Grand Canyon Education’s Brian Mueller Uses Coaching Skills To Lead – Investor’s Business Daily
When you’re a visionary, you’ll face pushback. Grand Canyon Education’s CEO can attest to that.
In the late 1990s, Brian Mueller was an executive with Apollo Education Group. The company offered higher education to adults in a classroom setting. Seeing the future of his industry, he urged Apollo’s then-CEO to invest in online education.
“We can make a huge impact,” he told his boss. “This will transform all of education, and we can be way out in front if we have access to capital to expand online so that we can really grow.”
At the time, online learning was in its infancy. Within a few years, he became chief executive of a newly formed Apollo unit, the University of Phoenix Online. Over the next eight years, its student count boomed from 3,000 to 340,000.
But resisters didn’t make it easy at first.
“We were criticized on a weekly basis,” recalled Mueller, now chief executive of Grand Canyon Education (LOPE). “It was ‘how dare you deliver education online.’ ”
Grand Canyon Education Rises
After 19 years at Apollo Group, including as CEO, Mueller moved to Grand Canyon Education as its CEO. And his results are solid, especially in an industry routinely challenged by changes in government-education funding.