinnis - Bethel I thought a lot of universities were forward looking when I was not in higher ed because they're training young minds across the world and all that. And then as I've gotten into the industry more, there are definitely anomalies, but typically we're behind in a lot of things. And so to be forward looking, I think would be really impactful. And to lead the way in that story is really important. And I think just as you think about it, as were talking about it's your most significant investment for most families outside of maybe their house, with their most significant relationship, their children. And yet we make it Confusing with price. It makes no sense. So I hope more people can get around the. Oh, my gosh. It could affect the value of our experience if we drop our price. 25:00 Paul McGinnis - Bethel I get that and it's serious and we had to address it, but I hope we're better than that and we can get past that to be able to really show that. Because if not, I, I, I worry about, I mean, there's a college closing every week. Right? I mean, we gotta figure this out. We can't keep doing the same thing we've been doing. 25:18 Sharlyn, Content Strong I think that's probably the biggest sound bite I'll take from there is we cannot keep doing the same thing that we've been doing. Look at the impact it's having. Yeah, you touched on this a little bit. I mean, you touched on metrics actually a lot. You mentioned, you know, you're tracking and monitoring kind of the positive feel that you're getting from some of the earned media that you're getting. You talked a little bit about social media engagement. You talked a little bit about website hits. Is there anything else, like, in terms of metrics, you're really kind of following right now? You're really looking to essentially measure all of your outcomes? 25:48 Paul McGinnis - Bethel Yeah, I, you know, I found that. And again, it's funny, if somebody's listened to this and they're like, you've only been in higher ed three and a half years. You know, just chill. But in the short time, in the short time I've been in higher ed and I've talked to a lot of different universities because since I'm not in higher ed, I want to learn, like, why does it this way? What do I need to revere? What do I need to challenge? I think metrics actually are pretty good across higher ed as far as measuring certain things, you know, yield rate and conversion rates and all the funnel health and those kind of things. I was worried, at least at Bethel, we do a really good job of tracking that. I was worried that would be something. 26:28 Paul McGinnis - Bethel We just have to get a better CRM and we would have to go into that. But Bethel invested in Salesforce about five years ago, and we use that really strategically. So from that perspective, I was impressed. And I think as I talked to colleagues of mine, I hear us talking about similar things from a metrics perspective. But one thing I learned at Ecolab and I worked in the food safety division, so our customers were restaurants and hotels, all in the tourism industry that all clients or customers Are not created equal. And so were a catalog company. Obviously that's changed. But when I was there, were a direct mail company. And we would mail a million catalogs every quarter to a million restaurants. There was about a million restaurants in the United States, approximately. So every quarter, we would mail every single restaurant. 27:24 Paul McGinnis - Bethel And when I came in, I was in a different role. And when I came into the marketing role, we wanted to challenge that idea of we're spending a, you know, a three dollar catalog and, you know, cost seven bucks to mail or whatever it was to a million restaurants that, you know, three out of five close in the first 60 days, blah, blah. And we did all the analysis and we found all the predictive variables of what made somebody purchase from our catalog or not. And the end result of all that was a score of every restaurant. And I knew that if a restaurant had a score of 739 on a scale of one to a thousand, that there was a 62% chance they would buy when they got a catalog within two weeks. Like I knew it. And so we revamped everything. 28:11 Paul McGinnis - Bethel We cut our catalog spend almost by 50% and we mailed to about 310,000 instead of a million. And we increased our sale by 25%. And it was just prioritizing the funnel. Now it feels differently when I say that. So I understand that when you take it, because there's students on the other end in higher ed and the lead. 28:37 Sharlyn, Content Strong Time is longer, right? Like the lead time of actually getting them from. I'm understanding what your institution gives and what the value is to actually getting them to. Okay, select apply to the school is a longer process, right? 28:50 Paul McGinnis - Bethel It's longer. But what I found is this. There were similar principles, right? Who is raising their hand and who is not raising their hand. And the ones that aren't raising their hand, can you identify them early to get to a point where are they going to raise their hand or they're not. And if they're not, don't spend a lot of time on them and spend more time on those that are kind of raising their hand and not. And getting them over to a very confident raising of the hand. And then how much time do you spend that those that raise their hand immediately, Right. They were going to come to Bethel, we'd have to kind of screw it up and being able to do that. 29:25 Paul McGinnis - Bethel So that's one thing that we're trying to build, is a better way to identify those type of students in our funnel so that we know how to respond not only from a technology perspective, email or text or social media or anything, but also from a counselor, like a person to person. How does that work as well? So that's probably been one of the things and making sure that we have systems and processes in place to be able to do that. And then I think the other thing is just consistency in marketing. Before I got here, I think it was we have some money to do this, so we'll do something in February or we'll do something in September or whatever. 