01
Project-based consulting
Scoped, time-bound work with clear deliverables. I diagnose the real problem, design the fix with your team, and help launch the operation into production.
Christie Madsen
Operator-Led Consulting for K-12 EdTech Post-Sale
You don't need another consultant with a deck. You need an operator who's built the systems and lived inside them.
I work with K-12 EdTech companies from pre-Series A through Series C — early-stage founders standing up post-sale for the first time, and growth-stage CS leaders building, optimizing, or rebuilding the function. Support, Onboarding, Customer Success, Renewals, Professional Learning, Tech Services — the whole post-sale org, designed and operated by someone who's spent fifteen years inside K-12 EdTech post-sale and crossed the full GTM machine to get there.
01 / The Difference
Most CS consultants teach the work. I've been on the hook for it — in your market.
I started in sales at MasteryConnect, crossed to Customer Success, and built the function from scratch. Then I took the long way back through Business Development and Business Operations before returning to lead CX. That route matters: it means I understand the full GTM machine, not just the post-sale slice. I know what a deal sounds like before it closes, what an AE oversells under district procurement pressure, where the deal desk pushback comes from, and where the renewal conversation actually lives in a K-12 buying committee.
I've built K-12 EdTech CX functions from zero — at MasteryConnect and most recently at Abre, where I built and ran the post-sale org through Series A close and a 6.6x revenue scale-up, scaling the team from 2 to 28 across Customer Success, Technical Services, Professional Learning, and Tech Support. At DreamBox, I optimized an existing function — delivering 112% Net Retention on ~$50M ARR across ~2,000 customers — and then led two post-acquisition integrations to $100M and more than 3,000 customers.
When you bring me in, you're not getting a consultant with a deck of frameworks borrowed from horizontal SaaS. You're getting an operator who has run the org you're trying to build, in the market you're trying to sell into.
- Educator-first, vendor-second. I started in a K-12 classroom before crossing to EdTech, and have since operated post-sale across assessment (MasteryConnect), curriculum and adaptive learning (DreamBox), and data and analytics platforms with comms and behavior tracking (Abre). Four category surfaces, three funding journeys, one industry.
- K-12 EdTech native. District procurement cycles, professional learning expectations, consortium dynamics, academic-year renewal rhythms — fluent in what actually drives post-sale outcomes in this market.
- Cross-functional operator. I've operated across Sales, Business Development, Business Operations, Product, and Client Experience — every conversation a post-sale leader has to navigate to get retention, expansion, and roadmap influence right.
- Built from zero twice. Scaled from there. Not a methodology — a muscle.
- Scaled through acquisition. Multiple product integrations across two companies; survived the messy middle.
- Investor-fluent at multiple stages. Series A close at Abre as CX voice in diligence and post-sale narrative with investors. DreamBox through acquisition (TPG). MasteryConnect from seed to acquisition. Three K-12 EdTech funding journeys, multiple M&A events, all carried inside the post-sale function.
02 / How We Work Together
Two ways to plug me in.
Pick the engagement model that fits your situation. Any of the named services in the menu below can be delivered through either structure.
02
Embedded Advisor
A light-touch retainer where I'm in the room without being in the seat. Working sessions with you and key reports, async access for high-stakes calls, and direct involvement in the moves that matter — board prep, exec escalations, hiring decisions, comp redesigns. Not fractional leadership. Not project work. The model in between.
04 / What I've Come to Believe
A few things, after nearly fifteen years of experience.
- Customers don't buy products. They buy outcomes. The CS function exists to identify the outcome the customer is reaching for, design the pathway to it, and — when the pathway doesn't exist — diagnose what's missing and work with Product, Marketing, Sales, and Engineering to remedy it. Retention and expansion follow from outcomes. They don't precede them. CS leaders who treat retention as the goal lose the customer relationship the moment an alternative offers a clearer path to the same outcome.
- Frameworks aren't the product. Systems are. A framework is a way of thinking about a problem. A system is the operating reality your team lives inside — the cadence, the playbooks, the dashboards, the conversations that fire on time without me in the room. Most consultants sell the first. I build the second, and help launch into production.
- Credibility in education is earned in the classroom. Too many decisions in K-12 EdTech are made by people who have never walked into a classroom on a Wednesday afternoon, who have never had to sustain a 28-kid math block while two students are in crisis, who have never sat through a curriculum adoption committee. Districts can tell. Teachers can tell. The CS motion that works is the one designed by someone who has been in the room as the practitioner, not just as the vendor.
- In K-12, your customer base is your sales team. Districts don't buy because of a great demo or a polished pitch deck. They buy because a peer superintendent two counties over told them this product worked. Reference-ability isn't a downstream nice-to-have in K-12 EdTech — it's the actual sales motion. If your customer base isn't referenceable, no amount of marketing spend will fix the top of your funnel. CS isn't the team that maintains relationships after the sale. CS is the team that builds the referenceable customer base your sales team is going to need next year.
- Measurement asymmetry masks upstream causes. When CS is the only function instrumented, CS becomes the default explanation for every miss — even when the real cause is upstream. Sales motion, ICP drift, product gaps, comp plan mismatch. The team with the data gets blamed because the team without the data can't be examined. I don't believe in instrumenting CS in isolation. I believe in instrumenting your post-sale function inside a GTM measurement system that holds every function to comparable standards — because that's the only way to find out what's actually broken when retention slips.
- The post-sale function only works as well as the people in it. The most leveraged investment a CS leader makes isn't tooling or process — it's the team. I build certification curriculum, leveling frameworks, competency models, and career pathways because people grow when the accountability is clear and the path is real, and they leave when it isn't. Most of the operators I've trained are still in the industry, and several still work with me.
- Authority has to match accountability. If you're hiring a CS leader to own retention, give them the authority over team composition, budget, and cross-functional escalation that makes the accountability fair. If you can't, hire a project consultant instead and own the function yourself for now. Either is fine. The middle option — accountability without authority — is the most expensive choice you can make.
05 / Why Me
I've walked the walk. The bullet points are real.
When I tell you something will work in K-12, I'm telling you because I've watched it work in K-12. When I tell you something won't, I'm saving you the year I lost finding out the hard way. That's the whole pitch. Frameworks are easy. Operating is hard. I've done the second one for more than a decade — in your market.