[00:00:00] Cheryl Broom: All right, Mike, thank you so much for joining me today. [00:00:03] Mike Toguchi: Thanks. I'm really excited to be here. [00:00:05] Cheryl Broom: so you work with colleges and universities across the country, and what are some of the biggest operational or technological challenges that they're facing right now? [00:00:16] Mike Toguchi: Well, at a macro level, you have everything going on budget-wise. And that's, there's a lot of layers to that. Uh, you have federal funding that's been pulled, research grants, you know, postdoctoral programs that are all sort of collapsing. You have state budgets that are equally strained. And so a lot of folks are really looking to do less with more. [00:00:36] Mike Toguchi: A lot of programs and departments are, they've lost they've lost staff and they're, don't have the budget to replace them. So they have you know, they have pressure there as well. And maybe the, the more longer term view is just, students are, you know, they're becoming more scarce. There's more competition for them. [00:00:54] Mike Toguchi: Enrollment, numbers are kind of have a downward trend or trajectory, at least at this point. And they're, you know, look, looking to make sure the ROI and the value is there. so you have that, you have those top level economic pressures that exist. From a technological standpoint technology's always been difficult in higher ed just because it moves slower and you have so many different little, you know, fiefdoms and silos that exist. [00:01:19] Mike Toguchi: And so getting something enterprise level, it takes, you know, it takes a lot of time. Now you have a compounding, you know, AI complexity layered on top of that where, uh, it's more of a business environment where everything wants to go at a frenetic pace, which is not, it's not really conducive to the way higher education operates. [00:01:39] Mike Toguchi: And so you have e- extreme governance and policy problems where people are trying to figure out, you know, what's in use what are we able to, you know, what are the rules around it? Is our data secure? Are we opening ourselves up to litigation? And then, you know, and that's on top of all of the legacy platforms that have been put in place over the, the past five to 10 years that people are trying to deal with. [00:02:03] Mike Toguchi: So when you look at those and combine them together, it paints, you know, it paints a challenging picture the e - the economic, tech- technological and operational issues. [00:02:13] Cheryl Broom: I feel like technology often comes in as a solution to some of those problems. Like we found something that can save money. We found something that can help us with enrollment. We found something that can track the student journey and people on campus get really excited to purchase the technology or they might form our committee, do an RFP and they buy the technology. [00:02:33] Cheryl Broom: And then there's just this like complete lag in implementation. what do you, why is that? Why do you think that that's such a hard point for colleges? I, so many struggle to implement the technology initiatives that they put forward. [00:02:50] Mike Toguchi: Well, I wanna cut them a little break. It's, I think a lot of us are, it's a lot more excited to buy something than to build it and to keep it working. And so I think that's sort of natural. But yeah, I mean, again, it goes back to when you, you could buy something that's enterprise level and you're trying to implement across thousands of staff and, you know, and five figures worth of students there's great challenge. [00:03:13] Mike Toguchi: Again, if you're dealing with, burned out and staff that's, you know, maybe not fully, you know, not fully staffed the way you would like it to be, and they're dealing with their current, you know, their current obligations, their current job, their current tool set, and now they have something new to put in. [00:03:28] Mike Toguchi: The idea of the transformation, you know, sort of in air quotes, they, they have fatigue with it. They're like, "Oh, well, it's another year, another budget cycle, another tool." and then again, some of that becomes a leadership issue, not all the way up to the top of the dean and, you know, sort of the institution, board, regents, down to the managers and directors that are running these programs, like, are they, how are they selling this? [00:03:51] Mike Toguchi: Are they explaining this is how you've, this is how this will help you. This is how this will make your day better or easier. are they taking feedback? Are they, you know, do they have a cycle that allows them to, to understand if things aren't working? And, you know, do, do they provide, you know, sort of the inertia to then stick to it-ness to keep it going? [00:04:12] Mike Toguchi: Or is it like, "Hey, we've all, like, we've got to launch. We take the big pair of scissors and cut the ribbon," and then everyone just kind of goes back to the way things were before. And so there is a lot of the sort of, like, work culture where people are kind of strained and, and they're trying to do their best, but, there's just not really an en - an