MBA Protocol has the best MBA success rates in the entire MBA application coaching industry. But are these results real? How can you trust them? And what all goes into these numbers?
The MBA Protocol Process of coaching candidates is unique in a lot of ways, and one of them is how we think about MBA admissions results. In this article, I’ll walk you through the MBA Protocol process of creating and tracking our MBA Student success statistics and answer (hopefully) all the questions you have about them.
If you’re worried that your candidacy might have a major weakness or that you’re not as competitive as a lot of other folks, this article will be of great value to you.
Table of Contents
First, at MBA Protocol we don’t care that much about our “client success numbers.”
I founded this firm to help people who want to make a difference in their career achieve their full potential.
Our goal in coaching our clients, therefore, is not just a handful of admissions. It’s…
- Essays that you are proud to share with friends and family because you can honestly say they show your very best self, leading to…
- Confident interviews in which you show up authentically and with no imposter syndrome, awkwardness, or second-guessing, leading to…
- At least one admission, ideally to a dream school, ideally with huge scholarships, and…
- Increased self-trust, career clarity, courage, and executive communication skills to go after the post-MBA career you truly want.
We measure our success as coaches not by your raw results of admissions, but by how you feel and how you experience yourself growing as a person on this journey with us as your guides.
Read our testimonials and student success stories to understand what I mean. Many of our clients say the process itself was worth the price they paid and the MBA admission was just the cherry on top.
We’re going for meaningful personal and professional growth on this journey that puts you in a permanently better place when we’re done, the MBA admission is but one small part of that overall transformation.
We don’t care about MBA admissions numbers, but we do care about your future.
Our work is about helping you build a future you’re proud of and create a career you genuinely love. We serve those of you who are making the world a better place for all of us. If an MBA is part of your path to greatness, the we darn well want to make sure you get in.
That means that we take a client’s failure to get in very personally. We absolutely HATE it when all our efforts result in no good news.
For that reason, we designed our program to get maximum results – and that’s exactly what it delivers.
Each of our clients goes through a robust process to minimize the likelihood of zero admissions.
Sidebar for the “Harvard, Stanford, or Bust” Types:
Some of you know that you don’t really NEED an MBA. If you get into Harvard or Stanford, you’ll go, but otherwise, you’ve got other options. Our process is ALSO designed to help you differentiate yourself from your highly competitive peers, but that happens in our Discovery and Storytelling coaching process, which is the subject of a different article.
This article is about school portfolio choice and ensuring admission to at least one school no matter the strength of your profile.
The MBA Protocol Data-Driven Edge: Precision, Proof, and Predictable Results
Take a look at our results:
| ALL YEARS | |
| Total Client Scholarships | $29,469,556 |
| Per Successful Client | $90,675 |
| Overall Client Success Rate | 93.1% |
| Guided Quest Success Rate* | 99.1% |
| 2023-24 | |
| Total Client Scholarships | $5,618,528 |
| Per Successful Client | $129,842 |
| Overall Client Success Rate | 89.8% |
| Guided Quest Success Rate* | 100% |
| 2022-23 | |
| Total Client Scholarships | $7,401,021 |
| Per Successful Client | $129,842 |
| Overall Client Success Rate | 96.6% |
| Guided Quest Success Rate* | 98.3% |
ALL YEARS
2023-24
2022-23
2021-22
Total Client Scholarships
Per Successful Client
Overall Client Success Rate
Guided Quest Success Rate
These results are real. And they are based on data tracked in highly finite detail.
Notice there are two different success numbers: The Overall Client Success Rate and the Guided Quest Success Rate. I will explain the difference between those two numbers in the next section. But first, let’s talk about how we are able to get such high success rates.
Our MBA application coaching process begins with holistic guidance on school selection.
Most of our clients need to get into business school and therefore need to apply to more than 2 or 3 schools to ensure they give themselves the best chance at admission.
Our most popular MBA Guided Quest Package is 3 schools, but no matter how many schools you choose, your coach will:
- Calibrate your odds and chances of admission given your statistics against all schools you’re considering.
This happens iteratively if you are still working on test scores as you apply.
- Help sort schools into reaches, matches, and safeties.
We do this very rigorously using MBAmo – our MBA odds calculator It’s not just somebody’s best guess. It’s a reliable answer based on cold, hard facts about you that measure your candidacy against target schools and past admitted students’ statistics.
- Help you choose a complete portfolio of schools that allows you to aim high (for reach schools!) while also protecting your downside risk of no admission by including safer schools.
If you have a major weakness, like a low test score or GPA, then you might need even safer schools or more safer schools to make the portfolio feel secure. But we don’t force you to only apply to weaker schools or bar you from trying reach schools. In fact, we encourage dreaming big and aiming high. (more on this in the next section).
- Your coach helps you choose which of your portfolio schools you should complete with the coach and which you should do on your own.
This decision is a collaborative effort, usually driven by the complexity of the application.
