Custom Cohort — Win the MeridianHealth Audition at Biscayne Executive Learning

A four-round, intermediate executive-education simulation set inside Biscayne Executive Learning (BEL), the custom-programs unit of a Miami business school billing $14M a year on a 28% contribution margin, where 64% of revenue is repeat business. MeridianHealth — a 9,000-employee hospital network and BEL's second-largest account ($1.9M over three years) — issues an urgent, over-scoped brief: design and deliver a leadership program for 48 newly promoted clinical managers, live in 8 weeks, for no more than 4 classroom days, under a hard $280,000 ceiling. The one-page brief lists 11 desired topics that would cost ~$410,000 to build fully; a national competitor is quoting a polished off-the-shelf academy at $240,000; and a 5-year, $3.2M master-services renewal in Q4 hinges on whether this 'audition' cohort feels genuinely built for the client. Playing the Custom Programs Lead, you (1) decode the brief — separating the client's stated wants from the underlying business problem (clinical experts failing as first-time managers, driving retention and patient-safety risk) and prioritizing the 11 topics to a core 3–4 via backward design; (2) configure the program from a module library under the iron triangle of scope, time and cost — choosing formats, build-vs-reuse, and resolving the faculty gap (wait for the marquee name, substitute, or partner externally) inside the ≤4-day and ≤8-week caps; (3) price the engagement — building the cost stack, choosing a pricing posture (match the competitor at $240K, hold at $280K with a differentiation argument, or phase the deal), and protecting a ≥25% contribution margin while distinguishing cutting price from cutting cost from cutting scope; and (4) defend the proposal to the CHRO, handling the topic-drop, the $40K price gap and the timeline objections without giving away margin or over-promising. The math rewards backward-designed, on-time, profitable, genuinely customized programs and punishes the five classic errors — topic-stuffing all 11, pricing to win below the margin floor, premium price with no differentiation, over-promising the 8-week timeline against faculty lead-times, and one-off margin-squeezing that forfeits the $3.2M renewal. Final KPIs track Contribution Margin %, Client Fit, Renewal Probability and Deliverability against the $280K ceiling, the 4-day cap and the 8-week window.