The Achieve Podcast - Matthew Flippen (Gracelyn University)

Welcome to the Achieve Podcast, the show where we highlight the leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs who are building meaningful businesses and shaping their industries. My name is Jesse Warner and I'll be your host today. We're excited to have Dr. Matthew Flippin, who is the founder and president of Graceland University. Matthew, it's a pleasure to have you on the show.

Hey, thanks Jesse, pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

So our audience can get to know you a little bit, give us a quick backstory on you and your, your business and how did it all get started?

Sure, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, I've been actually a serial entrepreneur. I've probably started 7, 6 or 7 businesses and bought and grown a couple different ones, all moving towards what I'd call the impact investment model. How do we, how as we as entrepreneurs do we, do we make an impact on other people's lives while at the same time building a a scalable, sustainable business effort. And so it was really that mission of looking for a way to make an impact that when I saw the gap that existed in the number of qualified teachers needed to teach our most vulnerable children, that this idea of starting an institution that would specifically educate future educators started to become an idea, a vision, and ultimately a reality.

So when did you start the, the university?

You know, we started doing the research on this in like in 2018, and so it was at that time that I was able to go and visit with school systems across the U.S., mainly public school systems, and they were sharing with me that they had this massive teacher shortage. And of course, many of them were concerned about their most vulnerable children. You know, when a great student doesn't have a great teacher, they can still perform. But when a child coming out of a real broken background comes to school, they need school to be their safe place. And they also need school to really make up for the gaps that, you know, that they might have at home. And so this issue was very apparent then. Then COVID happened, and now the data would say that like 600,000, of our teachers are underqualified, not fully certified in their content area. So 600,000 is a lot, right? And that impacts an enormous number of, of children. And so we saw at the same time that in these same school buildings where there were shortages, there were also 1.2 million teachers' assistants. So a teacher's assistant, think of as a $10 to $12 an hour, in many cases a single parent who loves kids but doesn't— didn't have a pathway to a degree and certification to become a teacher. And so we thought, wow, this is really maybe a great opportunity. If these teacher's assistants want to become teachers and we can address the barriers that they're facing in earning that degree, maybe there's a way that we could help upskill this really what turns out to be just a wonderful population of people that really care about children. And help them be successful in their lives as teachers, and then also help them serve children that are, you know, in need of great educators.

Talk to me about how the business has changed as it's grown. Was it just you that started it, or do you have partners? And what does it look like today?

Sure. Yeah. You know, when you— it's not necessarily someone's plan of like, hey, I'm going to start a university to solve a problem that our society is facing. And so we were very fortunate that, you know, our business entity, we were able to receive grant funding to get started off the ground. I definitely had a team come around me, you know, even though I'm an entrepreneur, I'm not a professional educator by training. And so we were fortunate to build a relationship with just incredible academic staff who we could build that. But also, you know, we wanted to be able to provide a very low-cost, high-quality solution for these teacher's assistants that we serve. And so we needed a team that included process automation experts and customer support skills. And so, because, you know, Jesse, to give you a context, you know, most of our students pay $100 a month to earn their undergraduate degree. $5,000 in total to earn their undergraduate degree. And we do that at a sustainable level so that, you know, we're cash flow positive even though we have this small amount of tuition. Now, anyone listening to this that's sending their kid to college right now is like, how do I get involved in this? And if your child wants to be a teacher, well, they're gonna have to come to Graceland to experience that. But, you know, this team that came around us really provided the expertise we needed to build this scalable model. Ultimately, we would get to the, to the point of an accredited institution, which means that we're recognized under the U.S. Department of Education. That would open up doors for us to actually receive outside venture funding to accelerate the rate that we're able to scale and grow the institution.

And how many students do you have now?

So yeah, we're just past 1,000 students. And so we're on our way, hopefully to 2,000 and 3,000 shortly. Our Our 3-year goal is to be in the 30,000 student range. You know, again, there's 1.2 million students that we're targeting, these teacher's assistants that are already working in the building. So our prayer is that we'd get to serve as many of them as we can, you know, get in front of effectively.

Let's talk about sales, marketing, and outreach. Sure. Your primary target, you just mentioned it, right, is teacher's assistant. Paraprofessional become teachers. Um, I imagine you're also having to recruit teachers as well as you grow, and, and some of the education side of that as well, on the recruiting side. But, but talk to me a little bit about what, what's working. Where are you seeing traction in getting people to actually enroll?

