Today I wrote job descriptions for three employees. Depending on your experience with scaling a business, you may read that statement as either boring, overwhelming, or celebratory. For me, it felt like a huge hurdle. Six months ago, in a cohort meeting with other microschool founders at Microschool Solutions, a microschool accelerator, we had a lesson on creating policies and procedures. The whole concept felt so industrialized to me; I could feel my resistance to the discussion. One of the appealing things about small learning pods is the flexibility to respond to each child’s needs and pivot easily as needed. Policies and procedures felt so rigid and impersonal.
But the other part of me knew it would be helpful, and was even necessary already in our school. I had recently made my first hire, bringing in one college student to help me at my three-day, learner-driven microschool in my home. I was already noticing how many systems lived only in my head, and the sheer number of questions my new helper asked me each day was exhausting me. In business lingo, these undocumented systems are called tacit knowledge, or sometimes tribal knowledge, and they are a sign that your business would not likely survive without you. That first hire revealed for me the need to externalize my processes in a way that helpers can, well, actually help. This meant creating policies and procedures.
I started moving my tacit knowledge into systems a little at a time, using the questions my new hire asked me as my guide. My goal for my students in my self-directed learning center is for them to become self-driven, meaning that they need less and less help from me. So it was actually pretty intuitive just to respond to my assistant’s questions and build procedures to remove myself from the process as much as possible, one question at a time. However, at the time, I had about a dozen students, and ran the school with my husband and this one helper. I wasn’t prepared for more than doubling our enrollment in just a few months and adding three new facilitators, which is where we are now.
When I set out to open The Treehouse in fall of 2024, I didn’t have a specific plan in mind for its size. Common business advice is to have a strategic plan that covers 3–5 years of growth projections; I knew I wanted to teach but hadn’t fully considered all the business aspects of my school yet. As with many entrepreneurs, my naivety was a gift that helped me take the leap. Given what my business license would allow, and my break-even income, I assumed that we would run the school somewhere between 6 and 16 kids, and I was okay with it staying small. But with the expansion of the Utah Fits All Scholarship (Utah’s education savings account), and my new status as a private school vendor for the program, I had a growing waitlist, and I could see how a larger group of students would benefit our learners. I moved quickly over the summer to create a second space and open as many seats as possible for our now 28 students.
This growth in my second year has brought new challenges, including insurance and payroll, and I am learning to wear new hats. Sometimes it’s hard not to get lost in the weeds and forget why I got into this in the first place. Many business coaches describe this process as a shift in mindset from entrepreneur (the start-up phase and often a one-woman show) to CEO (the scaling phase). The CEO needs to form a team that runs on systems which essentially clone the founder, who has up until now been running the show solo.
Because working directly with the students is what I most enjoy, I am trying to create a team that will allow me to hand off certain business responsibilities and keep me as much in the learning center as possible. This is where systems (including those rigid-sounding policies and procedures) are so helpful. One way I have made peace with this process is to keep my mission in clear focus. Each time a policy or procedure needs to be made, I ask myself, “How does this need to be handled in light of our overarching goal for the students?” Here are a few examples:
- Our self-directed space includes a woodshop, greenhouse, computer lab, makerspace, kitchen, and A/V room. When we were a small group, the kids could roam fairly freely, and the facilitators just moved as they were asked for help. In our first few weeks of school with more kids, I quickly realized I couldn’t run around everywhere. Our facilitators now have an assigned domain, and the kids do all the moving.
- Assigning spaces to each facilitator has helped me also divide up other responsibilities including office work, calendaring, parent communications, inventory, and ordering, so that it isn’t all on my plate. This requires some additional training, but it is slowly helping us stay more organized without depending entirely on my brain.
- Bookkeeping and accounting were the first two pieces I decided to outsource. We hired an accountant when we hired employees and needed to have payroll processed, and shortly after, I hired someone to handle our QuickBooks accounting software. Again, my goal is to be present with the students, and I wanted to know that someone else is paying attention to my budget and taxes.
Establishing policies and procedures feels like a case of not throwing the baby out with the bath water. As edupreneurs, we often feel that the rigidity of traditional school is ineffective at best, and harmful at its worst. We want to embrace the freedom to seek what is best for our students. But I am learning that what is best also includes what will make it sustainable. For me, that includes some solid systems to help share the work of creating and running our dynamic learning space.
