Case study: cut 30% of costs without losing teachers
A board member has read the same brief and wants to hear your plan before the quarter closes.
An advanced-level session of about 10 minutes. You present a decision and take 3 rounds of questions on it.
Thirty per cent is large enough that it cannot come from tightening a few line items, and keeping the teachers rules out the fastest way of getting there. The pressure in this conversation is arithmetic before it is rhetoric: where the money comes from, in what order, and what the first month looks like once it starts. The board member has read the same brief, so adjectives without support get picked up quickly, and the questioning tends to settle on the weakest item in your plan and stay there. Knowing in advance which part of your own plan you would drop first is worth more than defending all of it with equal energy.
Angles worth taking
- Sequence the cuts — what happens in month one, what needs a full quarter — so the plan reads as a calendar.
- Say which single item carries most of the saving, because that is the one that will be questioned hardest.
- Name what gets worse under your plan; a proposal with no cost attached to it sounds untested.
- If asked what month one looks like, describe a specific week instead of a principle about managing change.
- Keep a fallback that still lands near the target, and say plainly what it gives up to get there.
Who is in the room
You play
A candidate presenting a recommendation
You speak with
A board member who supports the cost target and doubts the plan survives the first month
Ready to speak?
Free to start. You need a TalkDrill account to speak — reading this page does not.
Browse all roleplay scenariosThe format
The situation
An edtech company must cut its cost base by 30% this year. Teacher salaries are 45% of costs, marketing 25%, technology 15%, everything else 15%. Renewals depend on teacher quality; new sales depend on marketing spend. Renewals are 70% of revenue.
What you must decide
Where the 30% comes from, and in what order.
Rounds of questioning
3
Modes
Learn (guided) · Mock (exam-real)
How a roleplay session works
Read your brief
Your role, the situation, and what a good outcome looks like. The counterpart has their own brief, and you do not get to read it.
Open the conversation
You speak first in most scenarios. How you open sets what you can ask for later, which is most of the exercise.
Handle the turn
Somewhere in the middle it stops going your way — a refusal, a counter-offer, a rebuttal you did not prepare for. That moment is the scenario.
Read the report
Outcome, the phrases you used and the ones you missed, fluency and clarity, and the specific line worth rewriting.
What you're scored on
Across every roleplay, the report looks at the same four things — because they are what makes a real conversation work or fail.
Present a costed plan, then defend the trade-offs when the numbers are pushed back at you.
Task outcome
Whether you got what the brief asked for: the refund, the extension, the concession, the point conceded.
Appropriacy
Whether the register fits. A complaint that is too soft gets nothing; the same complaint too hard gets a manager and no refund.
Recovery
What you do with the unexpected turn — repair, rephrase, push back, or stall. This is where most of the marks move.
Delivery
Fluency, pronunciation and pace, judged in conversation rather than in a prepared monologue.
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