Earlier this month RHB Founder and Principal Rick Bailey joined host Ken Anslement, RHB Vice President for Enrollment Management, on the Admissions Leadership Podcast (“The ALP”). You can listen to the episode or read the transcript below. 

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Transcript

Ken Anselment

Welcome to the Admissions Leadership Podcast, a series of one-on-one, conversations with people who have been climbing the leadership mountain in college admissions. Some are nearing the summit, some are already there. And some, like my guest today, built a lighthouse up there a very long time ago to show people how to get up there. But how did they all get there? And what can other climbers learn from their mindsets, habits, and experiences? I’m your host, Ken Anselment, VP for Enrollment Management at RHB. And with me today is, well, I guess the RHB in RHB, Richard Harrison Bailey. Rick, welcome to the ALP.

Rick Bailey

Thanks, Ken. Great to be here.

Ken

We were chatting before I started recording. This is the first time I’ve actually interviewed a sitting boss. I mean, I had Steve Syverson and Ray Brown and Roby Blust before, but they were since retired or they had gone on to other places, but now this feels like high stakes.

Rick

I’m frankly honored to be invited to be part of the podcast. And that list of people, esteemed leaders in higher education, is just an honor to be associated with that group.

Ken

Well, and lest people think this is some sort of sneaky advertorial about RHB. I will state at the outset that it’s not, first of all, but also Rick, I’ve known and admired you and your work for a very long time, and I consider you someone who has played an outsized role in the way I see the world of higher ed marketing and enrollment. And folks, he’s also a dear friend. I have broken bread and sat next to him in wonderful restaurants many times throughout my life, and so it is great to have you here. And Rick, I should start with just the pleasantries. How are you?

Rick

Doing well, thanks. As you know, I’m working on a doctoral dissertation.

Ken

We want to talk about that.

Rick

And this week I turned in my completed application to the IRB, and I’m on pins and needles right now, waiting for them to say, yes, you’re approved. Go ahead.

Ken

Did they tell you, did they let you know if they’re going to tell you this before the…

Rick

Holiday? I don’t know. I would love to know this week, but I’m not counting on it.

Ken

Okay. So well, maybe you’ll be surprised and delighted. Yeah. What, for folks, so they understand what you’re working on, what’s the focus of your program and how did it come to be?

Rick

I am in a program at Bay Path University in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. Melissa Morriss-Olson has been a longtime colleague and friend. She’s been a client at a couple of different institutions, one of them being Bay Path, and as she was creating as the provost there, she was creating this program of the Center for Higher Leadership and Innovative Practice. And out of that came a doctoral program in higher education leadership. As she was developing that, she’d occasionally chat with me about ideas she was thinking and how to make this program as relevant as it can be, as accessible as it can be, and as working-adult friendly as it can be. And as I watched that emerge, I kept being attracted to it. I have always wanted to earn my doctorate, and life just got in the way all the time. Funny that I didn’t get it while I was teaching at Notre Dame.

I thought, I’m going to do this while I’m here. This will be great. Just couldn’t make it happen. So a couple of years ago during the pandemic, as we were changing lifestyle and workstyle, I thought, oh, this might be the moment to try this. So I called Melissa and I said, Hey, Melissa, I’ve been watching this program and it looks amazing. Do you let old people in? She said, I don’t know who you’re talking about, but right, yeah, let’s talk. So really, it went very quickly. The decision was kind of immediate. And I went to ask Tammy whether or not she thought it would be all right if I devoted time to work on my doctorate. And she said, absolutely do it right now. So that was it. And I started in August or September of ’21, and I hope to be done at least by June.

I should have my dissertation done in May. I’ll graduate on the 10th of May, and then I will have a few weeks left and probably a presentation at some point. Good grief. What’s the focus of the dissertation? I was really interested in why there’s so much failure in DEI programming. I know that there are legislative, state and federal legislative limitations to programs that have been eliminated. I know that the discourse in the country has been so divisive, but what I watched was the increase in DEIB programming and the hiring of chief diversity officers right after George Floyd’s death. And within two years, according to Russell, about 60% of those CDOs had left or been dismissed. And I thought, there’s something more than legislative intervention here. And when you dig into that, you find out that those programs were not well-defined job descriptions were minimal, weak or absent. Resources were not assigned. Agendas were not developed. Measurements for success were not developed. And on college campuses, presidents weren’t lending their support. So naturally, all these new CDOs felt like they were left without any support, and it became an impossible task.

Ken

So they weren’t really given a chance to succeed in the first place. Many were not given a chance to…

Rick

Succeed. Right. There was no plan for success. And so I wanted to know what does it take? What do you have to do first? Or if your core values call you to be fair and just and equitable, what do you have to have place before you decide to hire a CDO or before you launch a DEIB program of some type? And I’m studying that piece that’s missing between the idea of we ought to, should, could do this and actually doing something, and I want to know what that is and how to create a clear and coherent concept and direction before an investment is made.

