Getting your first university representation agreement

A registration lets you operate. A representation agreement lets you earn. Between the two sits a gap that catches most new consultancies, because the agreement is the thing nobody can give you a form for.

Start with the aggregators, not the universities

The instinct is to email admissions at a university you like. The realistic first route is an aggregator: a company holding hundreds of university agreements that sub contracts placement to offices like yours.

You give up part of the commission. What you get is the ability to place a student next month rather than next year, and a placement record, which is the thing every direct agreement will later be decided on.

Treat this as a first step rather than a destination. Offices that stay on aggregators forever stay on aggregator margins forever.

What a university checks before it signs

Some of it is paperwork, and some of it is not.

The paperwork half:

• Company registration and Ministry of Education permission
• A named, accountable person with verifiable qualifications
• A real office address
• Increasingly, an agent certification such as the British Council's or ICEF's

The half that decides it:

• Whether you have placed students before, and where
• Your visa refusal rate, if you have one to show
• Whether the students you send finish the first year

That last point is worth sitting with. A university's problem is not recruitment. It is students who arrive, struggle, and leave in the first semester, having consumed a place and generated a complaint. An agent who sends six students who all pass is worth more than one who sends twenty, of whom eight go home.

You cannot show that record on day one. You can say clearly how you intend to build it, and that is a better first email than a list of how many students Nepal sends abroad annually, which they already know.

The terms worth reading twice

Most agreements are standard. Four clauses are not, and they are where the disagreements later come from.

When commission is payable. Enrolment, census date, or after the student has paid their own first instalment. These are very different cash positions. Census date is common and reasonable; anything later deserves a question.

Clawback. If a student withdraws inside a stated window, the commission comes back. Fair in principle. Read the window and read whether it applies when the student withdraws for reasons nothing to do with you.

Exclusivity. Occasionally a university asks you not to represent a named competitor. Rarely worth it early on. Your value to students is range, and you are trading it for a relationship you have not tested.

Termination and performance. What number of placements keeps the agreement alive, and how much notice ends it. An agreement that can end without notice is not really an agreement.

The email that actually gets answered

Short. Specific. About them.

Name the courses you can realistically fill and why students in your catchment want them. Say what your process is for checking a student is genuine before you send the file. Attach the registration and the permission. Ask for a call rather than a contract.

What does not get answered: a long message about the size of the Nepali market, a list of every destination you intend to cover, or anything that reads as though it was sent to forty universities at once, because it was.

Once you have two or three

The work changes shape. You now have different commission rates, different deadlines, different document requirements and different portals, and the person who knows which university wants what is one counsellor who will eventually take a holiday.

This is the point where offices start losing money quietly. Not through bad placements, through missed intake deadlines and applications sent to the wrong portal with the wrong form. Write down, somewhere shared, what each partner requires and when their intakes close. Whether that is a system or a wall chart matters less than it being somewhere other than one person's head.

The consultancies that grow past a handful of partners are not the ones with the best relationships. They are the ones who can still tell you, in March, which of their eleven partners has an April deadline.