Profile: Education Sales Management

Education Sales Management was established in 1995 when Rick Fort, our President and CEO, was looking for a way to promote the intangibles of education. Rick owned a Sylvan Learning Center franchise at the time, but was struggling with his conversion rates. Only about 20% of the people who inquired about his services actually enrolled in a program. He decided it was time to form a professional sales team before he opened his second Sylvan location. Through this process ESM was created, and Rick's Sylvan centers flourished. Conversion rates soared to 80% and revenues doubled.

This amazing success captured the attention of other local Sylvan franchisees and ESM grew rapidly as centers outsourced their customer contact needs. Currently, ESM provides a variety of services for over 200 Sylvan locations, including many corporate owned centers.

ESM has expanded its services to include working with a broad spectrum of educationally based clients. We have implemented many new systems and strategies to deliver the highest quality service and technology to our customers. Automated confirmation calls, computer based voice delivery systems, sophisticated call recording and monitoring combined with high performance reporting tools are but a few of the major technological developments.

Our ultimate goal is to help our clients by developing innovative solutions for their customer service problems. We provide outstanding services on-site, via phone, e-mail, and live chat.

Missions

1. To help worthwhile education and human service organizations grow by helping their clients open the door to personal growth and greater success in life.
2. To create a model work environment.
3. To continually grow as an organization.

Values

We are a principle-centered organization. We care as much about how we act as we do about what we accomplish. ESM is all about helping people. How we act toward our employees, our clients, and our clients’ customers is vitally important because it defines who we are as a company.

Integrity At ESM, integrity means trust, honesty, consistency, dependability and openness. It also means valuing ourselves as a worthwhile organization and always striving to act in accordance with our highest sense of who we are as a company.

Performance We collaborate with our clients to establish key performance indicators for their organizations. These KPIs become the foundation for employee performance standards. We strive to achieve and exceed those performance standards and to maintain consistency so that our clients develop long-term confidence in ESM. We are committed to continuous improvement and we constantly solicit ideas from our employees and clients to enhance our performance.

Mutual Fair Benefit We recognize that at its core, the relationship we establish with each client and each employee is a financial one. Mutual Fair Benefit means fairness to employees in compensation, fairness to clients in pricing, and fairness to ESM in profitability. Mutual Fair Benefit also means that we cooperate to meet each other’s needs and that we are both able to win. However, needs change and we may not always be able to meet each other’s needs. If we no longer can, our relationship should end. And that’s okay.

Quality Quality is our overall approach. It is a commitment to professionalism, to these values, and to excellence in all that we do.

Family Family is one of life’s highest priorities. Many of our clients help children and their families become more successful. Our employees have family commitments. We encourage our employees to balance their work life and their family life and we give our employees the space to take care of family needs as they arise.

Laughter We have fun at ESM. We believe that life is just too short to not enjoy work, our co-workers and our clients. We take our work seriously but not ourselves. We believe that work, when done right, should be as natural as play. If you hear laughter coming from Centennial, Colorado, it’s probably us.

Love  We care about our clients. We have a great deal of compassion for people who own and manage organizations designed to help other people grow and succeed in life. We care about our clients’ customers – not just as customers who produce revenue but as people who seek help in some way. We care about our employees and how we treat them. At the end of the day, our employees are the ones who make all of this work and we love them for it.

We believe in the Golden Rule and we believe in showing kindness to everyone we work with.

Freedom  We are free to make the choices that create our successes, our failures, and our lives. We have the freedom to achieve the highest potential for our company, for our clients, and for our employees.