Ken

Are you aware of anybody else working in this space right now, or at least pursuing this type of question?

Rick

Yeah, I think there’s some folks that are out there doing that. Most of them are studying what happens after you launch. And the theories about DEI really fall into how to do a DEI program once you’ve decided. So there’s some overlap there, but what I found missing was, what do you do first?

Ken

Do you see a playbook coming out of this for institutions?

Rick

We’ll see.

Ken

Got it. Stay tuned. Watch this space. So thank you for that. I imagine walking across that state, you are going to go out in person and accept.

Rick

Yeah, I am.

Ken

How many times have you played out that scenario in your head? I know you have a voracious imagination.

Rick

Yes. I can picture this. And most of the time when I’m stuck and feel like giving up, I go there in my head, say, nope, that’s a prize I’m going for. Let’s pull yourself together, Rick, and write another paragraph.

Ken

So when you’re stuck and you vision and have a vision for what it’s going to look like, that seems like as good a segue as any need to go back to the beginning. RHB the enterprise hasn’t always been called RHB either, right? It started as, was it Richard Harrison Bailey—The Agency?

Rick

It was Richard Harrison Bailey Inc. That’s our official name. We went by Richard Harrison Bailey—The Agency, which was started as a joke by our lead designer at the time who was doing our first letterhead. And he brought several options for logos and word marks to me. And one of them was this letterhead that said, Richard Harrison Bailey slash The Agency. And then he brought me a business card that said, Richard Harrison Bailey slash The Man. It was just an inside joke, and we laughed about it, and as it happened, it was laying on a table when a client came in and saw it and looked at it, picked it up and said, oh my gosh, this is awesome. This is audacious. This is pompous. I love it. And I said, oh, no, we’re not doing that. And he said, oh, you have to do that. So we got rid of the business card. I never had a business card, The Man. Richard Harrison Bailey—The Agency kind of stuck. I didn’t

Ken

No, it started as, I mean, the organization didn’t start as a joke, but that name,

Rick

No, the name started as just a little spoof. And the first time I went to a conference, I think it was at Illinois, ACAC, and I had my first little sign up on my table with that name on it, and John Lawler came up and he said, you are so pompous…I can’t believe you did that, but good for you. And John and I have been friends for a hundred years.

Ken

Yeah, another giant.

Rick

Yeah. And so we just used that for a while. We noticed that our clients started to, it’s a mouthful, and every variation you can dream of was associated with that. People couldn’t get the Harrison part. Our attorney said Richard was the marketer. Harrison was the creative guy, and Bailey was the bean counter in the back room. And so we would make jokes about that, but we noticed that our clients would just shorten it to RHB. So we started shortening it to RHB in our materials, and probably 15 or 16 years ago, we just said, let’s just go by RHB. So that’s where the RHB came from.

Ken

Let’s go back to where RHB came from. So, been around since 91, the firm. What was the spark? What was the genesis of Richard Harrison Bailey Inc.?

Rick

I should give credit to Tammy here.

Ken

Tammy. For folks who don’t know…

Rick

Is my wife, she and I have been married for 44 years.

Ken

Yeah, you better get that right.

Rick

Yeah. I had to do some quick math. Yeah, we’ve been together a little longer, but we’ve been married for 44 years and business partners for 32 of those. But a couple years I had been working at an agency and Tammy kept saying to me, you’d be really good doing your own. And I kept saying to her, oh, you don’t know how much work that would be, and I can’t do that. But she would just drop hints every once in a while.

Ken

Do you remember when they started? Was this…

Rick

Well, this was probably around ’89.

Ken

Okay.

Rick

I began working in an agency in ’83. So I’d been there for six years, and I think she was starting to see my angst about some things at work, and she just thought I would do well to launch my own. And I did not feel confident about that doing that. And in 1991, circumstances evolved in the firm I was working at the time. That ended up meaning that the firm was going to close its doors. So I had the choice of going to work somewhere else and continuing what I was doing. I could go back to campus and Tammy said, or this would be your moment to start your own. And I called a few clients and just said, what do you think? We didn’t have much time to think about it because of the circumstances, but really in a matter of just a few days, we launched our own

Ken

Went from idea to reality.

Rick

It went from idea to reality really quickly. And my deciding factor was whether Tammy would be my business partner. And so I just kind of hung it out there and I said, okay, if I were to do this, would you go halfsies with me? And she said, absolutely. Let’s do it. I’m in. So on April 15th, such a good day to start a business.

Ken

One of those existential crisis days for a lot of people.

Rick

It was 1991, was not a good year to start a business, not a good start a business in marketing or advertising, which is the words at the time. But we did, and it took off. We started in our home very humbly.

Ken

This was in South Bend.