environment or ecosystem that allows them, sets them up for success, essentially, when there are new technology initiatives. [00:04:37] In higher education, marketing is often treated as the department that makes things look good. The campaign, the website, the email, the ad, but marketing is much bigger than that. Every message, phone call, form, handoff, and interaction teaches students something about whether your institution is ready to help them. [00:04:56] In her new book, Marketing is Mission Work, Gradcom CEO Cheryl Broom challenges college leaders, marketers, communicators, enrollment teams, and campus partners to think beyond campaigns and consider the entire student experience. Through practical lessons, real stories, and field notes you can use with your own team, Cheryl explores how colleges can communicate with more clarity, humanity, and purpose. [00:05:19] At its heart, Marketing is Mission Work is about aligning the promise you make with the experience you deliver, strengthening trust, and making the student journey easier to understand. Because marketing helps make the promise visible, your institution brings that promise to life. Get your copy of Marketing Is Mission Work today at gradcom.com/book. [00:05:41] Cheryl Broom: Yeah, that's funny that you said it's, it's more fun to buy something. It really is because it's like all the possibilities are there and it's exciting. But then it comes time, you, you get this thing, you get this technology and then it comes time to make it real. And, and I do see a lot of struggle with people being overloaded. [00:06:02] Cheryl Broom: I've seen a lot of technology being purchased and then nobody's put in charge of it. Like there's not a person to oversee it. And that I feel is not [00:06:14] Mike Toguchi: absolutely. There's, there's not, there's not ownership of it. There's no one championing it. And that ownership has to go again. It needs to go through not the im - the implement, you're buying it, that's fun. Implementing it, there's at least, like, the planning and again, the promise of what it will do. [00:06:31] Mike Toguchi: But that's when you start to, you know, you start to uncover things like, "Oh, we have 10 different workflows in these two departments," or, "Our data is completely incongruent across the systems, and we have to map it to a completely new system." So you invest all of this energy intensely to try and hit, you know, a launch deadline, and then you get there, and then people have to continue to use it. [00:06:55] Mike Toguchi: Sometimes it gets customized too much, sometimes it's not customized enough. And so yeah, there, there are some real challenges there in terms of having leadership that understands the way to you know, to kind of move it through the transformation process, but then actually get those, get those benefits. [00:07:12] Mike Toguchi: Like you said, people buy it and they're like, "Oh, this is, this is going to transform the way that we you know, track people through the life cycle. And, you know, when we're awarding our financial aid, we can use all these tools." But somebody has to own that. Somebody has to document it. Somebody has to create policies around it, and somebody has to be there to help the staff, to train them, help them use it, and kind of, you know, change their, their ways of doing things. [00:07:35] Cheryl Broom: Now your, you work with a lot of colleges and universities on, on technological in like implementation. What are some tips that you give to leadership on how to launch something successfully, how to get people excited and committed to it? [00:07:52] Mike Toguchi: Well, the first thing is not to talk about it like it's technology not to talk it like it's a, a platform or a tool because everyone has seen those. They know it's Salesforce, it's HubSpot, it's it's Copilot. When, when you start thinking of it in those terms that you're sort of going to have a challenge getting buy-in in the first place. [00:08:12] Mike Toguchi: And that buy-in is so critical, having people. It's not, not getting sort of short-term excitement. It's more them, again, them understanding how does this tie back to the mission of the university? How does it tie back to the r- roles and responsibilities that I have in my individual unit? And the message we usually have is, like, try, you know, you have to tie it back to giving people back their time, if we're talking about operations. [00:08:36] Mike Toguchi: Like, it has to be something that says, "You signed up to do this particular job, and it probably wasn't in your mind, like, when I was a little boy, I wanted to copy and paste something from one email into a spreadsheet and then into a..." No one wants to do that. And so they're looking for solutions that change the way they work, that say, "40% of your day can now be spent giving services to a student or helping somebody as opposed to whatever manual tasks or legacy platforms you were working in." [00:09:08] Mike Toguchi: So I think it's really about framing it around the idea of you know, this is a leadership challenge to provide good communication, to be transparent and accountable, and to give the, you