SHARING OUR VALUES
At Charter School Capital, we hold each other accountable to core company values as the driving force and foundation of what we do. These values are our guiding principles as we work together to more effectively support the growth and development of our charter school partners. And, as a result, Charter School Capital is a proven catalyst for charter school growth. In CSC’s ten years, we are very proud to say that we’ve helped finance the education of more than 800,000 students in over 600 charter schools across the United States.
We measure everything we do by these core values:
- Best-in-Class
- Empowerment
- Innovation
- Teamwork
- Accountability
In this blog series, we wanted to spotlight how all of us at CSC work to exemplify these core values. For this, the first post of the series, we’ll dive deeper into what best-in-class means to us and how we strive to meet such an aspirational goal.
As the newest member of the Charter School Capital team, it’s already become clear to me—and quite refreshing—that best-in-class is indeed a way of life here. I see it in the way everyone interacts with each other on a daily basis, I see it in the support and encouragement I’ve received since day one – from everyone – regardless of their department, and I see it in how individuals and teams coach and enable each other to succeed by helping schools succeed in educating more and more students each day.
BEST-IN-CLASS
To get some expert insight into how we strive to be best-in-class, I sat down with Nancy Edmiston, Assistant General Counsel for Charter School Capital (CSC). Nancy was selected as the embodiment of the Best-in-Class value here at CSC, so I was really looking forward to getting to know her better—and learn why leadership had chosen her as their representative on this value. And, after meeting with her, it became clear.
Nancy has been with CSC for a little over three years now and been an integral part of CSC’s continued growth and the development of the CSC corporate culture. Because it’s such a lofty subject, we broke down our discussion into several topics that embody “best-in-class” attributes and how CSC sets about living up to those values.
We deliver. According to Nancy, what’s best for our clients is for us to develop and deliver a dependable and reliable financing product to our customer. “There’s a lot of pride in ownership in the delivery of such a high-quality product,” she said.
“Best in class for us is being able to provide products that are tailored to serve the needs of charter schools and the teachers out there who are providing educations to all of their students. And there’s a certain reliability when you’re best in class, you’re accountable, you empower your employees both individually and as a team to develop it all—and in the end, it benefits the customer.”
For all of at CSC, best-in-class means “when our clients succeed, we succeed.” But I wanted to get Nancy’s take…
“We put our schools’ success at the forefront, working with them beyond just helping them finance their growth or facility. We help them when things might get tough as well and help figure out why it is that everything’s upside down, and what we have to do to right the ship again to get them back on course. We’re providing a lot of value-added guidance, services and advice to help right those upside-down schools. Because their success is our success.
And, as a function of us having provided financing, we’ve actually helped a lot of schools become stronger over the long run. Because, as we’re providing finances and we’re seeing some early signals that there may be problems on the horizons, we can start proactively working with them to help. We can help them better understand that they may need to trim expenses so that they’re not in the red or even introduce them to back office providers who might be able to provide a service that would help them with their bookkeeping and other administrative support.
Being best in class means continually asking, are you best at serving the needs of your client? Does this help our client? Are we beneficially serving the charter school movement and the charter schools that we work with? Because our mission is to help the charter schools—and be able to deliver all of the products and provide services that fulfill the needs of the charter school movement, as a whole,” says Nancy.
CONCLUSION
After my inspiring chat with Nancy Edmiston, I can easily say that I was even more enthusiastic about being a part of the CSC team. And, I was able to glean the heart of CSC’s motivation behind achieving this aspirational “best-in-class” goal: Everything we do at Charter School Capital is in service to the mission, in service to our clients, and service to the charter school movement.
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