Why I Wrote This Book
It was summer of 2017. The back of my head was wet, and beads of sweat were dripping down the sides of my face. It was about 105 degrees in Washington, D.C., that day. The humidity reached 50 percent, and I could not control the huge amounts of sweat pouring down my body by the second.
The thing was, my profuse sweating had nothing to do with the temperature that day.
I was sweating because of the decision I had to make.
This was all because of a life-changing event that had occurred a few months earlier. That previous spring, I’d taken over as the manager of Vital Vittles, the student-run grocery store at Georgetown University. This wasn’t a typical on-campus university job. I, along with other undergraduate students, worked and managed the entirety of the store’s operations. Vital Vittles generates $1.7 million in revenue each year and is part of the $5 million-annual-revenue student-run business enterprise called Students of Georgetown, Inc. Featuring seven distinct external business lines, the organization operates three coffee shops, a salad restaurant, a catering service, a snack shop, and our grocery store.
And the management team of “The Corp” — as the company is known on campus — had entrusted to me the responsibility of managing one of these locations.
I’d never run a business and had very little experience outside of working for The Corp in prior years. My education was limited, but here I was sweating profusely and contemplating what I should do.
At the time, I was still in what I thought was my “honeymoon” phase — running my weekly management meetings, doing checkups on store financials, reviewing purchase orders, and so forth. Earlier that morning I received an email from the CEO of The Corp.
The title was innocuous yet troubling: “New Store: Georgetown Assortments.”
A new store, I thought. I wonder if she’s referring to some new restaurant somewhere in our area.
I opened the email and read the opening line.
“Hey, Marcos, let me know when you have your feet on the ground enough so that we might be able to talk about this. Attached are changes made to the new bookstore marketplace.”
I knew this was bad. This was a new store…on campus. And not just on campus, but a mere 60-second walk from our store. Plus, that store had the benefit of being in the clear line of sight of students on campus, whereas my store, Vital Vittles, was down a hallway and out of the main flow of people visiting campus.
As I opened the attached documents, I saw an endless number of new food products the bookstore was proposing to sell. These products would be offered at the very front of the bookstore — called Georgetown Assortments. This mini-commissary would be in prime view of everyone who walked through the main doors of one of the busiest sections on campus. The new product line was going to compete with approximately 30 percent of the products we sold in our store.
Suffice it to say, it was a bit of a rough start.
I was already dealing with the headaches I’d been handed the week prior, during the first week of my “honeymoon” phase. We had been told that the food court — another two-minute walk from the bookstore and in the main flow of foot traffic — was being renovated as well. The new restaurants going in would compete directly with our most profitable category line — our prepared foods. Now students could get food from Chick-fil-A and a luxury sandwich shop prepared for them.
I’d also been told during that meeting by the COO to “adjust the financial model to account for higher labor costs.” The city’s minimum wage was scheduled to rise from $11.50 an hour to $12.50. We’d have to adjust our hiring numbers to reflect this price hike and optimize our total employee base to be as cost effective as possible.
Now I was handed the double whammy of a third competitor, this time one which was going head to head with us on 30 percent of our product line and had better visibility to the foot traffic.
These issues all came together on that sweat-filled summer day. We finally had to move forward with a decision. How would we combat this new competition? These actions would affect the overall financial performance of the business for the coming year. Poor choices would result in losses and would negatively impact our profits, so further cuts would have to be made.
At that moment, it started to dawn on me that this was my new reality. My life was going to become a chaotic whirlwind of unexpected challenges constantly thrown my way. A little over halfway into my college experience, I never would have guessed this was where my education would take me.
Two and a half years ago I had far different things on my mind. I had just finished the college decision process and had decided to attend Georgetown University. It was exciting and incredible, as well as daunting. I had so many concerns running through my head, but I had one that just wouldn’t go away: money. How was I possibly going to pay for my education? Although I came from a middle-class background, there was no way I could possibly afford to pay the $67,000 yearly rate. The financial aid package only went so far, and the amount remaining was enormous.
In order to help pay for my tuition, my parents moved out of our lifelong home and rented it out for additional income. On top of that, my mom transitioned from being a homemaker to working a grueling 3 a.m. to 10 a.m. retail stocking job and later took on additional part-time work as an assistant infant teacher. It hurt me to hear stories about her having to go to the doctor for pains resulting from her job or how my mom and dad couldn’t see each other for days because they were awake and asleep at different hours. I’m extremely fortunate to have two loving and caring parents who always go above and beyond to support my brother and me — but at what cost? It began to weigh on me.
With all the extra support from my parents and the large loans I took out, college began to become more and more of a reality. I knew I had to attain a job to earn some additional income throughout my college career.