know, sort of the guidance and support to the teams that have to implement this to understand how they can make it work for them, and how it's going to improve not only their lives, but also the students that they're there to serve. [00:09:31] Cheryl Broom: I love it because a lot of the, our listeners for this podcast are, are marketing directors, marketing leadership across colleges and universities. And what my takeaway, of course I always have my marketing lens on, but my big takeaway is you have to market this. Like you, you gotta market it. It's not just buying a new tool, but you have to market it. [00:09:54] Mike Toguchi: Yeah, it's absolutely right. Like, you can talk to your blue in the face about drip campaigns and what you're gonna do to track somebody as they're removing through the application and get them to the finish line and, you know, and how to, and how to convert them. And you can, you know, all of those things exist. [00:10:09] Mike Toguchi: You, you could use many kinds of different platforms, tools, and workflows to do that, but you have to really work with the staff to ensure, you know, to, again, to sell them on how this is going to work, how they can be effective, to understand, you know, collect good data and know when it, you know, what, what part of your implementation plan was successful, what part needs to be refined, what part should potentially be scrapped. [00:10:30] Mike Toguchi: And people are much, be much more receptive to change if they understand, like, "Oh, they listened to me. When we tried to do this, it didn't have the ROI that we expected, so we made some, you know, we adapted to it." And they'll feel like they're part of that decision-making process, even if it's really still ultimately a leadership call. [00:10:49] Mike Toguchi: But you're right, I'm 100% the m. There is, there is a marketing and sales aspect to you know, selling technology projects as something that is, you know, it's, again, it's more of a workflow project. It's an operational transformation, and it's something that is designed to give people their time back to make real impact, not, you know, be in the muck. [00:11:09] Cheryl Broom: Speaking of, of data and marketing, one of the things that a lot of marketing teams that we work with often complain about is tension with the IT department during implementation. And, and actually just recently, you know, we, we do pixel codes for digital marketing to track what people are doing on the site after they come in through different ads to see if the ads are working. [00:11:35] Cheryl Broom: And, and IT wouldn't allow the pixel on the website at all, even after multiple meetings and assurances, it was just a hard no. How do you bridge those gaps, especially when I feel like there's sometimes two different languages being spoken? How, how do you get those teams to work together more fluidly? [00:11:56] Mike Toguchi: Well, you got to find the Venn diagram of, you know, the IT folks and the marketing team. And th- there are. They should have, again, they're common goals there, right? Like, we. Everybody wants this implementation to be successful. Everyone understands that you need certain data in order for. You know, that's the business intelligence that leadership is craving in order to understand what is working and what isn't. [00:12:18] Mike Toguchi: And we always start just from, you know, a, a place of trust where it's like, "Hey, you know, our organization is SOC two certified. We understand the challenges, you know, you have. We, we, we work in this space. We know you've got a million things coming at you, everything from little help desk requests to people that don't know how to reboot their computer, all the way up to this enterprise level piece where the university's endowment could be at stake if somebody, you know, breaches a certain database. [00:12:47] Mike Toguchi: So it, it's, it's also the sales marketing and understanding of their place in this and figuring out a solution like if, if this doesn't work, can you help us understand what does? Like, this is the data that we need. We can put in practice secure, you know, secure things. How can we get this? So what, what can we work with? [00:13:07] Mike Toguchi: And so, it's not always going to be successful or easy, but you know, we've had, we've had good luck making allies and, you know, with, with IT folks and, and helping, again, helping bridge the gap between our. We're working with a department or a program or a director and a team that they don't know that, you know, the IT folks are just a resource to them as well. [00:13:27] Mike Toguchi: And so we're, we're trying to, you know, create a team attitude for everybody at the university. [00:13:33] Cheryl Broom: Yeah, and I think part of that team attitude is making sure e- everybody does understand what the goal is. And, and you had said that, like, you know, the goal is to have the information to be able to make the decisions that will impact the, the college and the university and students. And being on that same page around the goal gets people to cooperate, I think, and to understand why it's important. [00:13:56] Mike Toguchi: Well, and