Rick

In South Bend, Indiana. We invited three people from the firm I had been a part of that had closed its doors the week before, and they all accepted positions. We had no idea how we were going to pay them. We offered them salaries. We launched a firm and hoped for the best. Fortunately, I had some clients who were now without a firm to help them. And I had the permission of the previous owners to pursue any business I had been involved in. And I had 13 clients that I was working with actively at the time in the previous firm. And 12 of those 13 called and said, we’d love to continue working. So we had 12 clients. I’ll spare you some awful details about some things we discovered along the way.

Ken

Because you don’t think people want to hear them or you don’t want to go there,

Rick

I’m not sure I want to go there.

Ken

Okay.

Rick

I want to protect some people.

Ken

Understood. Understood.

Rick

That being said, though, we had done work and charged these clients, we found out that they had been pre-charged by the…

Ken

Previous firm.

Rick

So we had to work for free for about six months. Got new clients. And started…

Ken

You had to go out and get them, or they came to you?

Rick

Yeah. Both. A little of both people, but all we could think of was these people that we had hired and we had to figure out how to pay them, and we had put everything on the line. We thought, if we don’t make this work, we’re out on the street, so we have to succeed here.

Ken

So I ask variations on this question too, in other ones, which is, were there ever moments where you thought you weren’t going to make it? And I suspect in the early days, or maybe even early years of a firm, those night sweats happen often. How do you plow through those? There’s got to be moments of great elation and also enormous anxiety, or maybe not. I’m projecting here. That may be different for you.

Rick

Yeah, I feel blessed in that I usually don’t carry my stress in the night. That’s not to say I haven’t had sleepless nights.

Ken

Wait a minute. So we got to spend an hour talking about how that happened. Maybe that’s a different episode.

Rick

Maybe that’s a different episode. But I have had very few sleepless nights about the business in 32 years. And when I do, it’s a serious thing that I’ve got to work out or Tam and I have to work out. But I don’t know. I had an optimism that it was going to work. I had a sense that we were in the right place doing the right thing at the right time, and this was going to work. And of course, we put all of our energy into it, but I didn’t think it wasn’t going to work. There have been times I’ve had a little imposter syndrome, but not much.

Early on when I worked for the agency, my boss there helped me out one day when I was, she and I were talking with a client, and I started most of my sentences with, I think…I think that you ought to. In the car after the meeting, she looked at me and she said, I’m going to charge you a fine. Every time you begin a sentence with, I think. Nobody comes to you for what you think. Nobody cares what you think. They’re paying you because you know. And if you don’t know, don’t speak.

Ken

That’s great advice.

Rick

And I thought, okay. And I think that did give me, it got me over the imposter syndrome hurdle in that I checked myself on what I was doing, what I was saying. And if I knew it, I felt comfortable to say it. And if I only thought it, I knew I had to do some research and come in with not only greater confidence, but assurance that if they check this out, they would find the same thing.

Ken

That’s great advice. When I get to the rapid descent, I’ll ask for another piece of advice, but that’s a good one. Don’t think. Know.

Rick

It was very good. It changed my thinking.

Ken

The RHB of today looks a little different from the RHB of ’91, I suspect, and ’98 and 2005. And first of all, is this what you had in mind when you couldn’t have foreseen what technology necessarily would be like in the higher ed space, but when you played out your long-term vision or your 300-year plan?

Rick

Yeah, yeah. We got to back up to that a minute.

Ken

Did this fit in? Did you see this coming?

Rick

I saw something bigger than what we were coming. I wasn’t able to imagine how the technology would change life. I knew it would. And when you read the 300-year plan.

Ken

This is really a thing. You really have a 300-year plan.

Rick

I’ll tell you this quickly. We had set out some, back in the day when you made 10-year plans, Tam and I wrote one. And at the five-year mark, we had achieved them all. And I started to spin because I wasn’t updating. That happened so quickly. I didn’t think we needed to update the plan. So I didn’t have clear goals at five years like I had prior to that. And Tam started to get worried about me because I thought, what do we do now? Just get better? And that didn’t seem ambitious enough. And so she started making sure I was being fed at some conferences, or she ultimately hired a consultant, David Baker, that we can talk about who would very instrumental in some change. But we went to a conference and met a couple, very much like us in Boston, who had just been influenced by Harvard’s BHAG concept of a big, hairy, audacious goal.

And they said, you guys need a BHAG. And so a couple months later, I woke up and started thinking about it and went downstairs and started noodling on what would life be like in the grand future. And before I knew it, I was talking about the year 2300. So I went and got Tammy and I said, do you need to come downstairs? I started this thing, but you and I need to talk about what this is going to be like. She and I hammered out this 300-year plan. In it, we tell the story of a guy named M and what is like in 2300 working at RHB. And I built it on our core values and some competencies and wasn’t specific about we were going to make X, Y or Z. Although I put in there some inventions that would come along the way, like RHB was going to produce the first holographic that would have all the characters come and tell the school story. But even that, I talked about a viewbook, put it in the context of review, tells you about the time.

