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Expanding Student Leadership Network’s Service Reach

Student Leadership Network (“Student Leadership”), which helps young people in underserved communities access higher education, was considering expanding its program offerings to broaden its mission impact. The organization engaged FTI Consulting to build a dynamic financial model that forecasts the impact of expanded services and evaluates pricing and staffing considerations related to its growth strategy.

Our Impact

FTI Consulting’s integrated financial model helped Student Leadership forecast the impact of expanding its services into a broader network of high schools in New York City, proving that program expansion will be margin accretive.
Student Leadership identified a shortlist of potential schools and was positioned to expand to more than 10 new high schools, which would further diversify the organization’s revenue streams and reach thousands of new students.
The Student Leadership team was able to better understand and isolate the financial impact of the new services under various pricing and cost structure assumptions. Further, the model provides the organization with visibility into the anticipated financial impact and provides a benchmark to compare against as they roll out the new services.

Our Role

FTI Consulting conducted a comprehensive analysis of Student Leadership’s existing program cost structure, including staff time allocation, overhead burden and external contractor utilization.
We built a dynamic financial model linking excess counselor capacity and service-level commitments to the newly contemplated services so that incremental programs could be added across a vast number of existing staff.
Additionally, our team partnered with the organization’s leadership to stress-test the financial implications of expansion across multiple school growth and pricing scenarios, identifying the most sustainable and realistic targets.
We delivered an executive summary of the proposed growth initiative that highlighted the mission impact, forecasted financial profitability and service delivery model to support stakeholder alignment, as needed, at the board and leadership level and for external use.

“FTI Consulting has been instrumental in our ability to think strategically about evolving our programs in a way that’s both scalable and thoughtful with our resource allocations. Their expertise in financial modeling and business planning has given us the framework to develop flexible service lines that can meet schools and districts where they are, while ensuring we’re making data-driven decisions about how we deploy our resources for maximum impact.” — Matthew Chacko, Director, Institutional and Corporate Giving, Student Leadership Network