I, I think it's also. I, I mean, from. Speaking from, from our side of things, like, we're, we wanna be as brutally efficient as possible and effective, of course. But a, a lot of it is, you know, if you're looking at it from the view of IT, like, they, again, they have. Those departments have tens of hundreds of millions of requests that they're dealing with. [00:14:16] Mike Toguchi: The faster and more quickly you can give them a good solution, and if the solution doesn't work for whatever reason, help create a problem solve and let them check it off, you know, whether it's a ticket or however they're treating it, I think they just want things off their plate so they can go to the next of their many fires to put out. [00:14:34] Mike Toguchi: And so, having that approach where you're like, w- we're, we're on the same team, we're working toward the same goal, we've offered something we will do, we will olive branch with, like, we will help you test, we will help you document, whatever it is that you need, that's the approach that we'll take, and then just help us get this so you can move on and we can move on. [00:14:53] Cheryl Broom: Okay. Well, great advice about working with IT departments. And I wanna take a quick break and listen to our sponsor, but f - I want you to think about while we're taking the break AI, because that's what I wanna talk about next. We clearly, like, the IT struggle, the implementational struggle at colleges has been going on for as long as I've been, 25 years, twice as long as me, probably forever. [00:15:19] Cheryl Broom: But now we have this brand new component on top of it that's creating challenges and definitely wanna get your take on that. So hold on one second and we'll be right back. [00:15:28] Cheryl Broom: How do higher education decision makers find the right solution when technology evolves at light speed? Well, we usually start with our network. EdTech Connect is the network that's democratizing the higher ed technology conversation. EdTech Connect is free, so anyone with a. Edu email address can sign up and list the software and services they use in their role at their school. [00:15:56] Cheryl Broom: Once you're in, you can find out what solutions similar schools are doing all over the country. Whether you're looking to find a hot new AI tool or maybe learn options you have to upgrade your campus search engine, or even get to your short list of marketing solution vendors, EdTech Connect is the place to go. [00:16:16] Cheryl Broom: So visit edtechconnect.com and set up your free profile to get a pulse for what's happening with higher ed technology today. [00:16:27] Cheryl Broom: All right. So before the break we were talking about leadership and how to work more effectively with IT especially creating shared visions and making sure that you're coming with requests and helping and not just demanding. [00:16:44] Cheryl Broom: And I know that your company is doing a lot of work with AI and automation. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the conversations that you've been hearing when you're out working with colleges and universities on this. [00:16:58] Mike Toguchi: Yeah, it's interesting. It's sort of been like the stock market where everyone was kind of dipping their toe in in 2025 and Q4, and then things just went crazy accelerated in Q1 of this year. Everyone was trying to figure out how quickly they can adopt it, you know, what, what can we use this for? [00:17:17] Mike Toguchi: Our, you know, the fears of job loss were accelerated and, you know, now there's an. Now we're in sort of another little mild downswing of people being like, "Hey, this, you know, the cost of agents and tokens and things like that are, is fairly outrageous. Like, is, is this something that is really, like, a viable long-term, long-term strategy for us?" [00:17:37] Mike Toguchi: I mean, that said, I think everyone is just trying to figure out the best balance. Again, from a university side it's harder than what a bu. You know, for us as a business, we can experiment and do whatever we want. I mean, we still have you know, security protocols and governance and policy that we need to put in place, but it's a lot easier than a university and the obligations they have. [00:17:55] Mike Toguchi: So as we talk to folks, everyone is trying to figure out, you know, how do we do things in a secure fashion? How do we respect student privacy? Because there's so many tools and there's such excitement about what those things could mean and do and perform for them, but everyone is, you know, you're talking about FERPA, HIPAA, a lot of you know, can you use even the data to train a model t - in order to, to accomplish those things? [00:18:20] Mike Toguchi: And so, you know, we work with a lot of disability centers and folks that are providing accessible services across campuses, and you start thinking about, "Oh, can they can they use a note taker to record a session? Can they summarize those notes? Can they help you know, automatically suggest potential accommodations that are available? [00:18:40] Mike Toguchi: Could they match them to a specialist that could provide services?" and so