CEO Notebook

 

In the independent school business office, agility isn't just a skill — it's a survival mechanism. You are expected to pivot seamlessly from granular spreadsheets to high-level board presentations, often before lunch. Any given day, you might draft a job description, field a question about overtime rules, prepare a financial update for a board of trustees meeting, and then somehow find time to sort out the school store’s sales tax. Many of you do all of this in offices of one or two people. There is never quite enough time, and the questions never stop.

NBOA was founded to help a national network of business officers cover all that ground — to  pool knowledge and resources to make everyone’s job more manageable and to help you do your job even better. In 1998, the year of NBOA’s founding, the tools we had for this job were a list-serv, newsletter and occasional in-person networking. We’ve innovated these tools over the many years since: today the list-serv has transformed into NBOA Connect, the newsletter into Net Assets NOW and in-person networking into signature events like the NBOA Annual Meeting and Business Officer Institute.

And as we start the 2026-27 school year, we introduced a new tool to turn the wide, diverse and deep treasure trove of NBOA content into easily accessible answers to your everyday questions. If you haven’t yet tried Bo, NBOA’s new AI assistant, I urge you to type in a question today. Ask anything in plain language, and Bo will respond with practical guidance drawn from our webinars, Net Assets articles, research, guidance, toolkits and more, with detailed links back to the original sources so you can dig deeper if you choose.

How Does Bo make your job easier?

During testing, a small group of dedicated NBOA members and NBOA staff put Bo to work on the real questions that frequently land on a business officer’s desk.

• Sorting out whether your employee is exempt or non-exempt, and what the salary tests require.
• Drafting a controller or HR director job description and tailoring it to your specific school.
• Explaining top indicators of a school’s financial health in plain terms.
• Recommending how to share financial reports and dashboards with your board of trustees.
• Building a 100-day plan for a new CFO.
• Benchmarking financial indicators like average boarding tuition in the Northeast or compensation for business office roles.
• Pointing you to the right NBOA webinar, course or resource.

Bo is most effective accelerating work that used to mean digging through a dozen browser tabs or waiting on a reply: a first draft, a quick benchmark, a refresher on a policy or a faster path to the NBOA resource.

A note on trust. Bo is grounded in NBOA’s highly vetted content, developed by your peers, business partner experts, and the NBOA staff you know and depend upon, not the open internet, and it shows you the source behind each answer. It provides a strong foundation for independent school business, but it’s not a replacement for your own sound judgment or your school’s reliable professional counsel. Bo is best used to get oriented and make initial progress quickly, and final plans and decisions, especially high-stakes ones, should be confirmed by your own knowledge and experience.

How to help Bo work best for you

1. Give it context. The more Bo knows about the issue you’re facing as well as your school’s context, like size, location, or other relevant public factors, the more tailored the answer.
2. Keep the conversation going. Ask follow-ups. Testers got their best results by refining: “make it shorter,” “what about for boarding schools?” or “rewrite this for a presentation to my faculty,” for example.
3. Use it to draft, then make it yours. Job descriptions, policies and board talking points come back as solid first drafts you can edit and own.
4. Follow the links. Every answer points to NBOA sources with greater specificity than our previous search capability. Click through to learn more and confirm the basis for the response.
5. Ask Bo what it can do. Not sure where to start? Try “What kinds of things can you help me with?”

A tool like this does not replace the longstanding expertise and community that make NBOA an indispensable resource and membership for your school.

Bo is available now as a value-add to your school’s NBOA membership. While those outside of the NBOA membership may ask Bo up to three questions a month, NBOA member business leaders of all stripes can ask UNLIMITED questions and, importantly, fully digest the member-exclusive resources upon which those answers are based.

A tool like this does not replace the longstanding expertise and community that make NBOA an indispensable resource and membership for your school. In fact, Bo’s strength is built on that very community, for speed and ease of use. NBOA Connect, NBOA programs and NBOA publications and resources remain valuable spaces to dig deeply into topics, stay ahead of trends and perhaps most importantly, lead your school with greater confidence and clarity thanks to Bo!

Try Bo today, and tell us what you think. Your feedback will only make Bo better. Welcome Bo into your daily routine to save you valuable time, which is ultimately your most precious resource.

Jeffrey Shields, FASAE, CAE
NBOA President and CEO
Follow NBOA President and CEO Jeff Shields on LinkedIn.