- Finally, in addition to working with you through unlimited essay drafts and other coaching on your core schools (e.g. 3 schools if you purchased the 3-School MBA Guided Quest), your MBA coach will also hold a high-level guidance call in which they help you outline the essays for up to 3 additional schools.
This way, you know you are approaching the essays in the best possible way for all 6 schools and fully benefiting from your coach’s wisdom and knowledge about you and school requirements for each school.
This process helps virtually guarantee student success because it is rooted in cold hard facts, real data, and brutal but loving honesty on the part of the coach.
We won’t pretend your odds are better than they are.
We’ll help you confront reality with courage and make powerful choices.
We’ll push you to aim high – MANY of our the 99.1% of our clients who were admitted got into reach schools and occasionally even moonshot schools (2.7 GPA admitted to Stanford and MIT e.g., two separate clients.)
But we will also really push you to apply to schools where your chances of admission are greater because your statistics are better in line with past successful applicants.
Combine all of that, and our school selection process itself might be worth the entire fee for the MBA Guided Quest. It’s a kind of insurance policy against no admission.
Our success rate for clients who follow this process isn’t 100%. We’ve been wrong a handful of times over the years. But it’s 99.1%. So if you are in the position where you NEED an MBA win, our team can help make that almost inevitable.
What else makes this MBA admission success rate possible?
Well, that’s the depth of our storytelling and MBA application coaching process, which brings out the best in each candidate and shows the very best you have to offer, whatever that may be.
Remember, we’re trying to help you build a life you love. So we’re not trying to cram your candidacy in a box, keep the essays safe and templated, or tell you exactly what to say so you can “game the system” and “tell schools what they want to hear.”
We’re aiming for pure, bold, and passionate self-expression. Personally speaking here, this is what I’m all about as a human being: I just believe we each have to sing the song we were meant to sing, because no one else is gonna sing it. What is the point of life if you’re always reading off someone else’s sheet music?
You have to love and honor and respect yourself enough to have the dignity to tell your own story and follow your own path.
That’s an unshakable belief I have about human life.
But it conveniently turns out to be the thing that works best in MBA admissions. In our aggregate 40+ years of coaching MBA applicants of every stripe, the MBA Protocol team may have had more unpredictable victories than any other coaching team.
That’s because when you make it your goal to stand out as yourself (the only goal we support for our clients), you’re naturally charismatic, irresistible, and unforgettable to someone reading thousands of similar boilerplate, safe, drab essays. That’s true no matter how anti-charismatic and un-unique you think you are.
But, again, how our storytelling and coaching process work is a topic for another article.
Now let’s talk about how we track these MBA success statistics and ensure their rigor and accuracy.
Your MBA Protocol Coach is your full partner on the whole process. We don’t even stop at admission. All our MBA Guided Quest clients also join YOMO: our pre-MBA recruiting training program at no additional charge. Because, again, we’re after your long-term success, your whole career fulfillment. MBA admission is but a tiny step on that long road and we want to give you all we’ve got to help you succeed.
And I personally know from experience; MBA admission is a cakewalk compared to post-MBA recruiting. Oof. Recruiting is a bitch. And you’ve got to be ready for it. So we help you get ready before you shuffle off to campus.
Since we’re your full partner, we are extremely invested in the outcome of every single application.
Me and the coaches during interview season:
We’re all over our clients. It gets annoying, I think. But it’s important because it’s…
How we track MBA admissions data
I like to joke that once a consultant, always a consultant. My BCG background informs our penchant for data rigor.
I still remember a couple of grillings my data models got in my days as a consultant and how detailed and thorough my analysis needed to be to stand up the pressure of Manager probing. I didn’t always pass. Oh the horror of a model that doesn’t stand up to Manager scrutiny. IYKYK.
As I built MBA Protocol, I wanted our data to survive that level of scrutiny.
At that point that level of data integrity had been beaten into me. I’d be embarrassed if I settled for less.
So here is how it works:
For every client, in every cycle, we record all your statistics: test scores, grades, work experience, companies, undergrad schools, etc. And we use this to calibrate your school portfolio.
Then we track every single outcome and piece of news in the process. (This part is actually a joy: your coach will often be the first person you email when you get good news and the person you lean on to get you past the bad news, too.) This includes interview invitations, waitlist updates, scholarship offers, and final admissions outcomes, including all rejections. (BTW, we also coach you through the waitlist and scholarship negotiations as part of the service).
We do this for ALL the schools you apply to, including schools you complete on your own.
Once we’ve compiled a GIANT database with every single client outcome, we extract 4 key metrics:
1. What was the total amount of money our clients earned in scholarships?
(This is a straight summation.)
2. What was the average amount of money each client earned in scholarships?
- Numerator: total client scholarship dollars received
- Denominator: total number of clients who received at least one admission
3. What was our overall client success rate?
- Numerator: every client who gained at least one admission
- Denominator: every client who submitted at least one application.
4. What was the success rate of the full MBA Guided Quest? (AKA, the clients who followed ALL Our advice vis-à-vis reach, match, and safety schools, which is most but not all of them.)
