Your First Week

Your first week with Growth Suite

Quick answer: Work through these steps in order: add your first families, set up email and SMS, configure your calendar and pipeline, launch your first funnel, and send your first campaign. Most schools take 3–5 days of focused work to get all of this in place.

Why a sequence matters

Growth Suite has a lot of pieces — communications, forms, pipelines, calendars, marketing, payments — and trying to set them all up at once is overwhelming. There's a natural order that builds each piece on the one before it:

1. Get your data in. Families and students first — everything else relates back to them.
2. Get communications working. Email and SMS are how you'll reach families day-to-day.
3. Set up the systems that capture new prospects. Funnel pages, forms, calendars.
4. Organize how prospects move through admissions. The pipeline tracks each student from inquiry to enrollment.
5. Automate the obvious follow-ups. A tour request shouldn't sit unanswered overnight.
6. Start sending campaigns. Newsletters, event invites, re-enrollment reminders.
7. Schedule social posts. Last, because it's least time-sensitive.

The recommended order

Each step has its own article. Click through in order:

1. Adding your first families
2. Importing your existing family list
3. Setting up email and SMS sending
4. Setting up your booking calendar for tours
5. Setting up your admissions pipeline
6. Launching your first funnel page
7. Setting up automatic follow-up for new inquiries
8. Sending your first email campaign
9. Setting up your social planner

How long it really takes

If you're doing this yourself, expect:

• Day 1: Family import (longest single step) and email/SMS setup
• Day 2: Calendar and pipeline configuration
• Day 3: First funnel page and follow-up automation
• Day 4: First email campaign, social planner setup
• Day 5: Buffer for the inevitable "I missed a step" cleanup

SMS sending can be a bottleneck — carrier registration (A2P 10DLC) takes 1–4 weeks of review time. Start that step early so it's done by the time you actually need to send a text.

What to do before you start

Have these ready:

• Your school's logo, brand colors, and standard contact info
• A spreadsheet of your current families (names, emails, students, grade levels) — see the import article for the exact format
• Your school's domain login (for setting up email authentication DNS records)
• Your school's tax ID / EIN (needed for SMS registration)
• Decisions on a few questions: which staff have which roles, what does your admissions pipeline look like, what tour times do you offer

Tips

• Don't try to perfect everything before launching. A working system at 80% beats a perfect system that's not in use.
• Start SMS registration on Day 1. It's the longest pole. Submit the paperwork while you set up everything else.
• Pick one or two team members to drive setup. Spreading the work across the whole staff makes it slower, not faster.
• Use the weekly office hours. Wednesday office hours are open Q&A — bring whatever you're stuck on.

Related articles

• Adding your first families
• Importing your existing family list
• Setting up email and SMS sending