Ken

Everything old is new again.

Rick

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But ultimately, I outlined a company that had seven divisions. They’re not the practices we have today, but that concept of making the organization, the enterprise bigger was in there in my head, but it just came out a little different way than I thought at the time. But there’s been a constant thread through our 32-year history of advancing higher education, and that has remained consistent. We have new tools, we have new data, we have new students, we have new institutions. Everything is new, but that thread is still all the way through. And our need for clear, consistent, and honest communication has been a through line.

Ken

You mentioned earlier core values. For folks who are not aware, what are the core values that drive the work at RHB? I want to hear it straight from the eponymous.

Rick

That’s a scary word.

Ken

Eponymous.

Rick

Yeah.

Ken

Every time I hear eponymous, I think of the REM album, right? They have an album called Eponymous. Okay. Rosa can fact check me on that.

Rick

Yeah. You should know first that Tam and I have a set of values that drive our interests, our behaviors, where we invest our time, where we invest our money, where we invest our attentions, what we think are important. And the four things are truth, beauty, love and justice.

Ken

I’m nodding. People can’t see that, but yeah.

Rick

I was counting on my four fingers. Truth, beauty, love and justice. When we volunteer, we think about where we’re volunteering our time. And it is always in one of those four categories.

Truth you can imagine, because of our interest in higher education and learning, and beauty comes out in a lot of our interest in the arts. Love is about community building and relationships. And justice is about issues of justice and equity and community building in a way that’s fair and right. And so those four things probably were the things that influenced how we shape our values at RHB. We think about them a little differently. We’ve developed five core values for our firm, which have to do with high-performing intelligence, creativity, accountability, honesty and one more that I skipped over.

Ken

Forward thinking.

Rick

Forward thinking. Thank you. I appreciate you…

Ken

You did. No, you did that on purpose just to set me up.

Rick

Yeah, that was an exam. I got it. That’ll come up later.

Ken

Okay.

Rick

But those five values have some relationship to the four that Tam and I carry around with us, but those core values have shaped the way we do business.

Ken

It even shapes, if I may go inside baseball a little bit, it even shapes the way that the firm responds to you and Tammy, which you’ve seen.

Rick

Tell me about that.

Ken

Well, we have had…

Rick

Oh, you mean at the holiday party?

Ken

Yeah. We have had a tradition in the past few years of honoring the generosity and hospitality and care of Rick and Tam by each giving charitable contributions in your name to an organization that touches on those four core values. And it’s interesting because people will pop up and explain what it is. It’s personally relevant to them, but it maps onto the two of you so well, and you always seem to be surprised, even still after all these years of doing it. But just the…

Rick

I’m not only surprised. I’m amazed. So grateful. It is the most meaningful thing to have others understand the things that are important to you in a way that prompts them to act on them and support an organization, many of which we are unfamiliar with, but it would be exactly things that where we would invest time, energy, money. It’s such a beautiful thing to know that multiplication of what we could do on our own through the…

Ken

Butterfly effect of…

Rick

Everybody in the firm, it is moving. I weep every year.

Ken

It’s a highlight. But I think it speaks to the type of folks who say yes to your offer to come and join them too. I mean, there’s so many of us come from higher ed and we identify, I’ll speak to myself, I can’t speak for everybody on that, but identify strongly within institution and perhaps with that institution’s values. And if you do it right, the values are aligned with your own. And so when you leave an institution to join a firm, having that set of values, but also the embodiment of it is in the two of you. And by extension, Sam too. And Sam Waterson just, it makes the leap a short walk.

Rick

Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah. I suppose, Ken, that some of our own interest and need in establishing a purpose and a mission, it comes from our own experience working in an institution and wanting something bigger than just coming to work or just making a thing. We think that having, having a big picture of what we want to accomplish in life and what our legacy might be is, it’s important for us to back that up with values and direction and clarity about why we’re all doing this together.

Ken

It’s coherent, you might say. In preparation for this conversation, I was rewinding the tape because in my head, it’s a tape. It’s not a digital format.

Rick

You’re giving your age, man.

Ken

And to be fair, it’s like an 8-track tape, just to really situate it, but I’m trying to remember when I came into your orbit, or we got into each other’s orbit, and I remember coming up to the table once at a NACAC conference and thinking these people, these are my people. But I also remember, and I don’t know why or how it happened, you sent me a pre-published copy of the book you wrote, Coherence. I don’t know why, but I was honored. And I remember you even told me it’s designed to be read in a flight. So because I’m the dutiful student and wanted to get it right, I reviewed it on a plane. I’m a slow reader. So it was a flight from California to Appleton, so it was a long one. Not that, this is Ken’s life, but I’m trying to remember when we got into each other’s.

Rick

Well, I think we had a friendship or a strong acquaintance for many years prior to that.

