Thank you for this entry and the modification. I believe that Entry 8 presents an direction that might be interesting to go down. The strong type treatment against the more contemporary/friendly design element seem to work nicely together. Not sure if you intended this in the design element, but I do see both a letter C and also E (Center, Excellence). Maybe reading too much into the idea with the decreasing size of the circles, but these could be interpreted by the viewer to be decreasing costs...which is a very strong idea without using something obvious like dollar signs.
I'm hesitant to provide you with too much direction, as I'd like to see what you can from your own creativity. One idea might be to go more monochrome on the circles to indicate they are all the same (costs), but shrinking? Color suggestions might be a bright green to a more muted green hue (green...dollars...) and the blue/green pallet would match what we have produced in our brochure (I'm considering posting the working comp of the brochure to show the color examples, however I didn't want this to influence the designs submitted, either).
If there are any other executions you might offer on this approach, I'm very interested.