What Teachers Can Learn from HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business
Ms. Coleman needed a reading intervention program and let vendor outreach set the pace of her search. She took every demo offered and adopted whichever sales representative was most responsive and persuasive. She had never written down what skill gap the program needed to close, what grade band it served, or her actual budget ceiling. Midway through the semester, she discovered the program didn't match most of her students' reading levels, and the department had already committed a year's budget to it. A colleague down the hall, who had piloted two options against a short list of written requirements first, was seeing real gains with a program that cost less.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
0 of 5 selected
The core lessons, applied to you
Writing down what a resource has to do before you look at any catalog
It's easy to let a compelling demo or a colleague's recommendation set the direction of a search for a new tool or approach. Writing specific criteria first — the exact skill gap to close, the grade band, the time budget, the cost ceiling — turns "we need something for reading intervention" into a filter that most flashy pitches simply fail, saving harder evaluation for the few options that genuinely fit.
A teacher adopts a program because a sales representative was persuasive, only to discover mid-semester it doesn't match the actual skill level of the students it was bought for.
Before taking any vendor meeting this term, write three non-negotiable requirements the resource must meet, and check every option against them first.
Screening a crowded market of ready pitches fast
Education vendors compete hard for a teacher's attention, and it's tempting to give equal time to everyone who reaches out. Efficient screening means using your written criteria to disqualify most inbound pitches within minutes — checking cost, evidence base, and grade fit before scheduling a call — so limited planning time goes to the handful that survive a first pass rather than being spread across everyone who asked.
A teacher schedules full demos with every vendor who emails, spends a month of planning periods on meetings, and still hasn't compared options against each other.
Set a five-minute rule: read a vendor's materials against your criteria before agreeing to any live demo, and decline anything that fails on cost or fit.
Checking a program's evidence against your own classroom
Curriculum vendors present their strongest case studies, usually from contexts unlike your classroom, so honest diligence means asking what evidence exists for students like yours, requesting a trial period, and tracking a real measure of progress rather than trusting a glossy results sheet. The same skepticism that protects a buyer from a seller's pitch protects a teacher from adopting something that looks good in a brochure and does little in practice.
A department adopts a program school-wide based on a publisher's national data, without piloting it in even one local classroom first, and learns it isn't working only after a full year.
Before any school-wide adoption, pilot the resource in one classroom for a full unit and compare a specific, pre-chosen measure of progress against your prior approach.
Giving a new routine time to actually take hold
Whether it's a new curriculum, a co-teaching partnership, or a classroom management system, the first weeks are usually rocky no matter how good the underlying choice is, and treating early friction as proof of failure abandons good changes too early. Patience means agreeing on a fair trial period in advance, communicating that timeline to colleagues or administration, and resisting the pressure to revert at the first sign of difficulty, while still watching honestly for a true mismatch.
The pressure to protect planning time by screening fast can quietly become an excuse to skip a real pilot before adopting something for the whole department. When time pressure and the need for real evidence pull against each other, keep the fast screen for eliminating obvious mismatches, but treat any option serious enough to reach a pilot as earning a slower, evidence-based look before it goes school-wide.
Name one thing, honestly
What resource or routine in your classroom did you adopt on enthusiasm rather than on evidence you actually checked?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
0 of 3 selected
Run this for seven days
Before any school-wide adoption, pilot the resource in one classroom for a full unit and compare a specific, pre-chosen measure of progress against your prior approach.