TGIF:
This Goal Is Finished
Good morning achievers! Hope you've had a wonderful week! If this is your first time on our website, welcome. Velocity is about helping you find and achieve your passion through personal goal setting. You can find out more about us by clicking on any of these links. If you are inspired by reading our achiever interview below and want to get on the achievement bandwagon, sign up for our latest Goal Setting Workshop on February 19, 2011 in Washington, DC.
Today's This Goal Is Finished achiever is Erik Kimel. Matt and I met Erik a few months ago and were both thoroughly impressed, as you will be when you read his interview. Erik started his company in HIGH SCHOOL and is still running it successfully today - WOW! Read more about Erik's amazing success below.
The Achiever
2004, growing the company organically into a network of over 1,500 tutors and 2,000 students across the East Coast region of the United States. Kimel was named one of the 10 Most Interesting People by Bethesda Magazine in 2006, featured in The Washington Post in 2008, on CNN as a Small Business Success in 2009, and one of the 40 under 40 in the Washington Business Journal in 2010. Kimel holds a BA in Finance and Management from New York University’s Stern School of Business. Kimel sits on the Montgomery County Business Roundtable for Education (MCBRE) Board of Advisors, and is a featured speaker on youth entrepreneurship, managing change, and cross-age learning platforms in various school districts and universities nationwide.
The Goal
My goal, as a freshman in college, was to take my business, Peer2Peer Tutors, and turn it into a full-time job by college graduation.
Why This Goal?
I have so much passion for the company and what it stands for, I knew that running the business I started was my ideal career choice. I thought I could learn a lot as a business major in undergrad that would help me make this a reality. I figured that I'd really understand what I was learning in class if I immediately applied it to my own business after class.
The First Step
My first step was entering a business plan competition, and this was probably the hardest step! I entered the competition my freshman year as a team of one -- the competition was open to undergraduates, graduates and even NYU alumni. The competition lasted all year - from October to April. It started with a submitting an executive summary, then a rough draft, then the final version, and finally presenting your plan to an impressive group of business gurus - the heads of NYU-Stern, Peter Sachs of Goldman Sachs, the head of Time Warner, and more. I didn't win any of the prize money, but I placed third! Even better, I'm the only one of finalists who is still in business today. The reason why this first step was so critical to my success, though, was that I was able to get free coaching and mentorship from my professors right off the bat, which was amazing.
Challenges
One of the other great outcomes of the business plan competition was that it highlighted the two main challenges my company would have in succeeding -- the need for adult management and scalability. Having these challenges defined early on in my goal was really helpful.
Our clients are really the parents that are paying for their child's tutoring, so we had to make sure they were willing to invest their money in our services. By adding adult management to our student-led and student-employed business, we increased our legitimacy with our clients and overcame that challenge.
To be honest, scalability in people-driven business is something that Peer2Peer continues to work on today. We started by building a website that automated much of our administration and created a barrier to entry for our competition. When I started Peer2Peer, we were in one county, and now we're in six, so we know scalability is possible.
Staying Motivated
Having mentors and professors really helped -- I was able to talk about what I was going through with them and get advice. Having new business courses each semester helped me also because I was continually applying things I'd just learned to the business. Involving my friends also helped, because the success of my business became a group effort -- and working for Peer2Peer became a 'cool' thing to do on campus.
Who Helped?
One of my professors, Ken Preston, was my main mentor. He taught a class called 'Managing Growing Companies' that I really liked. I would go in and talk to him during office hours every single week to get the support I needed to keep my goal on track.
One of the other business strategies I used to become successful was managing the company's financial resources. I never put the company in debt. I wanted to make sure that we were profitable each year so we could use the profits to invest in the company's growth the following year. As an example, we rolled out our web development over a series of years, buying only what we could afford at the time, rather than taking out a loan to pay for the entire site at once. Not only did that make us fiscally responsible, but it also ensured that we were only making development decisions that gave us the most return on our investment, not just because they looked cool. Be ok with "basic functionality" and let the users help direct the growth of your website.
TGIF - Celebrate!
When I graduated from NYU, I moved back to DC, rented an apartment, leased a car, and began working for myself full time. From the moment I graduated from college, I paid my bills with the money from my company. My dad told me that you should always have some skin in the game. Knowing that the success of my company impacted my own success (and ability to pay my bills) made me get up in the morning and get stuff accomplished.
Advice
Here's what helped me achieve my goal:
1) Set a deadline!
2) Break a big task into small tasks.
3) Ask everyone how they would do something, compile the research and information, and then decide. Other people will come up with other options, issues, and solutions that you couldn't have done by yourself.
4) Learn how to listen. Getting constructive feedback is hard, but it is worth listening to and only THEN make a judgment call if the feedback is appropriate or not.
What's Next?
Right now, we have a goal of growing Peer2Peer to ten counties by September of 2011. At the start of this school year (September 2010), we were in four counties. As of today, we are in six, and need four more. We've profiled and visited all the potential markets and are now looking for the right managers to run new operations in our targeted counties.
No comments:
Post a Comment