Company
C2 Education is the premiere enrichment provider in the $25 billion tutoring industry. For over twenty years, the company has been helping students improve test scores, GPA, and gain admission to their dream colleges. C2’s unique approach combines individualized instruction, customized proprietary curriculum, and dedicated education experts to create a personalized roadmap that enables students to master their specific tests and subjects. C2 serves more than 14,000 elementary, middle, and high school students each week. Their customized programs and expert teams drive exceptional results for students. C2 students have received over 16 thousand dream college acceptances and over $120 million in scholarship offers.
The college admissions environment has never been more turbulent or competitive, which will continue to drive increasing demand from families looking for access to top colleges. C2’s pedagogical approach and strong outcomes have resulted in industry-leading customer lifetime value and business model economics. Further, the historical C2 center-based model has driven exceptional margins with the hybrid offerings accelerating growth and efficiency of delivery.
The Private Equity Investors
Serent Capital invests in growing businesses that have developed compelling solutions that address their customers’ needs. As those businesses grow and evolve, the opportunities and challenges that they face evolve with them. Principals at Serent Capital have firsthand experience at capturing those opportunities and navigating those challenges through their experiences as CEOs, strategic advisors, and board members to successfully grow businesses. By bringing its experience and capital to bear, Serent helps growing businesses thrive.
Opportunity
The next CEO of C2 Education will lead a mission-driven, entrepreneurial organization poised for renewed national expansion after rebuilding its model and stabilizing post-pandemic.The CEO will be responsible for reigniting growth, strengthening operations, shaping long-term strategic direction—including partnerships, franchising, and AI-driven innovation—and ensuring the company sustains both its high-touch student outcomes and its strong, ownership-oriented culture.
Primary Responsibilities:
Growth & Market Expansion
- Drive aggressive national expansion from 120 centers toward a 300–400+ unit footprint.
- Execute the real estate and market-entry strategy for both corporate-owned and franchise locations.
- Reestablish and scale the franchising program after years of being largely dormant.
Operational Leadership
- Lead a distributed, multi-unit organization with center directors and district managers who balance sales, service quality, and student outcomes.
- Ensure operational discipline around student engagement, academic progress, and parent communication.
- Strengthen day-to-day performance management, workforce development, and organizational scalability as the company grows.
Strategic Direction & Innovation
- Oversee AI-driven initiatives that enhance curriculum, internal operations (grading, communication), and the parent/student experience.
- Evaluate and shape strategy around college-counselling—potential partnerships, acquisitions, or building a standalone offering.
- Position C2 as the category leader by advancing a differentiated hybrid (in-center + online) model.
Culture & Mission Stewardship
- Preserve and amplify C2’s entrepreneurial, education-first culture rooted in student outcomes and high ownership accountability.
- Maintain strong mission alignment around expanding access to top-tier universities for high-achieving public-school students.
Board & Stakeholder Management
- Partner closely with private-equity ownership through structured board meetings and strategic update cadences.
- Communicate transparently around performance, key initiatives, and value-creation milestones, while leveraging investor support as needed.
Ideal Candidate
You must be a leader who blends deep consumer empathy with an operator’s discipline and a builder’s mindset. You must have a track record of inspiring frontline teams, scale human-centered service businesses, and navigating ambiguity in entrepreneurial environments. You are comfortable making decisions at the intersection of data, mission, and customer experience, and equally at ease engaging in long-range strategic thinking and hands-on problem solving. Above all, you should be someone who naturally gravitates toward education as a calling—not just a category.
Human-Centered, Mission-Driven Leadership
- Demonstrated personal affinity for education, youth development, or other purpose-driven work where outcomes change lives.
- History of leading organizations where emotional intelligence, empathy, and trust-building were essential to success.
- Comfort engaging with parents, students, teachers, and community stakeholders—not just corporate audiences.
Leadership of Complex, Distributed Workforces
- Significant experience leading large, frontline-based teams where local managers act as mini-CEOs of their locations.
- Skilled at motivating culturally diverse workforces and creating cohesion across geographically dispersed units.
- Prior success shaping culture in environments where autonomy is high and consistent quality depends on influence, not command-and-control.
Experience Scaling Consumer Services with High Lifetime Value
- Background in high-consideration, relationship-based consumer services (e.g., healthcare, fitness/coaching, private-pay education, financial advisory).
- Familiarity with businesses where customer outcomes, retention, and trust drive performance more than one-time transactions.
- Experience in environments where the customer journey is long, consultative, and emotionally invested.
Proven Ability to Build Organizations for Their “Next Stage”
- Experience professionalizing an organization—building systems, talent pipelines, and structures that enable significant growth.
- Comfortable evolving a company from founder-led dynamics into scalable, repeatable operational and cultural models.
- Track record of developing rising leaders and strengthening bench depth across functions.
Strategic Curiosity and Pattern Recognition
- Ability to identify adjacencies, partnership opportunities, and new verticals through first-principles thinking—not industry habit.
- Comfort operating in markets with fragmented competitors, unclear norms, and large whitespace.
- Experience weighing buy/build/partner decisions with a balanced lens of creativity and pragmatism.
Consumer Brand & Marketing Fluency
- Exposure to modern consumer acquisition channels and shifting digital behaviors—not limited to traditional marketing playbooks.
- Ability to navigate evolving discovery pathways (including AI-driven search) and build messaging suited to discerning parents and students.
- Understanding of brand trust building in high-stakes, high-value purchase categories.
Technology-Forward Orientation (Not Just Literacy)
- A track record of embracing new technologies—especially those that enhance service delivery or personalization.
- Comfort leading teams exploring AI-enabled curriculum, workflow automation, or digital experience enhancements.
- Ability to distinguish between meaningful innovation and noise, allocating resources accordingly.
Experience Working Productively with Investors and Boards
- Familiarity with governance, performance measurement, and collaborative tension in investor-backed environments.
- Ability to articulate business performance succinctly and credibly while maintaining independence in decision-making.
- Comfortable in value-creation settings where clarity, transparency, and accountability matter.
Learn More
The Knowledge Leaders search process is thorough and may include: a written assessment, multiple interviews (recorded and in person), background and social media checks, employment and education verifications, a drug screen, and professional reference checking. After all, our mission is to transform education by recruiting the best world leaders.
Submit your resume to Peggy Williams at Knowledge Leaders.
Knowledge Leaders, LLC provides equal employment opportunities to all applicants and candidates for employment. Knowledge Leaders, LLC prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type based on race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.
