Give me a problem, I’ll make you a solution.
Custom tools, automated workflows, whatever the thing actually takes. It just so happens that these days the answer is almost always AI, and I know how to build it. Fifteen years inside schools before that, which is the part that makes the AI worth anything.
Give me 30 minutes, I’ll give you three hours back a week, every week.That is one tool, built on your screen and running by the following Monday, for work or for yourself. Then we go find the next three hours.
We built an organization culture that aligned to our mission by working with Chris. He built the capacity of our leadership team, created the systems and tools, and showed us what REAL change management looks like.
Kinnari Patel-Smyth · President, KIPP Foundation
Book a 30 minute call (opens in a new tab) Free, and useful either way.
DREAM · Explore Schools · PAVE · NYC Public Schools · LA Unified · Harvard GSE
Are you still spending hours on this?
- Building the deck for Wednesday’s PD.
- Writing the weekly team email, four drafts in, still not right.
- Rebuilding the daily coverage schedule from scratch, before most people are awake.
- Waiting on academic data that sits in a spreadsheet until somebody has four hours.
Or wake up at 3am sure you have forgotten something?
None of that needed a person. Ten custom tools so far, built for school leaders, ops directors, principal managers and academic teams, and together they hand back more than 100 hours a week. Point me at one of these and you get something that pays for itself in days. Some examples:
Individualized Data Reports For Academic Leaders And Principal Managers
Puts the ninth grade data in front of the people who can act on it, every Tuesday. The weekly read on how ninth graders are actually doing, and the artifacts that put it in front of the people who can act: the regional memo, the cusp-student tracker, the meeting agenda, the teacher digest. Cutting it by hand ran about twenty hours over four days, so it did not happen. Now it is in hand every Tuesday.
Coverage Schedule Maker For Ops Directors
Builds the day’s sub coverage in seconds instead of an hour. An ops leader at a mid-sized NY charter had a teammate at her desk before seven most mornings, building the day’s coverage by hand, and it was never a crisis so much as a paper cut she got every morning, the kind of thing that is begging for simple logic instead of a person. She was wary of AI, which I understood, and I built her the tool anyway. Three hours of her week came back, and she is asking what else can work this way.
In her hands now, a couple of iterations short of running itself.
Communications Engine For Principals, Deans And APs
Writes the email you have been putting off, in your voice. The emails you dread, drafted in a voice that still sounds like you. Sixteen situations, from the upset family to the hard call to the message after something goes wrong, each one with the moves that make it land. Paste your own draft and it will tell you where it will cost you trust.
Meeting Suite For Anyone Who Runs The Week In Meetings
Agendas, next steps, calendar invites, auto reminders and follow-up emails, in minutes, from a few keystrokes. It writes the prep brief, so you walk in as the most prepared person in the room, captures the notes live and turns them into next steps somebody is actually tracking, and has the follow-ups drafted before you have left the room. All of it wired to your calendar.
In build now.
Ask The Handbook For Anyone Tired Of Hearing “I Didn’t Know”
Answers any policy question straight out of your own handbook. Every policy, procedure, routine, expectation and value your school has, in one place a person can just ask. What is the phone policy in the cafeteria. Who covers a callout after 7am. What are we supposed to say to a parent about the new grading rule. It answers in seconds, out of your handbook, in your words.
Scoped and priced per school. Ask me what it would take.
Academic Health Coach Live, And Free To Try
Talks a principal through their own data and the next move. An AI that walks a school leader through their own data and the next move to make. What I am trying to put in there is the judgment I would bring to that conversation, so the read a principal needs is one question away instead of buried in a spreadsheet.
See A Real One The Ninth Grade Build, Start To Finish
Tell me your problem, book 30 minutes (opens in a new tab) Thirty minutes, no charge.
Systems changed schools. This is version two.
Version one asked more of people than people had hours for, which is why the binder is on a shelf by October. We are not outsourcing the hard work. We are taking the grunt work off it, so the systems you already believe in finally run.
Time back
Point this at the work that never needed a person: the pulls, the formatting, the first drafts, the weekly report nobody wants to build.
Every leadership team I have sat with already knows what it should be doing differently. What it does not have is an hour on a Tuesday to go do it. Nothing else here is possible until the time exists.
Ten percent of your week is more than 250 hours a year. Six-plus weeks of your life.
The risk: nothing student-facing, nothing that makes a decision, nothing that leaves the systems you already control. If it breaks, somebody does it the old way for a week.