on and so forth. There's, you know, there's sort of an unlimited potential for those types of things. But again, you, you know, you're talking about the student's personal information, you know, private health information, and so there are a lot of challenges just in terms of, of working through that. [00:18:59] Mike Toguchi: So I think there's, there's the idea of the top level where IT departments are trying to staple enterprise level AI on, like, "Hey, we all have, you know, we, we're a Google campus, so we're going to use Gemini, we're a Microsoft campus, we're going to use Copilot." And then they're more like, and that's sort of what I would view as, like, the federal government version of higher ed. [00:19:20] Mike Toguchi: It's the experimentation in what I would call the states, like, the federalism part of these individual departments that they are the ones with the, like, the laboratories where they're saying, like, "Here's the, here's the flexibility and budget that we have. What are we able to execute on? Like, so from an enrollment standpoint, can we, if we have 20% of people that are admitted and we have X amount of scholarship dollars, can we train things to offer its, offer the money strategically to try and target those that we think are much more likely to accept?" [00:19:52] Mike Toguchi: So there's all sorts of interesting applications that you can, you can put in place. It's just, it, it's going to be a challenge as people go through and try and look at the budget versus the rules, policy, and governance versus, like, again, that institutional momentum where it's like, this is super high-tech stuff where you may be dealing with a very old CRM or student info, like, a database, you know, it could be an old banner or PeopleSoft, and trying to tie all those things together and find a way to actually get value, get ROI is not gonna be the easiest in the world. [00:20:25] Mike Toguchi: It's gonna be a while before we figure out exactly how to balance that. [00:20:28] Cheryl Broom: I was actually just reading, a case study on Georgia State University that's done some amazing things with technology and prediction. And I hadn't considered that they're probably using AI, but one of the things that they had done was they had found that a lot of their students who were stopping out were stomping out over, over amounts of money that were less than $1,500. [00:20:53] Cheryl Broom: So not completing college because of a small amount of money missing. And they started flagging students who had, like, a certain amount of time left that had these debts on their account, and then proactively offering them grants to help them close the gap. And their graduation rate, like, skyrocketed. So there's, like, a use of technology, and probably AI had an amazing return on investment. [00:21:22] Mike Toguchi: Yeah, it's, it's crazy what you can accomplish, again, if you have the, if you've got good leadership and you've, you know, figured out a plan, I think that there's, there's a lot of ways that universities might be able to solve some of these. I think the way people were looking, students may have been looking at it a year or two ago and saying, like, "We know more about AI than certainly the, you know, the staff that we're working with, the teachers. [00:21:45] Mike Toguchi: I think that that's, that gap is closing now." and so students may be drawn back in saying, like, "Oh, well, there is, there is an actual, you know, plan, policy, use cases, and, you know, we're seeing the benefits of it." And that's where, you know, we tie back to the idea of operationalizing transformation, is those operations, that is the student experience. [00:22:07] Mike Toguchi: And, like, that's what we're looking at, is how do you create a strategy that is, you know, that has good leadership? Is it a scalable strategy that can be used not just in, like, one little place, but across different parts of the, of the campus? And then does that op - do those operations lead to better and fa - better quality service, like, faster service, more efficient workflows that aren't, you know, the old version of, like, take this paper over to this office and have it signed? [00:22:36] Mike Toguchi: No, wait, go get this stamped. And that kind of got replaced by, send that PDF to this office. So it, the, you know, what you're trying to do is use technology to make people more efficient so that you, it essentially trickles down to that student experience so that they be - they get all of the positive effects and then that's that goal and that mission, that shared vision that you want people to be promoting. [00:23:00] Cheryl Broom: And how exactly does Tectonic come in and help colleges and universities with this? Let's say maybe there's something with accessibility that we need to work on. Where would [00:23:09] Mike Toguchi: Yeah. Well, well, as it relates to accessibility, we would, um, you know, find a university's disability center and you know, kind of evaluate their workflow. How are they, how are their case managers or specialists working with students? where are they running into challenges with accommodations, which have exploded, I