How XPLANE expanded a successful consultancy business by creating an academy
Client: XPLANE
Type: Design & Strategy Consultancy
Location: Portland, OR
Creating something new isn’t easy, especially when you’re already busy with existing client work. But XPLANE had a bigger vision for themselves to establish an entirely new business model to augment their client service delivery.
XPLANE is a design and strategy consultancy in Portland, Oregon. They help organizations transform by designing and aligning Vision & Strategy, People, Process, Tools and Activation.
Participants loved the experience and content of XPLANE’s courses, but the process of creating and delivering the courses was laborious and inconsistent.
Photo credit: Cristinia Morillo on pexels.com
ABOUT XPLANE
XPLANE exists to accelerate positive change for organizations, their people, and the world. Whether launching a new vision and strategy or embedding new ways of working, they help teams improve understanding and adoption by engaging people with communications, learning programs, and tools that accelerate adoption and change.
Envisioning a bigger impact.
With more than 30 years of exceptional design and strategy consulting under their belt, XPLANE wanted to expand their impact and diversify their revenue sources, thus providing increased stability for their own business in a rapidly changing world.
For years, XPLANE had nurtured a growing community of enthusiasts who loved XPLANE’s visual and personable approach to solving big, meaningful challenges. Clients routinely asked how they could learn to do things “the XPLANE way”.
So Aric Wood, the CEO of XPLANE, engaged Zahler Design to support and guide his team to begin building an academy for professional learners. It was important to him that the academy was created using the same human-centered and collaborative principles that define their client engagements.
Aric introduced Kimberly to the rest of the core project team:
Nancy, the Senior Program and Product Manager and Director of Studio X (who also still delivered client consulting services)
Tim, the Creative Director as well as an instructor, subject matter expert, and client visual facilitator extraordinaire
Erika, the Marketing Manager responsible for drawing awareness to learning products and other client services
Almost immediately, it was obvious that the breadth of responsibilities each carried could affect the project timeline. Delivering client services still took priority to bring in revenue, despite the organization’s emphasis on creating this new business model.
In the past, creating new courses could take up to a year because of the demands on project members’ time. Subject Matter Experts could get sidetracked by deep details, forgetting where novice learners were starting and leaving them confused. And without a formally defined curriculum and standard, course delivery varied from cohort to cohort and instructor to instructor.
Our goal together was to smooth the process so instructors and subject matter experts could engage efficiently with a project, harnessing their expertise while making the course development process predictable and shorter.
Get to know each other
Flagship course curriculum design.
Beginning in early 2021, Zahler Design introduced the team to a structured process for designing course experiences, creating curriculum, and documenting instructor notes to train additional instructors in course delivery.
It’s going great, let’s do more!
Build out a robust multi-year academy strategy.
Together, we developed Learner Personas and Aspirational Journeys; an XPLANE Competency Model; developed shared product definitions, goals, and marketing funnel for year-round awareness; designed an intentional process for Development Cycle Planning; mapped product and course topics and development roadmap; tested hypotheses with potential customers; and established Business Metrics.
Prepare to sell and systematize
Harness technology to sell and engage.
Basecamp had worked great as a way to test early courses and prove the business case, but it wasn’t going to cut it in the long run. So we evaluated and selected Thinkific, a Learning Management System (LMS) we set up with some light automation to create an interconnected system managing email campaigns, learner profiles, course management, and e-commerce.
Using the new LMS trimmed course delivery time by about 20 hours for the flagship multi-day course offering.
Our team just got bigger
Acquisition, transition, and shared definitions.
At the end of 2022, XPLANE was acquired by TiER1 Solutions, a global people-centered consultancy. The team’s focus therefore shifted in 2023 to navigate the business transition and define the new path forward. We brought the XPLANE and TiER1 Performance Institute teams together to map out a combined academy strategy that would simplify the back-end business processes, enable brand-specific product development, and ensure every experience and product was of the highest consistency and quality possible.