RecRe Roundtable: Lillian Stott of Saxbys
I’m so excited to welcome our next guest of the RecRe Roundtable, Lillian Stott. I first got to know Lillian during her time at NACAS and I have been fortunate enough to collaborate with her through her role at the Director of Partnerships at Saxbys. She recently asked me to address her group of Saxbys “student CEOs.” This experience reinspired myself and my team at RecRe to prioritize listening to and empowering students, especially since our business impacts their daily campus life.
Griffin Harrington:
Thank you everyone, for joining another episode of the RecRe Roundtable. I’m very excited about this week’s episode. Just like we’ve outlined in the past, the RecRe Roundtable showcases the wide view of Higher Ed from campuses to vendors to the associations. Today, we’ve got Lillian Stott who has seen a lot of those avenues and been a really big part of one association that lives really near and dear to the RecRe story. I met Lillian and got to know her a little bit from her time at NACAS. She had a couple different roles and got all the way up into the C-Suite by the end of it. And now we’ve been able to collaborate a little bit as she’s the Director of Partnerships at Saxbys. I actually got to speak to one of the big groups that Saxbys does a couple weeks ago and brought Lillian and I back together to collaborate. Lillian, can you just give us a little bit about what you do now, and after what you do now, how did you get there? Give us the brief timeline on who you are.
Lillian Stott:
Great question, and not a short answer either. I am currently Director of Partnerships at Saxbys. It is an amazing organization that partners with colleges and universities to bring our experiential learning platform to campuses. We do experiential learning by way of cafes. We partner with the school to bring a great cafe to the campus serving great coffee and great food but it’s completely student-led everything from the student CEO, who’s running the cafe to the team lead supporting them to the rest of the student team. It’s 100% students. And we partner with the school to ensure that those students are getting academic credit for their experience. They have full responsibility from profit and loss to leading, developing the team, and community engagement with the campus community. It’s really amazing and true life experiential learning that these students are getting at 19-22 years old. I landed here from a career adjacent to higher education working primarily with the National Association of College Auxiliary Services, NACAS, and spent about 10 years there. I actually started in a role at the time that was focused on community colleges, so I got a lot of experience with an organization called Community College Business Officers, working with CFOs at those colleges and then transitioned to a role that was more focused on college and university auxiliary services and then had a number of roles and positions from there. I kind of landed on it through and internship through my undergraduate experience at the University of Virginia. They had this great program. I think it’s still running where they partner students who want to have real life experience where the student would get matched with a local organization and local business based on their interests and what they wanted to spend their time doing in their career. They also had a classroom component where we learned about organizational leadership and psychology and other topics like that to put some theory to practice and got some real world experience as well. I was a classics major, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I listed some general interest in event planning, higher education, and business and it kind of was a perfect fit of all of those things.
Griffin Harrington:
Can you describe a little bit more about what the goal is of that program and what some of the success stories are out of that student CEO program.
Lillian Stott:
Yeah, absolutely. So the goal is certainly to prepare really strong leaders and business people. Regardless of your major, career path, business skills, leadership skills and management skills. It’s all applicable, no matter what path you choose. The goal is to really prepare the next generation of leaders in that way. It’s exceptionally great for anyone who wants to be an entrepreneur or lead a business. By any means we have nurses who go through the program. We have marketing majors, english majors, business majors, you name it. There is a really diverse array of interests and majors and career paths that these students go into. One of my favorite success stories is that the Harvard Business Review did a study recently on average for college graduates entering the workforce after college graduation they get a leadership role within seven years after graduation. We’ve started tracking our student CEO alumni outcomes. At this point we’re over 130 student CEO alumni, we’ve tracked where they are, what they’re doing and on average Saxbys student CEO alumni reach leadership roles within one year of graduation, so it’s really impressive. You’re cutting that time, by a lot. That’s one of my favorite stats to share. It’s really great to hear personal stories from student CEOs as well. Folks have decided to change what their career path looks like. Or even, one student CEO was telling me that they are a finance major, they’re planning to go into finance but they’re finding that really what motivates them personally is building a successful team, helping coach people through challenges and difficult situations and that’s what is personally driving them in their day-to-day work. I think that’s so incredibly mature to know that at 21-22 when your graduating. It’s also really healthy to have that outlook on, no matter what I do in my career, this is what guides me and motivates me. It’s almost as if it’s like a guiding principle or value for that individual and you hear a lot of those stories who are students CEO’s, who go on and graduate and find their way based on this program and things that they learn from it.
Griffin Harrington:
Yeah. I mean it just seems like such an incredible program and getting to hear from the Saxbys CEO talk about it as well, it’s a powerful message and powerful program so I’m excited to follow along. One of the things that has come out of this series is getting to meet such a wide variety of people and understand what brought and what keeps people in Higher Ed. You mentioned how you spent a decade inside of associations, specifically NACAS, that were helping improve and push the whole field forward. When you had a chance to go elsewhere, why did you stay in Higher Ed? What made you want to work with a vendor and a service provider that also worked with Higher Ed providers primarily?
