Every consulting firm says they’re different. We get it. We’ve sat across the table from enough vendors to know that “different” usually means a new logo on the same PowerPoint template. So instead of asking you to take our word for it, we’re going to make sure the math is mathing for you.
A triangle is one of the strongest shapes there is. Push on it from any direction, and it holds its form, because no single point is carrying the weight alone. That’s not a metaphor we bolted on after picking a name we liked. It’s the actual model behind Three Point Consulting: three founders, three different backgrounds, one firm built so no single perspective has to hold up the whole thing by itself.
Why we started this
We met working together inside a higher education institution, in the rooms where marketing, enrollment, finance, facilities, and academic priorities were all technically working toward the same goal and yet, still tripping over each other. If you work in higher ed, you already know this problem. It’s not that your institution lacks good ideas. It’s that strategy gets built in one office, budget gets decided in another, and enrollment and marketing both find out after the fact.
Higher education is starting to recognize (maybe?) that these aren’t separate problems that happen to share a campus. They’re one system. The institutions that are getting ahead of this are the ones treating strategic priorities through an enterprise risk lens, connecting the dots instead of solving each department’s version of the problem in isolation. Most institutions know this shift is coming. Very few have the bandwidth, or the outside perspective, to actually act on it while also running the place day to day.
That’s the gap we built Three Point Consulting to work in.
What we actually do
We’re a higher education consulting firm focused on connecting strategy, marketing, and analytics across the whole institution, not just inside one department’s walls. In practice, that means:
Strategic planning and enterprise risk management. Structured assessments and full strategic plans that look at how your priorities connect across the enterprise, not just how they look on their own.
Higher education marketing consulting. Brand positioning, audience segmentation, channel strategy, and crisis communications, built by people who have actually run a university marketing enterprise, not just studied one from the outside.
Higher education analytics and data services. Enrollment forecasting, budget modeling, and marketing performance analysis that tie spend and strategy to real outcomes, so your decisions are backed by data instead of gut instinct and whoever spoke last in the meeting.
Executive coaching and leadership development. Because frameworks don’t implement themselves. Leaders do. We build the capability to carry the work forward long after we’re gone.
We didn’t pick our services at random. Between the three of us, we’ve directed a university’s full marketing enterprise and a $1.4 million media investment, led presidential task forces under 30-day mandates, rebuilt institutional websites from strategy through launch, created segmentation marketing, built analytical calculators to predict next year’s enrollment, and led crisis communications work when the stakes were higher than ever. We’ve been the institutional leaders inside the exact rooms we now walk into as outside partners. We know what a good plan looks like, and we know what happens to a good plan when nobody builds the structure to hold it up.
What we’re actually trying to do here
Here’s the part that’s easy to say and harder to mean: we’re not in this to sell you a binder. We’re not interested in a strategic plan that looks great in a board meeting and gathers dust by spring. Our whole model is built around leaving institutions stronger and more capable than when we met them, with frameworks and leadership capacity that outlast the engagement itself. If you still need us in three years, we didn’t do our job.
And we’ll be straight with you, because higher ed has enough jargon already. We’re going to tell you what we actually see, not what’s easiest to hear.
Why this matters beyond the org chart
It would be easy to talk about this purely in terms of enrollment funnels, budget models, and brand positioning. Those things matter, and we’re good at them. But none of that is really the point.
Every strategic plan that actually holds together, every budget model that gives leadership room to invest instead of just cut, every marketing strategy that reaches the right student at the right moment, all of it comes back to the same thing: institutions that are aligned can focus on their actual mission instead of putting out fires between departments. And a college or university’s actual mission is students. The ones sitting in your classrooms right now who are going to run companies, teach classrooms of their own, cure illnesses, build things, and generally change the world in ways none of us can fully predict yet.
We can’t teach your students. That’s not our lane, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise. But we can help make sure the institution around them is built to support that work instead of quietly getting in its own way. That’s the whole solution we’re offering with this firm.
Where we go from here
We don’t have twenty years of case studies to point to yet, and we’re not going to pretend we do. What we have is direct, in-the-room experience, a model built to give you more than one perspective on every problem, and a genuine belief that higher education is worth fighting for right now.
If your institution is feeling the strain of strategy, marketing, enrollment, and operations all pulling in slightly different directions, that’s exactly the conversation we want to have. Reach out. Let’s talk about what alignment could actually look like for you.
Three points. One solution. Let’s build something that holds.
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