The best programmes used to sell themselves. That world has changed.
It isn't enough any more.
The market is noisier, the competition is fiercer, and families have more choices than ever. A genuinely excellent programme that isn't commercially well-organised will lose ground to a mediocre one that is.
I know this because I spent the first part of my career somewhere that gap would have been unthinkable — commercial sales for a Fortune 500 tech company, managing teams across Europe and the Middle East. The difference between a well-designed commercial operation and a poorly designed one shows up in the numbers within a quarter.
Then I made the move into education. It is a sector I genuinely love, and felt the need to be part of it.
What I found surprised me. Strong programmes. Committed people. Real care for students and families. And underneath that — enquiries handled rather than converted. CRM systems part populated and hardly interrogated. Talented people stretched across too many functions, doing none of them as well as they could.
But most of all, I saw that students missed out. Families who would have thrived on a programme never found it, or found it too late, or found a competitor first — not because the programme wasn't right for them, but because the commercial operation wasn't working well enough to reach them.
That observation became the founding argument of Hoopoe & Co.
Built inside the sector. Under real pressure.
Over the years that followed, I worked inside a major seasonal education provider to build something that had not existed before: a complete commercial operating model designed for the realities of international education.
I proposed it. I drove it. I influenced every part of it — the team structure, the processes, the technology, the data architecture, the marketing integration, the international partnership network. From the initial diagnosis of what was broken, through to the design and implementation of what replaced it.
Specialist roles with clear processes to create a seamless experience, where previously a team of generalists had been expected to each do a bit of everything. A bespoke CRM system built from scratch to cover the full customer journey. Reporting infrastructure that gave leadership a real picture of commercial performance — conversion rates, acquisition costs, lifetime value, returner tracking — for the first time.
Hoopoe & Co. is built from that work. It is built for you.
Commercial rigour and genuine care are not in tension. They are the same thing, expressed differently.
Education is not an emotionally neutral transaction. Families are making high-trust decisions — about where their children go, who looks after them, what they experience. That trust is the product.
Which means a weak commercial operation doesn't just cost money. It signals something about the organisation. Slow follow-up tells a family you are not attentive. Vague communication tells them you are not organised. An admissions process that feels uncertain tells them, at the moment they are deciding whether to trust you with their child, that perhaps they shouldn't.
The best education organisations understand this.
— Founder, Hoopoe & Co.
The thinking behind the model.
Three essays on commercial operations, admissions design, and the case for selling what you’ve built. A good place to start before we speak.
Read the series →The bird who brought Solomon what no army could.
The hoopoe is a bird from Islamic tradition — the messenger who carried intelligence from a distant land back to the great king Solomon.
Not force, and not conquest. Knowledge, precisely applied.
That is the role this consultancy is built to play. It's likely you already have what you need: the programmes, the people, the relationships. We bring the view from outside your walls — and help you apply what you have with the precision it deserves.
Start with an honest picture of where your operation stands.