Systems
The manuals, the operating guides, the review cycles. What turns a decision made in August into what actually happens on a Tuesday in February.
A system with nobody free to run it is just a binder, and I have spent fifteen years watching that happen in schools that had done nothing wrong except run out of hours.
Yours to keep: written down, handed off, running without me.
Expert Thought Partner
The part only a person can do: what to do next, which of these three problems is actually one problem, whether the leader in front of you is struggling or simply in the wrong seat.
It goes last, though it is the most expensive thing you buy from me, and frankly I would rather you spend that money on judgment than on work a machine should have handled.
What the first month actually looks like
A call. You tell me what is eating the week, and I tell you honestly whether I can help.
On your screen, in your account, we build one thing that runs the following week.
That thing runs. You use it, you break it, I fix it.
We pick the next grind. Or we do not. Every time.
Seventy-five minutes of your time, total. You keep whatever we built either way.
At KIPP, the data systems my team built turned network data into the answers leaders actually acted on. That year 46% of ninth graders across all 48 KIPP high schools finished Q3 at a 3.0 GPA or better, up 6 points year over year.
The work with Chris deeply accelerated the trajectory of my school, and ultimately the network at large. It was nothing short of transformational, and I do not use that word lightly.
Jerel Bryant · CEO, Collegiate Academies · Louisiana State Principal of the Year
Our school leaders name his coaching and support as having very high impact, and they push hard to get as many ‘Chris days’ at their schools as possible. I would highly recommend Chris to any school, CMO, or district looking to make dramatic improvements.
Doug McCurry · Co-Founder, Achievement First
Chris spent two days with us, but his impression has left a mark for years. In minutes he could identify the root causes of culture breakdowns, and equally important, tools and strategies to dramatically and immediately change them. He is always there for us, to talk, share, empathize and then help me make tough decisions.
Rachel Yanof · Founder, ASU Prep South Phoenix
Chris’s monthly visits were a catalyst for dramatic growth. On our network’s evaluation system, we went from the lowest-performing middle school to the highest-performing in the history of our network. Truly, Chris was no small part of that.
Tom Kaiser · Founder, Authentic Leaders · former Principal, Achievement First Endeavor MS
Book a 30 minute call (opens in a new tab) Three minutes, and the answer is yours to keep.
I have been on all three sides of this category.
I advise investors and education companies on the K-12 buying decision: who actually decides, what a school will renew, and why a product that demos beautifully in June is dead by March.
Fifteen-plus years, 100+ engagements across 15+ states, and every one of them from inside the leadership team rather than across the table from it. Four altitudes, four different sets of incentives, and most of what goes wrong in this category happens in the gaps between them.
- Mid-level leaders
- Deans, coaches, grade-level leads. The daily user, and whether the tool gets opened on a Tuesday in March.
- School leaders
- The discretionary buyer, and the person whose departure churns the account.
- Regional leaders
- Standardization pressure, and where school autonomy gets overruled.
- Charter CMO executives
- The enterprise contract, the procurement bar, the renewal decision.
I built one. I built DeansList and we grew it from 0 to 275 schools; it is now in 1,000+, though I am no longer affiliated with the company.
Then I bought them. At the KIPP Foundation I ran the $10M+ EdTech vendor portfolio, including the national ACT/SAT evaluation across 48 high schools, where we ran structured interviews and elimination rounds on efficacy and pricing and took 15 vendors down to 8 approved.
And I still do the work they are supposed to serve. Fifteen years of it, which is why I can tell you what a school will actually do with one.
Diligence and expert-network calls, category and market reads, go-to-market and pricing for education companies, and advisory retainers. Sessions run 30 to 60 minutes and I take them on short notice.
Book an advisory or diligence call (opens in a new tab) Or write me: chris@habetlerconsulting.com
You do not have time to figure out AI, and you probably cannot afford to keep putting it off either.
I know that is not a fun place to be.
Call me. If you are heading into a launch, a leadership transition, or a stretch that has to go right, I will tell you in one call whether it is worth your time. Tell me what you are up against. I will tell you honestly whether I can help, and what I would do first.
Book a 30 minute call (opens in a new tab) Or write me: chris@habetlerconsulting.com · 617-913-8366
Not ready for a call? Two other ways in. Take the three-minute scorecard and get a read on where your week is going. Or name the problem here and I will tell you what I would do first.