Case: cut 30% of costs without losing teachers
An edtech company must reduce its cost base by 30% this year. Teacher salaries are 45% of costs, marketing 25%, technology 15%, and everything else 15%. Renewals depend on teacher quality; new sales depend on marketing.
An advanced-level session of about 10 minutes. You join 3 other speakers already in the discussion. You get 90 seconds to prepare before it starts.
The percentages do the arguing here and the group that works from them finishes in front. Teachers are forty-five per cent and ruled out, so thirty per cent has to come from the remaining fifty-five — which means the cut inside marketing, technology and everything else is proportionally brutal, and anyone proposing efficiencies has not done the arithmetic out loud. That is the single most useful thing to put in front of the room. After that the real trade appears: renewals depend on teachers and new sales depend on marketing, so cutting marketing hard is a decision to become a retention business, and the group should say so deliberately rather than arrive there by subtraction.
Angles worth taking
- Do the arithmetic aloud: excluding teachers, 30% of total means over half of everything else.
- "Find efficiencies" collapses the moment someone states that ratio. Be the person who states it.
- Cutting marketing is choosing to become a retention business. Make the group choose it on purpose.
- Teacher cost and teacher headcount are not the same lever. That distinction is usually missed.
- This year is the constraint. A plan that saves it in eighteen months has answered a different case.
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Speakers in the room
You plus 3 other speakers
Preparation time
90 seconds
Modes
Learn (guided) · Mock (exam-real)
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Read the situation
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Get into the discussion
The AI participants open with their own positions and keep going. You enter when you find the gap, name what you are adding, and hold your turn.
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What you're scored on
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Contribute real points, build on what others say, and hold your share of the discussion without dominating it.
Content
Whether your points are real — an example, a number, a consequence — or a restatement of the topic in longer words.
Entry and airtime
Whether you got in at all, how often, and whether you held your share without running the whole room.
Listening
Whether you answered what was actually said. Building on someone, or disagreeing with their point specifically, scores far above a prepared line.
Delivery
Pace, clarity and steadiness under interruption — the part that decides whether a good point survives being made.
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