Lessons Learned From a Failed Ivy League Entrepreneur

A "Case Story" By Chris Cononico
 

Chapter Thirty-Seven

After all the work of preparing our marketing material, the mailer went out as easily as pushing a button. We just delivered the files to our printer along with the mailing list we purchased. It was that simple. Since the envelopes were sent at the bulk-rate to keep down costs, we expected students to begin receiving our materials within two to four weeks depending on where they lived in the country.

With a sense of relief from meeting our launch deadline, we began to focus on other logistics of the program. For example, I identified a service provider to outsource the delivery of one million door stickers and one million register stickers to businesses near college campuses. The cost to our company was 10 cents per sticker. For $150,000, we could blanket VISA merchants across the country with advertisements that proclaimed “Campus Card Accepted Here.”

The same week our mailer launched, I also embraced the task of training our 10 new customer service operators, who ranged in age from 25 to 65 years old. Ironically, George, Mark, and I were only 22 years old ourselves. I remember giving the new staff an overview of our company’s background and our lofty aspirations for the Campus Card. I painted a picture of NCRB as an entrepreneurial organization that provided an important service to college students. The people we hired seemed equally enthusiastic to be part of a new company on the cusp of success.

Since we had asked students to respond to our mailer by May 15th, we had a very good sense when we would begin to receive incoming calls. I tried to prepare our staff to handle any questions they could encounter. Unfortunately, it never occurred to me that I needed to prepare our staff for angry calls from students, universities, or state Attorneys General.

During the week following the mailer, we started to receive intermittent phone calls from new customers. The first few calls were greeted with a lot of excitement and muffled cheering around the office. It felt like the start of something big. I tried not to get excited, but I couldn’t help but smile from ear to ear when the first call came through. It was a student verifying that she could use the card at off-campus restaurants. “Yes,” our operator responded. “Any off-campus restaurants wherever VISA is accepted.”
 

Copyright  2005 by Chris Cononico
All rights reserved. No part of this manuscript may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.