30:08 Paul McGinnis - Bethel And to be able to increase our marketing spend so that we can be consistent really pretty much year round, we definitely have heavy months, but we want to be more consistent in the marketplace. And so being able to find a way to do that and measure, that's really important. 30:25 Sharlyn, Content Strong Good answer. And it makes me think of another question, but I'll move into what I actually have on the table to ask you. And it really is about thinking about what your goals are over the next few months. You know, if we think about the next six to 12 months even what's your, what's one strategic capability or shift you're really focused on building whether it's on your team or across the cabinet or you know, how Bethel is kind of positioned in the market. 30:52 Paul McGinnis - Bethel Yeah, I think you said one. Two things come to mind. The first is agility. We have really focused on moving faster because the market is disrupting so quickly. 31:06 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 31:07 Paul McGinnis - Bethel Have to move faster than Bethel. And I'm sure probably typical higher ed has moved. We just have to. Right. But, but the thing that really bubbles the top to me is the capability of thinking strategically. We, we've built teams here that are more around how to execute well, which again, strategy without great execution is not, you know, is a waste. So I get that. But strategy is knowing where you are. Honestly, like a very honest assessment and then having a clear line vision of where you want to go and then figuring out how you're going to get there. We complicate it, but that's really what it is. And so getting the team out of just execution mode and kind of tell me what you want me to do. The team are the ones that are in the guts. 32:01 Paul McGinnis - Bethel They know they get exposed to everything. And I think raising the level of strategic thought on the team is really important. And we have to carve out time to do that strategically. We have to use strategic management tools where, you know, we just had a five hour AI workshop just for marketing and it was just, it Was, you know, some people are really, I mean, I got a lot to do. It's like, no, no. Like this is so important that we're carving out most of the day to talk through how this can be a creative partner that we can use to elevate what we do as a brand. 32:41 Paul McGinnis - Bethel And so I think it's just figuring out the ways to elevate the strategic thinking to keep the execution that's gone really well, but add layer to that and sometimes you have to have really hard questions about do we have the leaders that are able to do that. 32:57 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 32:57 Paul McGinnis - Bethel Because we have hired this type of person. But if we're going to, for Bethel, we've been around 150 years. If we're going to survive and thrive in the next 150 years, we got to think more strategically all the time. But especially now we're in the season of craziness in higher ed. 33:15 Sharlyn, Content Strong This is the time for bigger picture thinking. 110 really is the purpose of, honestly, all these conversations I'm having is to do that. Because I think a lot of us don't get that chance to take that step back and think about what does this actually mean for us, how should we be making shifts, what is it going to look like in the long term? How does that actually impact our strategy or the things that our tactics essentially the things that we're actually going to do. So it's a huge, I mean it's a huge question and we have to. 33:42 Paul McGinnis - Bethel Carve out time to do that. And that's not a higher ed thing. Listen, it was the same deal at Ecolab, right? It was like, all right, we get into the tyranny of the urgent or especially when you're in a public company, the tyranny of the quarter and making sure we hit our shareholders forecasts and all this stuff. And you just push off that strategic thinking. And I have found that you have to get away. We're getting away tomorrow and Wednesday with my leaders on enrollment and marketing for a two day off site. And I started it three years ago. The first time it was four hours in an afternoon in a conference room because they weren't ready for big stuff. Then last year it was off site at somebody's cabin up north in Minnesota. 34:26 Paul McGinnis - Bethel And then tomorrow it's, we're actually doing an overnight where we're gonna cook dinner together and we're gonna do some stuff where we're gonna have kind of some team Bonding and relationship building, but also some strategic thinking. And they've actually done a lot of work prior to the retreat. So we're just. That's what I mean about getting the team to think strategically. Over the last three years, we've just kind of climbed the stairs of strategic thinking. We're looking back, were here and now we're here. But to your point, we have to be intentional or we'll just kind of gonna be in this routine that's not going to get us where we need to go. 35:01 Sharlyn, Content Strong It's amazing how impactful removing yourself from the weeds, being even in physically in a specific place changes your mindse specific, like completely changes your ability to see, be objective, let's say. Right. It's amazing how much that works. I'm, I'm. I would love to hear what kind of what your big wins are from that, let's say from that, from those retreats. Because I think you'll probably find we started here and now we're going here. I think you'll see some like, I think you'll see some huge updates. 