Ken

That was Coherence. The book was…

Rick

That was 2010. We had known each other enough for me to think I would like Ken’s opinion about this before I publish it. And so we must’ve known each other or at least been conversing for five or six years. Yeah, I have thought about that several times because as you know, I had my eye on you as a potential RHB colleague for a very long time.

Ken

So I’ve been told.

Rick

I think part of my asking you in 2010 to review that draft, or 2009 to review that draft was to plant a seed to say, you belong here. I had read enough about what you were writing and had heard you speak at meetings, and I thought, yeah, got what belongs at RHB. And then it took me another 10 years to move down. But I don’t know how many times I brought that up. First of all, I wanted you to be a client. I thought if you were a client, you’d know how this works, how well it works, and then you’d want to do it. So it took me a long time to get you to spend your money on hiring RHB.

Ken

Yeah. Yeah.

Rick

When you did, it was kind of magical.

Ken

Oh, man. It was the work we did. I remember.

Rick

The day that you signed your first agreement with us, and I thought, this is going down in history. I worked hard for this.

Ken

The hardest yes you ever got from a client.

Rick

Oh my gosh. I worked years at that. Yeah. I have kept regularly a list of wannabe clients, and I always make it sound like they want to be clients, but it’s me wanting them to be clients. I’ve always kept a list on my desk. Years Lawrence was on there. I thought, oh, someday that’s going to happen.

Ken

It was magical.

Rick

It was magical. I thought our work together at Lawrence was thrilling, exciting, profound and…

Ken

You helped us find our voice.

Rick

Fun.

Ken

Yeah. Well, and you, well, you taught the VP there who shall remain unnamed, but it rhymes with Schmanselment, how to move away from, and here’s the callback, I think to I know, when speaking about the institution, you helped us speak more confidently about who we are and to be specific. And it changed the game for us. And yeah, this is the part where it sounds like an advertorial, but this is really more of the renaissance that it was the awakening. And also, I remember we were celebrating Alisa at Wintergathering. Alisa is our lead designer and just a beautiful artist. But the work that RHB did, when I think about how it inspired the rest of the creative folks, the folks involved with marketing, the folks involved with admissions, how it wasn’t about RHB, it was about empowering Lawrence with its own vision of what it could be. And then we started to walk and talk more confidently about who we were. It just the way it rippled out into the look and feel and voice of the institution was profound.

Rick

That’s exciting to hear. There’s so much at Lawrence, and you were doing such interesting and good things. You just needed a pinch.

Ken

Yeah, a pinch and a punch. A little bit of both. I appreciated that. So you wrote Coherence in 2010, the second edition came out. And for folks, real quickly, what is the principle of coherence? I know we talk about it all the time, but I know I want to hear it from the person who wrote the book.

Rick

Sure. Essentially, coherence is about telling the truth, and it’s about understanding your organization, your institution, so clearly that you become unafraid to tell the truth.

And what makes coherence work is when you not only understand what’s true about you, but what others believe to be true about you. And in the middle of that is what do you say is true about you? So if I can figure out the answer to those three questions—What’s true about us? What do we say is true about us? And what do others believe to be true about us?—I will get a pretty good sense of market position. And what people believe about us, our reputation, is what’s important. They define what brand is. We define what position is. And there’s something that hasn’t changed, right? As long as I have been in this business, institutions don’t understand that. They decide position, customers decide brand.

I’ve heard more people speak and be confused about that, and they…don’t get me started. That is one of higher education’s greatest challenges, is to get clarity about that concept. And coherence helps clients align position that they decide with brand that customers decide. And if can get alignment between position and brand, you’re gold.

Ken

And how many folks get that? Well, that’s a silly way of asking the question. You can’t quantify that. But I suppose you wouldn’t still wouldn’t be in business if everybody understood that concept.

Rick

And every time I’ve been in meetings with a room full of presidents and one president will get up and talk about branding, and I just want to pull my hair out, jump up and say, no, that’s not it. You started this backwards. It isn’t about your logo. It’s not about your viewbook. It’s not about your website. That’ll all come. Don’t worry about your big branding party. Understand that you have responsibility. I think institutions have an ethical responsibility to articulate their clear position. And if they don’t do that, they risk inviting people who don’t belong at their institution, students and faculty. They risk promising something they’re not going to deliver.

Ken

And that’s what you mean by not belong? Creating a false expectation.

Rick

Yeah. They bring somebody in who would be better served somewhere else.

Ken

Right. So you’ve been at this for a while. Are there things that still surprise you? I mean, the changes, the changes this year. I was talking to a client who said, in any year, any one of the things that are happening this year would be enough. SCOTUS, FAFSA changes, demographic changes, all of that. But they’re all coming together. But there are still, and I know you’re a pattern matcher, there are things that don’t change or haven’t changed.