My story is certainly not unique from millions of other college-bound students.
Some twenty million students attend American colleges and universities annually — an increase of more than five million students since the fall of the year 2000 according to the National Center for Education Statistics. According to the 2017 Sallie Mae college student study, the average annual cost to attend college was $23,757 in 2017.
Financial aid only covers 35 percent of the average student’s costs — less if you remove the cost of living. That support matters greatly to many students with 69 percent of prospective college students eliminating a university from consideration due to poor financial aid offerings. The federal work-study program, which currently provides $990 million of financial aid to students, has been targeted by the Trump administration as a potential budget cut in 2018.
If the budget is cut in half, it will leave 300,000 students without access to the program. That will leave too many college students without another important method to pay for college. Seventy-six percent of all college students will work at one point during college to help pay for tuition, according to the same Sallie Mae study.
So, many students — myself included — must work to make college a possibility.
When I first came to college, I expected to get a traditional job such as a university clerical assistant or a student guard position. I never would have imagined I’d help run a multimillion-dollar business. I was hired in the fall of my freshman year, and I started off working six to eight hours per week cashing and stocking at Vital Vittles. By the midpoint of the semester, I was working between 15 and 20 hours per week. I pushed myself to learn more about this incredibly engaging environment, and I worked myself tirelessly to help pull my own weight to pay for my education. As time went by, I could feel myself changing and developing with the new skills and abilities I was attaining.
These new skills and lessons helped me appreciate another equally important aspect of working in college. While the income certainly helps remove some of the burden of student loan debt for many of us in college, it’s not the only reason to work. Previous job experience helps prepare students for success in future careers.
In a 2013 report, High Fliers Research found that college graduates without work experience have “little chance” of getting a job.
Ouch.
“New graduates who’ve not had any work experience at all during their studies are increasingly unlikely to be offered a good graduate job after university,” High Fliers Research managing director Martin Birchall told The Huffington Post.
According to Birchall, work experience is “now just as important” as a college degree.
I got that message loud and clear as I began searching for internships and job opportunities. In every single one of my interviews, I was able to draw upon my experiences in the company and find ways to stand out. Not only was I able to help pay my way through college, but I was also able to garner applicable skills that I could apply to my future career aspirations.
When I was first hired, I never knew how lucky I was to be able to take part in this incredible experience. I can’t believe that three years ago I was completely oblivious to one of the most significant journeys I was about to take for myself.
At that realization, I started to wish that more students had the chance to have this same type of experience for themselves.
I vividly remember the first time I ever had that thought. I stopped in my tracks and said aloud, “Wait…so why don’t more universities have these opportunities?”
If universities and colleges are serious about solving these challenges for students — the rising need for financial support and a need for more hands-on, experiential work experience — higher education should invest in backing student-run businesses.
If universities don’t invest in new ways to help their students afford their education, more and more students won’t be able to pay the exorbitant tuition costs being asked of them. If universities don’t invest in creating competitive advantages for their students, these universities will falter as our country’s workforce continues to become more talented and more competitive than ever before.
These are two critical issues in higher education that need to be addressed, and they can be addressed by student-run businesses. Student-run businesses are successful in developing individuals because they teach students hands-on knowledge they can’t learn in a traditional classroom setting. Remember back to that sweat-filled summer day when I had to help decide our strategy in response to the new competition that was setting up shop next door?
That sweat was real because the challenges I was addressing were real.
With this expected drop off in revenue, and the ever-increasing costs present in our business, we had to come up with a plan to tackle these concerns within the coming year. As the months ticked on, and summer rolled around, we eventually had to move forward from the planning phase to the implementation phase:
- Would we change our own product line to differentiate ourselves from our new competitors?
- Would we renovate our own space to match the aesthetic of the new stores?
- Would we move our location to a cheaper spot and consolidate our product pool to focus solely on our most profitable items?
- Would we try to engage in a price war with the new competitors and attempt to beat them on price?
Years from now I probably won’t remember the tactics we deployed or the results of the efforts, but I will have the benefit of real experiences with real problems — experiences I’ve already used in countless job interviews.
It’s the place I’ve learned the most in my entire collegiate experience.
And yet too few college students have these opportunities today. Fewer than 50 college campuses have active prominent student-run businesses. This is what led me to write this book; I hope to show how SRB programs function, demonstrate why they are successful, and describe actions that potentially grow an SRB program. I designed the text to offer the first in-depth analysis of student-run businesses. I hope you all enjoyed learning more about SRBs. If you’d like to learn more about them, click here for the introduction to my book!