35:33 Paul McGinnis - Bethel Yeah, I think you're right. It's funny, one of the things you asked, what's working, what's not working specific to tuition repositioning, but to the thinking strategically. It's fighting the. Paul, we just need to grow enrollment. Why do we need to talk about it? That's, that's the mentality. And again, that's not a higher Ed or a Bethel thing. That's just all organization. Just, I gotta go do my job. I know what I need to do. No, I don't think. I think we have to back up. Growing enrollment is an outcome of really good strategy. We got to get really good strategy in place. And so that's been the biggest fight. Luckily, I have a team that's really embracing it. But you still have those slivers of we just have to grow enrollment. Paul, let's not make this complicated. 36:17 Sharlyn, Content Strong Yeah, yeah, I'm looking forward to hear. I'm going touch base with you because I want to hear what the kind of outcome of all of that is. That's amazing. I mean, my last question. I've taken up so much of your time already, but my last question is always that magic wand question, which is, you know, if I were to give you the keys to the castle right now, I give you those magic powers, what is the one barrier you would snap your fingers and remove if you could, that one barrier that's holding whether you're team back specifically or higher Ed in general, but I'd love to ask about your chief specifically. What would be that thing that you'd remove out of your path and what would that mean for you? 36:53 Paul McGinnis - Bethel I think it's something we've touched on for sure, but I think it's the attitude or perspective that we're just marcom. Yeah, well, you know, I mean, there's so much in that statement of we're just marcom. It's a limited perspective that holds back so much innovation and forward thinking. And it's, it starts with thinking that we have more to offer, like as a team, as a marketing function. But it takes intentional, an intentional plan really, with the marcom leader. And we have a great marketing leader here, Tim, and he blazes the trail to really elevate the value of the team internally mainly, but also the capabilities of the team. 37:40 Paul McGinnis - Bethel And so to get out of that we're just here to make sure advancement and development have the great fundraising, giving, impact report or whatever, all those things are important, but we got to be able to go past that and say no, we are a strategic function of the university and we are key in pushing forward so that we can continue to grow and achieve the things that we want to do as a university. 38:08 Sharlyn, Content Strong I think that's a great answer. And you know, I come from a government background as well and I remember that being a big sticking point is what we'll give you. We'll give you the program to talk about publicly, you know, after it's done. Well, no, let's. We need to be right at the beginning. We need to be embedded in the thinking of it because how you package it, who it helps all matters. On who, you know, who's it going to reach and what the outcome is going to be. I. So I think that's a huge point. I think that's a huge. 38:33 Paul McGinnis - Bethel Yeah, you're right. It's. It's that's part of the process is when we have, when an organization have, has an attitude of we're just markom, everything has been decided and it's like here, go communicate this. And it would be so much better. Like you said nine months before, whenever it started to have those type of people in the room that are not only crafting messaging in their mind, but they're adding strategic value needs to be done. 39:00 Sharlyn, Content Strong Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Is there anything else that you were like really hoping touch on in this conversation that I did not ask you about that you think is valuable to share. 39:11 Paul McGinnis - Bethel No, I, you know, I, I'm excited that you have put forth time and effort into thinking about higher thinking in higher ed. Like what you said, we have to think differently about the future of higher ed. And, and some schools are really doing that well, and some are. Are waiting or maybe seeing what other schools do. And, And I, I have found, and I've challenged my team. We were, were working on elevating campus visits. You know, campus visits are still very important. Right. And they were like, I'm gonna go and see what this university is doing and this university is doing. And I'm like, let me challenge you. And this is where I think the business mindset helps. Go see who's. Who's engaging all five senses really well. So don't go to another university. 40:01 Paul McGinnis - Bethel Another university might be doing that, but instead they went to Disney. They went to the Minnesota Children's Museum. They went to places where the whole experience is about engaging all five senses. And so that's what we've been doing with our campus visits, is how can we engage them instead of just following a student around or something like that. How can we do that? And so I think it's just changing that mindset. And so your podcast and what you're really leaning into excites me because it challenges people to think at a different level. And I think that's what's needed in any industry that is going through disruption. 40:38 Sharlyn, Content Strong Thanks, Paul. I agree with you. It's very valuable. And the issue is nobody takes the time to do it unless there's someone like me in their face, like, let's stop and think about this, and how could we help each other and how could we co create? So, anyway, yes, absolutely. Thank you. Thank you for sharing your time, your experience, your perspective with myself, with everybody else who watches this today. It really was a super generous conversation. To anybody who watches this, I hope this episode sparked ideas, affirmed your own experiences, helped you see a challenge in a new light. Maybe if you're a communications and marketing leader in higher ed and you want to contribute to the conversation, I would love to hear from you. And the truth is, these conversations are ideally the start of a shared roadmap to. 41:22 Sharlyn, Content Strong For the future of our field. So let's get to work. Thank you so much again, Paul. 41:25 Paul McGinnis - Bethel Absolutely. Thank you.