Rick

It’s interesting. I’ve changed my perspective about this several times in the last few years. The pandemic changed some of that for me. But I’ve always felt like higher ed had difficulty reading trends and responding to them. And I think there’s an unwillingness at some institutions to engage with reality. We get caught in our environment, which is very exciting, where tons of new things are being developed and explored. I was at MIT’s Innovation Lab a couple of weeks ago for a meeting, and oh my gosh, that place is just alive with ideas. And I think, okay, that’s what should be happening. But I’ve also been on campuses of late where there’s just no sense that they need to change or that the world is changing around them. At the same time, I’ve watched the seeds of innovation take off sometimes prematurely, in an interest in being innovative or being relevant, making choices. That happened too soon. One of those, I think, was Sweet Briar, the decision being made that Sweet Briar wasn’t going to be relevant or they couldn’t sustain that. So let’s close it.

Ken

The alumnae had a different idea.

Rick

Oh my gosh, such a different idea. And the potential hadn’t been tapped. And that’s one where I feel like a decision was made that was premature. Or I’m trying to think of another good example of that where I’ve seen lately somebody making a choice, not about closure, but about programming that just was a little too soon. So it’s kind of interesting. I think it’s all related to being in tune with reality and having the wisdom to respond at the right moment and the right time. That’s hard to do, but it’s not impossible. But I’ve watched higher ed not be thoughtful about timing in relation to reality.

You’ve been talking about the cliff. Gosh, we’ve been talking about that now. When did Nathan write that book?

Ken

I don’t remember when it dropped, but this is probably not a popular view, but I think the notion of it being a cliff is it’s good for scaring people. I don’t think it’s a cliff. It’s a difficult downward slope to navigate. But in that is tremendous opportunity.

Rick

I agree.

Ken

But there are things that colleges need to be doing now, needed to be doing five years ago, 10 years ago. And many, many are. Even just to go back to the top of the conversation with DEIB. Are we creating college environments that are going to look like the world into which we’re graduating our students?

Rick

Oh man.

Ken

Are communities composed of the blend of socioeconomic diversity and cultural perspectives that will be represented in the world into which they’ll be graduating? You talk about the ethical responsibility. Now, some colleges are better positioned to do that than others, but even in their own corner of the universe, are there different ways to approach it so that, there’s another word, they can remain relevant?

Rick

Yeah, I love that word. The idea of relevance is critical when we talk about institutions responding to reality at the right time. Our mission and vision at RHB is based on that. Again, no commercial here, just saying, we believe that relevance is the driver to build meaningful relationships. And relationships are the drivers to create revenue that all of our clients, all of our institutions rely on.

Our clients come to us for a variety of issues, most of which are attached to generating or protecting revenue. And our thinking is that revenue doesn’t just happen. It comes from nurturing relationships. But relationships don’t just happen either. They’re built because an institution chooses to do something that others want, need or demand. So if I’m doing something that is meaningful and can build relationships, I will have a resource that will help me achieve my ambitions in order to continue to deliver relevance. So we believe heavily, and I’m a huge proponent of helping institutions when they understand what’s true of themselves, make sure that what is true is also wanted, needed or in demand, that it’s relevant. So if you want to boil this all down, it’s about relevant truth.

Ken

Dang.

Rick

So you can crisp this whole podcast down.

Ken

It’s going to be a 10-second podcast, but there’s an hour of material that’ll be on the floor. No, but there’s a pattern there too. I think in terms of what you were describing earlier about colleges saying, we need a new brand, or we need to zhuzh our brand, we need a new logo that’s further down the line. And same thing, we need more revenue, we need more enrollment. Okay, that’s a problem. But we need to get back to first principles. And that’s sometimes I think where the urgency of now and the impatience and sometimes the feeling of desperation that some institutions have can cloud the need for that. What can sometimes seem like a slow discovery process of No, no, no, no, no. Hold. Let’s tap the brakes first. You got to know where you are before you know where you’re going to go.

Rick

Yeah. Do you still have that truck outside with the backup lights?

Ken

Yeah.

Rick

Sound effect right now.

Ken

Right? Yeah. I live in the middle of a construction zone right now.

Rick

Yeah, I agree completely with that. The truth is, your logo’s not going to raise money.

Ken

Nope. No matter how clever your tagline is.

Rick

Your digital ads are not going to raise money. If you want to raise money, do something relevant. Don’t worry about your logo. And if you want a new logo, fine, create a new logo. But don’t let that be the driver or the foundation on which you base relevance. And part of it is people think that what they are is wonderful, and if only more people knew about it, their problems would be solved. So they think about the branding and promotion as the reason why you’re not getting what you want.

Ken

It’s marketing’s fault, it admissions’ fault. It’s not.

Rick

And it isn’t. You don’t have anything relevant in the market. And if you had something really relevant, you probably wouldn’t need any marketing.

