Bryan Alexander Consulting, after eight years

Eight years ago Ceredwyn and I launched a business, Bryan Alexander Consulting. Which is astonishing. That’s nearly a decade. As a friend said, soon we’ll have to send BAC to college.

We’ve been very transparent about our work, sharing as much information as we can, barring legal limits and client wishes. Every year since 2013* I’ve blogged about BAC’s progress. Hopefully that gives people some insight into what we do here.

If you’re new to BAC, it’s a small consultancy focused on the future of higher education. We help clients (colleges, universities, associations, nonprofits, governments, businesses) understand and plan for where academia might be headed. To this end we conduct and share research through a variety of channels, while also offering consulting on spec.

Overall, right now we’re actually doing well. Revenues are at a record high for us, although so are working hours. Because of the pandemic we haven’t done any in-person work, which is a financial loss, since fees for each in-person presentation tend to two-three times virtual events, yet we’ve done a higher volume of them, leading to a new increase. The pandemic transition to entirely online work accomplished in spring 2020, everything since has proceeded smoothly on the logistics backend. On the front end, video events occur daily, while asynchronous work (research, writing, etc.) takes place continuously.

We continued to add new clients and to serve preexisting ones. The overwhelming…