mean, like, 40, 50% greater than they were before. [00:23:30] Mike Toguchi: think there was a study at Stanford that, like, you know, I don't know, four and five s - four out of every five students had some level of accommodation you know, whether it was a physical disability or some other. And so, you know, kind of work to, to break down w- where are things going slowly? Like, is there, is there, in the handoff from the specialist, is there a problem there? [00:23:49] Mike Toguchi: Are the faculty frustrated with their electronic process in terms of trying to confirm these things or, you know, provide information? So just evaluating each audience and each user and understanding w- where they're running into bottlenecks, where there's frustration, where there could be efficiencies added in, and where there could be automation. [00:24:08] Mike Toguchi: Like, if you're talking about AI, like, generative AI if you have to have an, a letter of accommodation, do, could AI just write this for you? If not, you know, or can you automate the sending of it just so that at least there's a nice audit trail you've covered yourself for, you know, from a liability standpoint? [00:24:27] Mike Toguchi: So all of those, all of those are creating, looking at it from a strategy standpoint and, and, you know, an operational standpoint to create some la- layer of transformation, [00:24:37] Cheryl Broom: I love how you start the journey by asking a lot of questions. I mean, I, I bet you, do you get colleges and universities come in that think that they already figured out what's wrong? And do you have to, like, take a step back and be like, "Let's ask some questions first." [00:24:52] Mike Toguchi: Yeah, I mean, that's the, the fastest way to fail is people that have pre-selected a tool or platform or technology and said, "I want you to come do. Can you, can you come Salesforce us?" Then, you know, that's not, that's not strategy, that's not really transformation. You know, kind of going back to the accessibility, and this is not, doesn't have to be direct with disability centers, really any university in any kind of program or platform that we would help people work on. [00:25:20] Mike Toguchi: We wanna find the connection points for departmental collaboration. Like, I think that's one of the weakest parts of you know, the university ecosystem, is that you could have two programs within the same department, same dean, but they have built their own, like, individual little workflows, and that means you have different sets of data, and you don't really have natural collaboration points for the staff. [00:25:46] Mike Toguchi: So, going back to the disability center example, you may have housing and dining, parking or a testing center. All three of those kinds of academic units have accommodations, but if all, if everybody's got their own way of handling it, like, the student, that's where the student gets a di - they could have a different experience. [00:26:05] Mike Toguchi: They don't have anything that's unified. They don't. It's inefficient because they have to go to four different places. So we're looking for things like that where you can say, "Oh, well, can you not only implement this, but can you, can you scale it across these other departments so that the student, the faculty, and the staff all get the same experience?" [00:26:23] Cheryl Broom: This is such a great point. I actually have just developed a new, keynote speech that deals with the, how colleges and universities need to start acting like a product and not like a service. And a, and a true product is an entire experience from the beginning to the end. Like when you market a product, everything is in unison from the packaging to how you interact with somebody at the call center. [00:26:51] Cheryl Broom: And I think that what you're describing is one of higher education's biggest challenges is it's so big and siloed that the student experience can be so different from one department to another. And everybody's offering all these services, but they're not offering an entire unified experience for students. [00:27:13] Cheryl Broom: And I think today, you know, s - as you mentioned before, students are questioning the higher, the value of higher ed more than ever before. And I think that you're really showing how technology can impact, like, the student experience and, and it can impact per - the perception of value. [00:27:30] Mike Toguchi: That's the hope, for sure. [00:27:32] Cheryl Broom: Yeah, for sure. [00:27:33] Mike Toguchi: And also, just, just to make the, just to make the staff, you know, lessen the pressure on, on staff. I mean, that's where they right, many will rightly have the attitude, "Well, you know, I, I have so much on my plate right now. How can I possibly learn something new, take on something new, and it's just faster for me to do it the way that I'm doing it now than to onboard somebody else or to onboard a new way of doing things?" [00:27:58] Mike Toguchi: And so, I think that, that ties back to our, you have to, you know, tie the communication to them, give them the vision, and give them the bandwidth to, you know, figure out what's gonna work