Yeah, it's a great question. And you know, Jesse, one of the things that we didn't anticipate when we started from an outreach standpoint is that the story that our target students tell themselves is actually the biggest barrier to them engaging with us. And so let me give you some context. So before we started, we got about 3,000 survey responses back from teacher's assistants, paraprofessionals. Do you want to be a teacher? 90% said yes. What barriers are you facing? I got time and money, right? Because I'm mainly single mom, low income. Right? I'm weak in math. I've got these other challenges. So we built a system for that, and then we reached back out to that same 3,000 people who said, yes, if you'll do these things, $100 a month, um, tuition, then I want to enroll. So reached back out, and we had very few actually step up and apply, which was odd, right? You just told me this is what you wanted, I gave you what you wanted, and then you didn't step forward. And so I contacted a friend that's in education leadership and asked, told the same story, "What am I missing?" And she said, "You know, there's actually a lot of research that supports or documents that women, especially women that have come out of hard circumstances, will not self-advocate, and that it is important that a trusted authority figure actually nominate or recommend your potential student to come look at Graceland. And so we thought, well, we can test that model and see. And so we shifted, and instead of having a direct outreach program to paraprofessionals, to shifting to reaching to school districts and saying, hey, you've got, you've got a challenge of teacher shortages, and you've got the solution in the building. Will you forward your teacher's assistants a nomination letter that says, hey, I see Jesse, I've seen you with kids, I see you'd make a great educator, will you consider getting your teaching degree? Graceland was purpose-built to meet your needs. And what we find is in that model that there's a high percentage of application and enrollment that comes through this trusted authority model. You know, that has its challenges, right? It means I need this I need this, this third party that is interested, but they're actually not the customer, right, to get on our team to refer their people. And when they do that, it's a beautiful thing, and we serve them and really help address a system-wide challenge. But getting enough school districts on board fast enough is always, is always a challenge.

In other industries, right, in B2B, we call them partners or referral partners or channels, right?

Right.

B2C, you might call it an affiliate network or essentially building a referral network, right? To— that's, that's super smart and makes a lot of sense.

Yeah. And we're actually taking that to a different level in the next month where we're engaging at what we're calling an ambassador program. Where we can have ambassadors at our school districts or individuals who will help share the good news of Graceland with those that want to be educators specifically. And then we've got a system to provide compensation for them on essentially a success basis, you know, as we move forward.

Matthew, right now there's a lot of buzz around AI, around automation.

Sure.

How are you finding ways to use it in your business?

Yeah, I mean, many. I mean, the, the potential to reduce costs, you know, in operations, in product delivery, in marketing are pretty substantial. And so, yeah, I can share with you just a few. You know, what's important to us is we've got to maintain high quality relationships with our students, right? Because, you know, they need a live person that they can interact with when they're facing challenges in their lives or in their classrooms where they're teaching already and they're in their work. So, so we don't want to strip out the human element, but we know that we can use AI grading assist type of tools. So if you think of something, you submit a writing assignment and you want to pregrade it against criteria, we're doing that to help increase the capacity of each of our instructors. On how many students they can serve. On the customer support side, we call them student success coaches. You know, our, our model is moving quickly in the next couple months to more AI-assisted initial calls, call screening, call support, and then the triage or next level of, I'll call it, crisis or personal intervention goes to a success coach. So that expands the number of students that a success coach is able to support. And then on the outreach side, we're using AI to— right now we're again testing an outreach model where, you know, can voice agents, for example, pre-qualify school districts for partnerships? Can, you know, voice agents respond to lead forms that, you know, Meta ads generate. So we're testing some of those things. We also have programs in Spanish. And so being able to successfully work with voice agents specifically to address other languages will expand our market without, you know, significantly impacting our cost structure.

As you've tried to scale, I mean, you start in 2018, is that right?

So officially our first term was '21, August of '21. Yeah.

Okay, so it's 5 years beginning, the origin to where you are now, right? As you try to scale, what are some of the constraints that you keep bumping into? What, what are the, those walls that you just keep hitting?

Sure. Yeah, I mean There's several, right? I mean, there's always the plans I make today, and then you get to test them tomorrow and see if they work or not. But some of what we've done in terms of outreach, we've had a little bit of up and down in how we effectively engage school districts. The accreditation process itself, so we expected it would take 3 years, it took 4. And so that 4th year when we were in that process, caused concern among our student body, right? What if you don't get accredited? And so in some ways that, that drug our growth rates down some, whereas we were growing, you know, 300% a year. We really kind of leveled off '23 to '24 into early '25 as we actually finally accomplished accreditation. Now, now we're looking at 1.5 times month over month growth in terms of applications at this point. So thankfully we've accomplished accreditation because that was really an anchor that we had to get released before we could take off.

Yeah, that makes sense. It's one of those things that just takes time and the right people too, I imagine, right?