Ken

Well, there you go. Yeah. I’m looking at the time. We could do this for three hours, and we would only be scratching the surface. But I know you’ve got a dissertation to work on.

Rick

Yes, I do.

Ken

And so it seems like a high time that maybe we pivot to the rapid descent. Sure. Are you ready for that?

Rick

I think so.

Ken

Okay. There, the tone seems to have shifted. There seems a little bit of trepidation I’m maybe hearing in your voice. You said, I think. You didn’t say, I know. So I’m just…

Rick

I’m ready. Fire.

Ken

You’re getting fined. So what is your walkout song and is it something that you have sung yourself in a traveling singing group?

Rick

It’s not. That’s another show. No, it’s not. I’ve never sung this song, but I hear it in my head a lot. Do you know Carl Orff and Carmina Burana?

Ken

Oh, Carmina Burana. I remember that from when I saw Excalibur and I was like 12 years old.

Rick

Yeah. Yeah. This song, this composition is pretty interesting. It’s built on some ancient, well, 13th century poems and lyrics and songs, but was set to music in the 1930s, 40s by Carl Orff. And it’s just a powerful composition that the themes in it, when I’m driving, when I’m stuck in a paragraph or a thought in my dissertation, I hear, it pushes me to write to the next thing.

Ken

Do you even need to queue it up, or does it just pop into your head?

Rick

Oh, it pops in my head. I don’t.

Ken

Okay. Okay.

Rick

I sent it. I sent it to some of my classmates and my cohort not too long ago when they were all talking about, I can’t get through this. I said, oh, here, listen to this. So I don’t know. I don’t know if I’d walk onto it, but it is kind of a power.

Ken

It would be dramatic.

Rick

It would be dramatic. Yeah.

Ken

You’d need to have a cape on, I think if you’re coming out with that. And there’s got to be some dry ice involved. So this next question is probably a loaded one. What’s the best thing you’ve read lately, knowing you’re reading all the time?

Rick

Yeah. I don’t think you’re interested in most of the things I’m reading for my dissertation, but for a class I’m taking on women in higher ed. I just read a really great account in a book called Yale Needs Women. And it’s the story of the first 575 women that were admitted to Yale in 1969. And how disruptive moving to a co-educational environment was for a campus that had been for 268 years all male. And what was that transition? What forced that to happen, and what did it mean not only for the women that were admitted and changed the institution, but what did it mean for the men? What did it mean for the institution as a whole? Yeah. It’s kind of a good reminder of how recently…

Ken

’69. Yeah.

Rick

Yeah. I was in high school for heaven’s sakes.

Ken

There are, that reminds me of, apropos of something, I guess if Back to the Future were filmed today, Marty McFly would be going back to, was it like 1993?

Rick

Yeah. Kind of crazy, isn’t it?

Ken

But when you think in 300-year time spans, I suppose things are just slivers, slivers to you.

What is something you’re eager to read next?

Rick

Oh, man.

Ken

And is it a dissertation piece, or do you actually get any pleasure reading?

Rick

No.

Ken

I mean, not that it’s not a pleasure, but…

Rick

I’ve got to say I’m learning a ton. I’m not loving everything I’m reading, but I like a lot what I’m reading for my dissertation. But when I’m done with my dissertation, my life is going to be pretty wonderful, and my reading habits will be even better. But I just saw a book of Who Stole the Truth?, Who Killed Truth?, and it’s written by a Harvard historian. And I want to read that. That strikes me as something important for somebody who believes in coherence. So that’s on my list. It probably won’t happen until summer, but…

Ken

Won’t get here soon enough.

Rick

Yeah. Yeah.

Ken

That first non-dissertational book is going to be a special choice, I imagine.

Rick

Yeah. It might be an illustrated book.

Ken

Oh yeah?

Rick

No words.

Ken

Yeah. What’s a podcast you particularly enjoy?

Rick

Besides yours? I actually, I listen to Melissa Morriss-Olson’s.

Ken

She’s terrific.

Rick

She has a similar pattern where she interviews innovative, mostly university presidents, but that same sense of getting to know in your case, Ken, an enrollment leader in her as a university president, that ability to dive into somebody’s thinking is really helpful.

Ken

Yeah, she’s wonderful. And thanks for bringing her to meet with us.

Rick

Oh yeah. I was knocked out. I thought she, I think she read us well.

Ken

Yeah. What’s your favorite thing to make in the kitchen? I’ve really got to hear this one, knowing what a foodie you are.

Rick

Oh, my favorite thing.

Ken

I’m sorry. What is a favorite thing? Let’s make it a little more generous than that.

Rick

Alright. My kids will tell you that I’m one of those cooks that looks at the closet in the fridge and says, we’ve got these things. We’ll turn it into whatever.

Ken

Let’s improvise.