and what isn't so that they don't feel like the, you know, it's just more pressure, just another project that they have to take on. [00:28:15] Cheryl Broom: Yeah. I think I've told this story on the podcast before, but I had an review once with my college president when I worked at a college and he asked if I could change one thing about my job, what would I change? And I said, "I would like to have more time to just do strategic thinking." And he laughed and he said, "You're never gonna get that." And I was so disappointed because I'm like, "I'm just running. Like I can't make improvements or think about how things are working because it's just from one thing to the next, to the next, to the next." So I'm hearing it from you, give your staff time. [00:28:56] Mike Toguchi: G, yeah, well, uh, the, the, the way we thought about it, you know, for, for a while, especially with AI, is you give people, give people room to fail, to experiment and to fail, that failure is an okay part of this because this is such new technology. I think we've advanced a little. I mean, the concept is still true. [00:29:13] Mike Toguchi: Like, if somebody is trying something new and trying to figure out what can work, like, you can't assume 100% success especially with things that are AI related. Moved a little bit past that into, like, wanting to, you know, find concrete steps that are that are actionable and successful, that can start bridging fragmented workflows and, and really showing operational success. [00:29:35] Mike Toguchi: But it, the, conceptually, you still need to give people that space to do the strategic thinking, to do the testing, to figure out, you know, give you, give you the feedback, say, you know, "Hey, we worked on this and we were able to solve this workflow issue. We weren't able to solve this one." And, you know, you can kind of go back to the drawing board on it. [00:29:52] Cheryl Broom: Well, as we wrap up our conversation for anybody listening that's like, "Oh my gosh, all of these points are so true but I don't even know where to start." What advice would you give? [00:30:03] Mike Toguchi: I mean, we like to start both small and big. Again, when, when I started this conversation, I said that there's the macro level, and then you kind of drill down. And if somebody is overwhelmed or, you know, thinking, "I don't know where to start," or even, you know, the same, I'm in the same, I've been in the same spot you've been in where, like, "I know I could figure this out if I just had a little bit of time to breathe and think, but, you know, you're not necessarily afforded that." [00:30:27] Mike Toguchi: I would say both you know, jot things down thinking big and thinking small. The thinking big is, what does constitute, you know, operational transformation? What are the ways that you could improve, you know, staff quality of life, make them more efficient? What are the ways you could improve student experience? [00:30:46] Mike Toguchi: Like, what, what are the parts of the, uh, of the mission that you are supposed to affect or impact, and how can you reach those goals? Not thinking about it from a technology standpoint, thinking about it more from you know, the person, a person-centric standpoint. And then the drill down part is more you know, pick one workflow, pick one problem that you could potentially solve. [00:31:06] Mike Toguchi: It doesn't have to be with AI, it could be with some other, you know, platform or just some other way of kind of, again, finding workflows that aren't working well, finding parts of you know, university departments that aren't collaborating, aren't connected. Pick one thing and, and try and solve that and, you know, kind of try and take your top level view and, and solve those things one at a time. [00:31:27] Cheryl Broom: Great. Well, it's been such a pleasure talking to you. If people wanna learn more about you, where can they go? [00:31:34] Mike Toguchi: I'm of, I'm on LinkedIn. You can find Mike Taguchi. There's not a lot of Tegucis floating around. My, our company is Tectonic, so our, and our web- website is teamtectonic.com. You can find out about our, about the Orchestrate platform, which is our workflow and application system. Orchestrate AMS is the, the part of the system that is designed specifically for disability centers. [00:31:57] Mike Toguchi: And we have a whole host of other services that we use at in higher education for marketing and branding to you know, to design and custom software. And so we can really help with a lot of different problems. We're good at speaking the language of the IT folks while creating the strategy for transformation and then, you know, just sort of looking specifically at operational efficiency. [00:32:18] Mike Toguchi: So, we're there if you, if you need us and happy to connect with anyone, even if you just have questions. It doesn't, doesn't have to be a, you know, a business situation. Be happy to try and, if you wanna reach out I'd love to chat with [00:32:29] Cheryl Broom: Okay. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. [00:32:32] Mike Toguchi: Well, thanks, Cheryl. This been great. Great conversation. Thanks so much.