Lillian Stott:
Higher Ed really it just sucks you in and pulls you in and it’s an amazing group of people. I would say it’s probably the people at the end of the day that motivated me and encouraged me to stay, indirectly. I think it’s natural saying that coming out of an association job, right. It’s all about the people in the connections and the networking and connecting the right people in the right places. But I will say, when I was thinking about my next step, I was with NACAS for so long, I was like what direction do I want to go? I knew I wanted a challenge and a different type of challenge. I thought about for a second leaving Higher Ed. I live in Charlottesville, so I was looking at jobs in Charlottesville that are not connected to Higher Ed. I did seriously think about it, and what ultimately brought it back was there was this turning point where I was actually offered a job outside of Higher Ed and it was a great job, there were so many good things about it. I ended up turning it down because It wasn’t speaking to me, it wasn’t resonating with me. And I think at the end of the day it’s because in Higher ed, there’s a connection to mission and purpose no matter who you’re working with. So at the college and university, no matter what department, they might have slightly different priorities or different topics that they’re focused on, but really, at the end of the day, it’s about making the best student experience. It’s graduating the best leaders for tomorrow, the best people for tomorrow. It’s, this is kind of a tangent, but I think it’s worth saying, I really like the University of Virginia strategic plan. I read it recently. I’m a graduate from there.
Griffin Harrington:
It’s a little bit of light reading, yeah.
Lillian Stott:
Yea, I think there’s a lot of great, strategic plans out there and there’s probably a lot that share something similar to this, but what resonated me a lot with UVA’s is that, the whole plan is focused around being a great school but also being a good school, doing good things. So what is the greater purpose of greatness and excellence? It’s doing good. It’s making sure that you’re producing and preparing, really strong graduates that are thinking about their community and thinking about their impact on the world, doing great things when they graduate. It’s about the community relationships with the local town or the local government or whatever that looks like for the university. It’s about ensuring that you’re a good employer, making sure that you’re thinking of your staff, team, faculty, administrators, service providers, frontline service workers, thinking holistically about being good and doing good as well as being great.
Fast forward, and I will say all very similar themes brought me to Saxbys as an organization as well. The mission is to make life better and we’re doing that through preparing these students to do amazing things, once they graduate preparing them for real life experiences, giving them so many tools and resources and a cohort to really go through this experience with. It’s a mission driven organization that really supports Higher Ed’s mission as well as our own mission as well. Very mission aligned. And then the people are just great. They all care and are very collaborative.
Griffin Harrington:
That is such a perfect answer because I was gonna get there. I need to read this strategic plan because it’s exactly what we’re trying to do. You had a decade at NACAS, where you got to see thousands, maybe high hundreds of thousands of schools and interact with the professionals that lead those organizations. Then you probably got to work with hundreds of vendors and service providers that came in to serve those Higher Ed institutions. There are lots of companies that are great but what are ways that companies can be good when serving Higher Ed institutions, like you mentioned, how the school was trying to be good but selfishly, how can companies be good when trying to service Higer Ed institutions outside of being great with their actual service?
Lillian Stott:
Yeah, that’s a great question. A lot of it comes down to listening, being empathetic to what the leadership of the campus is going through, what the student experience is, thinking beyond just dollars and cents. Obviously, those are all important. It keeps the lights on for all of us, but really thinking about what will provide the best experience for the students and what will also provide the best experience for the teams involved in supporting those students and asking questions, listening, hearing people. I think a lot of the time it’s so easy to make assumptions. I’m guilty of this. Making assumptions and just jumping to a conclusion on why someone’s thinking something.
Griffin Harrington:
It’s natural. Yeah.
Lillian Stott:
Yeah, and so it’s just pausing and really thinking and asking and reflecting with people around what the goals are, what they’re looking to do and how you can be solution oriented with that. That’s an example of doing good and being good in partnership with the school. I would say that’s probably the most important piece.
Griffin Harrington:
That’s helpful, one of the reasons that I mentioned that NACAS holds such an important part of our history, NACAS in Atlantic City in 2021, was the first time that RecRe announced ourselves to the industry and ever since then NACAS has been such an important part of our growth. I was a photographer for NACAS for a couple years before we started RecRe. So, I was able to get to know the community before figuring out a way to serve the community. To that, if you were giving some advice or some clarity and some kind of behind the scenes insight into how either associates or Higher Ed professionals and service provider professionals can interact with each other better, and get to know the Higher Ed industry as a whole, NACAS is obviously a great way to do it, but if you were to give other little tips or tricks about how to get to know more about what’s available in the industry, how to dive in, how to learn more, where would you tell someone to go to get those resources?
Lillian Stott:
I would say associations are a great start. Conferences and events are a really great natural way to get involved in a lot of those impromptu conversations there and connections happen there where you can just be authentic and just talk it out with someone and you can learn so much based on what other people are going through or spiraling from one quick question into a really deep long conversation. You learn a lot in those events, but I think too, thinking about younger professionals that might not have, or really anyone these days, who might not have a big budget to travel all the time or a lot of time, I would say there’s also a lot that associations offer that companies can participate in.
