During the summer, most college students intern, travel, or take summer classes. For us, summer is an opportunity to work full time—40 hours a week—on something we are passionate about. In May, 2008, the four of us, Kyle Wong, Awad Sayeed, Charles Naut, and Dolly Li founded myCollegeSTAT as a resource that would help students get into college by giving students access to free user-submitted college admissions data.  We want high school students to realize that a perfect GPA or SAT score isn’t required for acceptance into a competitive college—a belief shared by many high school students. The process is a holistic approach that looks at the entire candidate.  Our solution was to humanize the college admissions process by showing the people behind the scores.

                This summer, we turned down internship offers, in industries such as finance, consulting, and software development, to work full time on our business.  Our experience so far has been a story of long hours, humility, and friendship.

                myCollegeSTAT’s office for the summer is Awad Sayeed’s house. Our working area is his living room; our conference room is his bedroom. We were offered shared office space for the summer, but we didn’t want to get too comfortable in an air conditioned office in the midtown Manhattan. Instead, we opted for a true start-up experience. 

                So far, it has been a tremendous learning experience because we are in charge of running the businesses finances, operations, marketing, and development by ourselves. We don’t have a boss to report to or a timecard to punch. Yet, every morning we start at 9AM and end at 6PM. We often have dinner or hang out after.

                It’s a great way to spend a summer—working full time with friends on a cause you believe in.  

Hello Soon to be Millionaires,

My name is Renroy Chase a Alumni from NFTE NYC. I am a film producer and Storymaker meaning I write and create different stories for comics, shows and short films.  My business partner Jorge and I are opening up a Skate Company called SDC Sk8boards.  I am working different organizations to in get a big block party for skateboarders together on July 19th in Brooklyn, so if you're in the NYC area around that time, save the date. 

 I meet Jorge in a Barnes & Noble for a Quincy Jones Book signing. I was waiting for a sister from church traveling from NJ.  He was working as security and saw that I was wearing DC Shoes and called me over to talk. We hit it off right away and kept talking almost every day. Even though he was not from NFTE I knew he was serious and to tell you the truth I always wanted a skateboard team of my own.  I know God wanted us to meet - it was Fate. I was making skate Films but I didn't have the one thing he did: Passion. Jorge and I are friends first and partners second. So if a security guard pitches a business plan to you in a Barnes & Noble, listen and get his or her number.  I will post new things and problems we may face alone the way.  Sk8dabasement.blogspot.com is the best place for info about the company until the website comes up.

While it is imperative to differentiate cost and profit, it is much more important to understand your business using EOU. NFTE teaches you that your EOU is the quantification of your business. All numbers are derived from that one unit. But what about the attributes of your business that cannot be determined by calculations?

Reading about a recent case study in an HR firm, management had a lot of trouble gaining sufficient profit despite their steady sales. So I asked myself, what is this firm trying to sell? Their EOU was 8 sessions of consultation to a client priced at $1200 per session followed by a volley a numbers and costs. But I still did not understand what exactly a consultation consisted of.  Is it two people talking back and forth? Was it a textbook session of Q&A? What?

As the business owner, you always want to maximize profit while minimizing cost. In this case, management was paying a huge percent of the $1200 for "Direct Labor" or the employees being deployed to prospective clients. Unfortunately, there was a very inconsistent result because the employees had varying abilities of consulting. Some would be able to identify their client's exact needs while others were clueless for hours. Even differentiating pay incentives failed. So what should management do?

Again, what is their EOU – not in terms of numbers, but in terms of "manageable value".  Besides the employee physically talking to the client, the employee has been trained to use various tools, metrics, and instruments to help their client. All of these tools and metrics are provided by the company/management. Now we have a much better perspective of their EOU: Employee interaction and Training/Materials provided by management. If we had some numbers, we can say that one consultation would be 80% Employee determined and 20% Company provided. That's the problem. The EOU is almost completely determined by the Employee. Not only that, but regardless of whether or not the employee performs to their potential, they would get paid the same.

Solution? Management must invest much more to ensure that their metrics and tools are easily understood and that their employee training is sufficient. This takes the guesswork out for the employee and levels the EOU so that management determines 50%+ rather than just 20%. In addition, their clients would experience a consistent level of consulting because all the employees have a relatively identical process.