Nobody Knew We Existed

When I stepped into my first district technology leadership role, I inherited a lot of things I didn’t choose…a network, a device fleet, contracts, renewal dates, and an empty filing cabinet.

And I inherited vendors.

Dozens of them, in a small rural district that didn’t have the enrollment to warrant a dedicated account manager at most of the companies we bought from. There was no relationship manager to call. There was, in many cases, no name at all. Just a support portal, a renewal invoice, and a general inbox.

If you had asked me in year one who we worked with for what, I would have had to look it up. If you had asked my team, they would have had to ask me.

Nobody had done anything wrong. That was just the shape of things, and for a while it worked well enough that I didn’t question it. Inherited systems are almost like weather. You don’t audit weather. You just dress for it.

The moment the weather changed

About a year in, we sent out our district’s first E-Rate Category 2 RFP.

I did everything by the book, with a consultant. Scope, timelines, evaluation criteria, all of it posted properly and on time. I was genuinely a little proud of it.

We received one response.

One.

I sat with that for a long time, because my first instinct was to be annoyed. Where was everybody? Didn’t they want the work?

The real answer took longer to arrive. Almost none of them knew we existed. We were a small district in a rural corner of Indiana with no relationships, no reputation in that market, and no reason for anyone’s regional team to have us on a list.

I had been treating vendor relationships as something that happened to my district, and a one-response RFP is what that looks like when it finally comes due.

That was the wake-up call. A bill arriving for a year of not knowing what I didn’t know.

Meanwhile, someone had been showing up

While I was learning that lesson the hard way, one company had already been doing the opposite.

We had started buying Chromebooks from Newmind Group out of Kalamazoo, close enough to drive to us and far enough that they had no particular reason to. Newmind had spent most of its history serving private-sector businesses. Then the Chromebook arrived, and businesses shrugged, and schools raised their hands. They were among the first Chromebook resellers in the country, and their education work started almost by accident: one small wing of the business, one dedicated salesperson.

His name is Shawn Tooley, and he kept showing up. Shawn drove out to see us, got on Zoom calls that weren’t about a purchase, learned our goals, our building layout, our staff, and our constraints.

He also did things that made no immediate sense to me as a buyer. He gave us honest third quotes on projects he knew he wasn’t going to win, because he knew I needed three quotes to move forward and he’d rather I move forward than stall. He told us early when the market was shifting, before it showed up in our pricing. And he told me plainly what he would buy and what he would avoid, including the times when the thing he would avoid was something he could have sold me.

Shawn was the first real partner I had in getting my district where it needed to go. It took me embarrassingly long to notice, because I had no framework for the difference. I thought “good vendor” was the top of the scale because I had never had a partner.

What I’d tell my year-one self

I’ve written before that partnership is a posture rather than a title and I still believe that. But posture is hard to evaluate in a demo, so here is the more practical version: the things that actually distinguished a partner from a very good vendor in my experience.

The part I had to own

That education wing doesn’t exist anymore. Newmind is still around, still doing good work, but the K-12 side never quite caught on and eventually they closed it up. Shawn moved on years ago and isn’t in education technology at all now.

Which means the best partner I had in my first years as a director worked for a company that ultimately decided this market wasn’t worth staying in. Newmind made a reasonable business decision, but what did the rest of us did to make it reasonable?

It would be easy to write this as a list of things vendors should do better, but edtech leaders have a role in it too.

I couldn’t claim I wanted partners while treating providers as transactional line items and measuring them only by response time. I couldn’t expect anyone to understand my district’s goals if I had never articulated them out loud to the people selling into my district. And I couldn’t expect a strong RFP response from a market that had never heard of us.

Relationships that show up when you need them are built during the seasons when you don’t.

After that RFP, I started answering the emails. Taking the calls I used to let go to voicemail. Asking peers who they trusted and why. Telling providers, specifically, what we were trying to do and what would make a solution fail here.

And with Shawn, I did the thing I think districts most often withhold. I vouched for him. I hosted Newmind as our vendor partner at regional edtech gatherings. I introduced him to other directors who were sitting in exactly the seat I’d been sitting in a year earlier.

That’s the part of partnership we don’t talk about much. Vendors are asked to earn trust continuously and publicly. District leaders get to extend it quietly, or withhold it quietly, at almost no cost to us either way. The currency on our side of the table is the introduction.

Not every conversation turned into something. Most didn’t. That was fine. That’s what the seasons in between are for.

The next time we went out to bid, we had responses.

Before you call someone a partner

Most of us don’t get the luxury of choosing every relationship we inherit. But we do get to choose which ones we invest in, and which ones we’re honest about outgrowing.

So a question for edtech leaders worth sitting with, now from either side of the table: If you sent something out tomorrow, who would answer?

That answer is your real vendor list. Everything else is a subscription.