- Numerator: every client who gained at least one admission
- Denominator: (every client who submitted at least one application MINUS every client who submitted at least one application and didn’t have at least one or two safety schools as recommended by their coach).
We measure these last two statistics differently for three reasons:
- We do not force your school choice. We want you to aim high AND keep your feet on the ground. It’s your prerogative if you want to ONLY aim high and forego safety schools. We’ll give everything we’ve got to help you be successful in that endeavor.
- But, if you choose to do that, then your failure to gain admission doesn’t reflect the effectiveness of our process. Because if we told you the odds were stacked against you and you weren’t admitted, we both know the outcome wasn’t a result of our work. It was a feature of odds and the candidate pool. (By the way, every year SEVERAL Candidates in this category DO gain admission to dream and reach schools and we have many client testimonials of people who only aimed high and failed but were still thoroughly satisfied with our process.)
- This makes the Guided Quest success rate the one that matters most. Because if you control everything within your control (including applying to safer schools), then you can trust that we can almost guarantee you’ll be successful if you work with us.
Other Nifty Data Tricks
Then, because we’ve tracked EVERY piece of information by school, we can also drill down to success rates at individual schools, categories of schools (the M7, e.g.), and over different years, among other things.
We tend not to publish this data very much because they can be wildly misleading.
One year our HBS success rate was 50% because we just had a lot of rockstar applicants choose to work with us that year. The next year it dipped to 30%, but that was because more people aimed for the Harvard moonshot (with our full recommendation and support!!)
Why Scholarships Are Our Favorite Metric
We’re especially proud of our scholarship results. Not only do they represent a life-changing amount of money per person, but they also prove something more important: schools want our clients so badly – because of the quality, authenticity, and compelling narratives in their applications – that they are willing to pay them to enroll.
It’s the ultimate signal of market demand: when top programs compete for you, they offer generous financial incentives to win you over. And no other firm rivals these numbers.
What does this mean for you if you’re considering hiring an MBA Protocol Coach to support your MBA applications?
There are 3 key conclusions I’d love for you to take away from this article:
Number 1: We really effing care.
More than these statistics and this article saying “we’re good at our jobs,” I hope what they reveal is how much we genuinely care about you and your success. If we were just “selling a service” it would be easy to look the other way on school choice, success, and even rejection.
Our coaches take at most 10 MBA Guided Quest clients per round. Not because they don’t have the time to serve more people, but because you can only care so much about a few people and still maintain your personal relationships and family obligations and sanity.
Our limitation is emotional commitment, not time commitment. It’s not about hand-holding; it’s having limited mental and emotional capacity to be fully invested in the success of another person.
Every year, I try to figure out if there are ways we can dial back the commitment level to make the MBA Guided Quest more profitable as a service, but every year I fail.
We just care and we can’t help it.
Our process is designed for your success, but it’s delivered by our full-time, tight-knit, deeply skilled, and overwhelmingly committed team who will take your success just as seriously as you do.
What that means for you: You need to bring your A-game to this party. If you choose to work with us, we’re going to settle for nothing less than your best.
Number 2: We can’t guarantee any specific result, but we can guarantee you’ll have the best chance for success with us.
Whether you can get into a given school or not depends on your candidacy, your goals, your statistics, and lots of other things we can’t control like who else is applying this year.
So even if our success rate was 50% at Harvard in a given year, that doesn’t mean YOUR chances of getting into Harvard will be 50%.
What we CAN promise is that our process gives you the chance to honestly confront the merits and limitations of your statistics and career to date, make choices that take those facts into account, while still encouraging you to aim high.
And then, once you’ve chosen your schools knowing full well the risks those choices entail, we will give your application everything we’ve collectively got. So that even if you don’t get into Stanford, the process of writing your What Matters Most essay is a meaningful, confidence-building, voice-clarifying, transformational experience that gives you the best chance at success AND delivers incredible value in its own right.
What that means for you: If you need to get into business school this year, please consider working with us. You can chat with us about our services here:
Number 3: If you’ve got weaknesses in your candidacy or feel like you might be a “risky” candidate (because you’re making a radical pivot, coming from a nontraditional background, or any other reason), you probably should work with us.
Hopefully this article has clarified why and how we help you maximize your chances of success. We back up what we do with data and a rock-solid process that gives you confidence in your choices and the knowledge you’ve done your very best.
You can either choose our full MBA Guided Quest or – if you just want help on the school portfolio selection part, you can purchase our MBA School Portfolio Choice Toolkit or Coaching Package.
That way you can hold your head high and accept the outcome with pride and enthusiasm for your future, not regret for what might have been.
And that step is absolutely essential to building a life you love.
What this means for you: With or without an MBA, you can have the life you want if you embrace choices with eyes wide open and bring your whole self to the task. That’s what we’re here to help you do.
Whatever you decide and wherever your career takes you, we are rooting for you!
With data nerdery and love,
Angela.
Angela Guido
Student of Human Nature| Founder and
Chief Education Officer of Career Protocol
Let’s have a conversation!
Start your journey with MBA Protocol today.
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