Totally. Yeah.

As you look at the next stage of growth, what are you most excited about?

You know, the, the degree program that we provide is called Transformational Education. And so, you know, the thing that I'm most excited about is to see that transformation actually occur in our students. You know, not only do they get a great degree and how to be a wonderful teacher, they actually experience a lot of just personal transformation and growth. And so that helps them be not just a better teacher, but a better mom, spouse, you know, citizen. And so, you know, growing is what allows us to reach more people. And so the more we can grow, the more excited I am, you know, about the lives that we're able to touch. We're testing markets outside of the US in Mexico with the Spanish programs. We're doing some tests in Africa and in India as well. And so we're excited about, you know, the potential international opportunities for, for what we're able to offer. Our price point makes us market acceptable in a lot of regions around the world. And so I hope we have the opportunity to serve really every place there is a need for great, great teachers.

Let's look back, let's look back on your journey a little bit. You mentioned you've founded multiple companies. Um, talk to me a little bit about some of the wins or maybe even some of the mistakes that you've had along the way.

Sure, yes. Yeah, my first business that I founded was in the year 2000. So anyone that started a business that year in the tech space especially will know that 2001 is when the internet bubble burst, and many of us learned a lot of, uh, a lot of great lessons there. So, you know, so that first venture was in that, that tech industry in Austin, Texas. And, and so it went under. I did learn some great lessons there. And one was just about conserving cash and being careful about testing your market theories before you burn through all your money. So that, that was important. But, you know, I've had the opportunity to be in the M&A space, to be in financial services. I bought a stone quarry at one point, which is completely, you know, other side of the spectrum. Went to Haiti and started a construction materials company to help after the earthquake happened there in 2010. And so, you know, that was extremely difficult from, you know, every different angle. It was really a God-inspired adventure is really the best way to say it. I mean, it was meant to be a for-profit business venture, but it was just very, very difficult. And, but we, you know, we were blessed to get to serve the Haitian people who for the most part are really wonderful, hardworking people. And we were able to help build a new port that was established there and some other incredible things. But no, I think probably the key lessons that I've learned along the way are that your culture really is the foundation for what you can build on. If you don't have a strong culture, in other words, your people don't trust you, they're not comfortable sharing their ideas openly, which includes things that they think don't work. You know, I have a lot of ideas and I'm always like, hey, if I get one a month, that's a win. So I'm going to tell you 100. And you may, but you've got to tell me that I don't think that's going to work and why, you know, and being able to have healthy culture where you can rely on people and people love coming to work. They feel inspired, you know, by what they're doing. I always say that, you know, a great culture is when you feel loved, you feel known, and you feel inspired by the work that you're doing. And so if you don't have that in place, the amount of scale that you can actually accomplish is limited. You've limited yourself because your people aren't bringing all of themselves to the work that they're doing. So that's probably the most important lesson I've learned over my 25 years.

Last question for you. Any final thoughts or advice that you give to other leaders or entrepreneurs who are on a similar journey to you?

Yeah, I mean, you know, when you're starting a new venture, it's incredibly exciting. It's incredibly stressful. And, you know, all at the same time. And so, you know, funding is always a question. So, you know, there's so many principles that I would say, but I would go back to that one. Culture is important. You know, be a person of high integrity. So let your word be your word. You know, an entrepreneur at times, because we have such an optimistic view of the future, we can overstate what we what is possible. We believe it's possible, but we need to be measured, you know, in that. I'm still guilty of that today. I think the other thing that I would say is, you know, having a family, you know, I was fortunate to marry my high school sweetheart and still be married to her 34 years later. To do that as an entrepreneur takes very, very significant intentionality that you— if you— your relationships that are most important to you they can go through times where I've worked 100 hours a week. But if I did that for 10 years, I probably would not still have the same bride I have, have today. So just be careful about what you, what you commit to. I think this other idea of testing the ideas that you have, the market that you want to go into in controlled, small ways, you know, that whole idea of shoot BBs before you shoot cannonballs, and so that you're effective with your resource and you can prove out your model without having to deploy huge amounts of capital, you know, that are taking significant risks.

Well, Matthew, I really appreciate you sharing your story and your insights with us today. For those listening, if you want to learn more about Graceland University and what Matthew and his team are doing, I invite you to go to graceland.edu. And learn more about Graceland University. Um, so that'll wrap up today's episode of the Achieve Podcast. A big thank you to our sponsor Achieve Fractional, which provides fractional executives for growing businesses. And if you enjoyed today's conversation, follow the show, share with another entrepreneur who also find value in it. And again, thanks for listening. We'll see you on the next episode of the Achieve Podcast.