Webinars or white papers or reading their publications or journals, just staying connected in every way you can definitely helps stay connected within the university professionals as well as just staying up to date on the industry and what’s going on. There’s a lot of other publications out there like the Chronicle of Higher Ed. It’s always good to keep an eye out on those, where you learn a lot about the bigger picture and what’s happening in higher education.
I would say too, mentorship is really important, it doesn’t have to be overly formalized, it doesn’t have to be like “you are my mentor and I’m gonna talk to you every day,” but just finding one, two, three people it doesn’t even have to be just one person. A small couple of people that you can really rely on to be honest with you, share their guidance and be a thought partner to you if you’re stuck on something. I will say too that it doesn’t necessarily have to be if I’m a business partner, it doesn’t have to be another business partner. If I’m a school, it doesn’t have to be another school colleague, it can be and that can help a lot. But, I would say, really anyone that you connect with that they are comfortable with. I think that’s really important in this day and age, but more than ever probably for saying up to date, staying current, and then just having, a really good outlet for conversation.
Griffin Harrington:
That’s awesome. I’m trying to get my team to subscribe to all those news sources to wrap around the industry a little bit. So you can see, not even in business services or auxiliaries or even student engagement, about what’s going on with the enrollment, what are all the topics that they’re talking about that are campus partners are talking about on a daily basis so that if it comes up in conversation, you know what’s going on. I try to go as deep on what’s going on the industry. I love trying to understand how the football team’s doing or to have something else because they’re excited about it, so I want to be excited about it and that’s a big part of it.
We end every roundtable with a question that I think I’m very interested to see where your head goes with this and I don’t want to give you too much set up but we’re very interested in trying to find ways to bring an innovative approach to the campus of tomorrow. I would love to hear from your perspective and using either your current company or just your broad awareness of the industry, over your decade and seeing where it was going from the association perspective. What does the campus of 2030 look like?
Lillian Stott:
If only I had a crystal ball. I read interesting articles around of how, post-covid, a lot of campuses are bouncing back to have in-person classes. They still though, have more hybrid and virtual classes than ever before. There’s this interesting dynamic of physical space on campus that is at its lowest capacity ever. Yet a lot of campuses construction is heightened right now and then there’s these older buildings that aren’t being utilized as much as possible, but have really high deferred maintenance costs that they’re carrying for them. It’s this interesting challenge of with the enrollment cliff and fewer people coming to campus over the next 5 to 10 years combined with having more space than you need combined with technology. I think some of the conveniences that we got used to during covid that we’re now fully embracing and adopting such as mobile ordering and other things like that.
It’s an interesting dynamic of how do you still provide that close-knit community experience for students especially because classroom learning is obviously essential and why students go to college and also everyone knows that it’s very important what’s happening outside the classroom. Those real life experiences whether through something like experiential learning or even just connecting with people in your dorm and just having that community. How do you keep all of that while still meeting the demands of, I want my food delivered to me without talking to anyone and need the demands of wanting a newer building. Even though you have these other buildings on campus, you are trying to leverage plus the school itself, how do you address all those financial challenges of having the extra space? Are you partnering with the community? Are you partnering with someone out there that can help provide a revenue stream for a repurposing the buildings? It’s just an interesting inflection point right now that we’re in for how is it the best in person experience it can be, while facing all of these outside factors that are pushing and pulling in different directions. So if you want to know what the campus of 2030 looks like that is the short answer.
Griffin Harrington:
Yeah, the reason we’re asking it, is it’s so fascinating trying to get all these different perspectives in. It’s got to be one of the more interesting, five to ten year periods we’re about to walk into in a Higher Ed perspective than there was in a long time. That’s from hearing it from people that have been in this for 30 to 40 years. The student changed so drastically in the last three to four years from their needs and their expectations, and it’s also affected the next 10 cycles of students, because it affected who they are, as fourth graders, and fifth graders and eighth graders and 12th graders. It’s a shockwave down the line of who these people are, how they’re adjusting, and seeing what they want? How will they interact with physical and virtual experience to get their education and where do they see value? So it’s just gonna be fascinating to see how the end of this massive industry reacts and moves in slight directions when they’re just potentially a different need at the end of the tunnel. And so that I think you perfectly answered it by saying there’s all these different things that are in this juggle at the moment and we don’t know.
Lillian Stott:
And I think your comment around how there are such enormous organizations, and there’s so many components to it, I think it’s an opportunity for Higher Ed to be nimble and to operate, maybe a little less bureaucratically too, which I know is going to be challenging.
Griffin Harrington:
If only, one can dream and we’ll leave it on that, Lillian. Thank you so much for joining the RecRe Roundtable. We appreciate the time and the insights and I hope to see you at another association conference sometime soon.
Lillian Stott:
I’m sure we will. Thank you Griffin. I really appreciate it.
Interested in participating in our RecRe Roundtable series? Email griffin@recrebox.com.