Rick

Let’s improvise. And I used to make their birthday dinners and one year, I can’t remember for which child, I thought we had the makings of something that would resemble like a lemon chicken pasta. And so I made some linguini and started with some oil and wine and chicken and basil, and there was some cream in there and maybe some artichokes and I think red pepper slices. Anyway, I just was grabbing what we had, but it turned out pretty well. And that became a family favorite. So while it might not be the thing I like to make the most, it is that at our house has both culinary and emotional connection.

Ken

That seems the best and most appropriate thing in the kitchen.

Rick

I agree. I agree. I think if you let go of emotion in the kitchen, or even passion in the kitchen, you’ve lost part of the meal.

Ken

The emotion I usually feel in the kitchen is the fear of, I don’t know if this is going to turn out right, if people are going to like it, or if I did the ingredients wrong, I didn’t cook it long enough. Does that sound familiar?

Rick

No, I am always of the mind if this is terrible, we’re only eating it once.

Ken

See. Okay. We can ditto that down to the advice section too.

What do you use to take and keep your notes?

Rick

I am currently, I’m a pencil person. I used to be a roller ball person, but I have turned into a pencil person, and my current utensil is a little Zebra number two pencil with a retractable, what do you call it?

Ken

I want to call it nib, but that’s a point.

Rick

Yeah. Point. But lead, retractable lead. I am a huge Blackwing pencil fan. I love those nifty erasers. I’ve really been on this Zebra kick for some time and they’re good.

Ken

Is that a wood body or a…?

Rick

No, it’s a plastic body. It feels like it’s wood. The pinch feels like a regular pencil, but it’s just the right length.

Ken

I remember Sam gave me a Ticonderoga.

Rick

Oh yeah. That’s nice. Yeah, I’m big on those too.

Ken

They smell so good.

Rick

Yeah, these Blackwings are cedar and they smell wonderful.

Ken

Okay. Are you a paper snob? Are you agnostic about the paper? Do you care?

Rick

If I’m working on something that really matters, I have a huge paper snob. Picking out paper for letterhead is, requires an investment of everything. But when I’m keeping notes, it’s on everything. If there’s a slip of paper near me, that’s what I use. My desk is lined with stenographers pads and post-it notes and little notebooks and journals. My colleagues, when we were in the office together, my directions would happen on a scrap of paper, could even be something I tore off from a sheet somewhere, and it would just be this little indecipherable note that I had written down. It was highly meaningful, but it drove people nuts. So I think they’re happy we work from home now.

Ken

I know I am.

Rick

Yeah. Well, you live in a beautiful place with a beautiful view.

Ken

Although every time I come into the mothership, I love being among the fellow RHB people.

Rick

Yeah. Energy that comes from that.

Ken

Oh my God.

Rick

We were just together a couple weeks ago, man, I’m still living off that buzz. That was wonderful.

Ken

You could light a city of 500,000 people for a good six months, I think, with all that energy.

Rick

Yeah.

Ken

Other than, no, don’t think, what’s a memorable bit of advice you’ve received?

Rick

I mentioned David Baker consult to experts and people who do expert counsel over product making. And one of the things he said to me that changed RHB pretty significantly was that narrow does not equal small. And his point was, the more narrow you become in your position, the deeper you will be able to go in your expertise. And the deeper you are in your expertise, the more you will know and the more you will know, the more you will bypass or surpass the competition. And by being deeply expertise, you will become the go-to in that arena. So that was a path we chose at RHB, was to just go very deep in our expertise in higher ed. And that changed our firm. When he says narrow does not equal small, I really questioned him, but that’s a truth. I mean, it allowed us to expand our reach around the world because we had this thing that others don’t.

Ken

Last question. Name an item on your bucket list, presuming you have a bucket list.

Rick

Oh, I’ve got a big bucket list.

Ken

That you haven’t yet checked off.

Rick

And one of the things I’ve joked about what I’m going to do in retirement is to open a little bar in the coast of Spain and serve Rioja. And it’s been a little bit of a joke, but only a little bit. I’d really like to do that and spend at least a few months of the year just absorbing the environment, but sharing a glass of good Tempranillo or Rioja. That sounds good to me. I had this picture that I have about three customers who are always there. Just four little glasses of wine and talk.

Ken

That’s all it takes.

Rick

Sometimes we don’t talk.

Ken

Oh, that sounds wonderful. Well soon-to-be Dr. Bailey, this was a pleasure. Thank you for all this time. Thank you for, as I said at the outset, building that lighthouse on top of the mountain to show folks how to get there, myself included. But I appreciate your time this morning. But more than that, I appreciate everything you have done for me and that you do for institutions. And going back to the pattern of that butterfly effect, the impact that RHB has, not just as a firm, but as a philosophy on how it approaches the world is tough to beat. So thank you for that. And thank you for being here today.

Rick

Thank you very much. It’s been a treat.

Ken

I will close as I always do, which is to say, Rick, may all your big dreams come true, at least the good ones. And to you dear listener, thanks for listening. Be well and do well.