by Christopher Hathaway, founder of Dimension Admissions
Every business starts with an idea and an offer. The idea has to do with need — identifying an area of life where there is room for improvement. In our case, the profoundly competitive landscape of college admissions has left ambitious applicants and their families unduly anxious, scrambling for how to decipher the cryptic admission riddle posed by highly selective schools. How does a candidate, even one who is highly qualified, gain access? The answer — differentiation — is the foundation of our business model.
But an idea only gets an entrepreneur as far as the starting gate, if that. The build-out is make-or-break, and it needs to be done efficiently and intentionally. In most cases, as with a growing human, business development happens in stages. Spurts are intermixed with periods of relative dormancy, occasional awkwardness or insecurity, and often, surprising discoveries. Growth occurs within, but also around the skeleton that holds everything together. The spine is the business’s vision — inclusive of its long-term objective as it relates to fulfilling the need the business is defined to meet — and its ethos.
At Dimension (formerly Advantage Ivy Tutoring), our ethos is centered on our desire to transform the admissions experience for our clients — not just to help them gain access to top schools, but to ease the psychological, emotional, and spiritual burden by focusing the effort inward, on personal growth and development. We realized that our service needed to be process-oriented, rather than product-oriented, which engendered one of our early challenges: how to convince clients that they would achieve their desired ends by focusing exclusively on the means. The barometer of our clients’ success, and thus our own, shifted to be about certain intrinsic qualities: skills development, sense of direction, self-awareness, self-confidence, and other, unquantifiable metrics, in addition to our admit rate. Results became a byproduct of our belief in the individual, and our endeavor to prepare them to thrive once they reach campus. Still, we never fooled ourselves into thinking tangible results don’t matter to our clients — or to us. We just relied on a more wholesome, holistic process to obtain them, and in our first four years, our process-oriented focus led us to beat the current median acceptance rate for top 10 schools by a factor of eleven. We had our start.
With an idea, vision, and ethos in mind, the real work of business development begins. This is when business owners realize an overwhelming reality: growth needs to happen in a coordinated manner in every direction all at once, often before any money is coming through the door. With this latter point in mind, business owners need to determine their capacity for risk (i.e. taking on debt) in light of their access to funds and their need for control over operations. By shopping out their idea to venture capital firms, for instance, business owners can mitigate their personal risk while benefitting from a team of experienced professionals, but at the same time, they stand to lose some of control (and future profit). Booting around to different banks in search of loans has its own set of problems, while crowdsourcing from family or friends can be a highly motivating and equally high-pressured situation, as the specter of failure has a ripple effect. Either way, most new businesses exist for at least a period of time in the red, with a net deficit. On the plus side, these expenditures can be a tax benefit against all the future revenue the business stands to make. On the negative side, it’s a deeply uncomfortable position rife with uncertainty — one key aspect of new business development that separates the entrepreneurial wheat from the chaff.
No matter what, it seems that there are never enough people to do all the work that needs to be done. So, business owners need to hire a team. Choosing the right people to work with — individuals excited about the idea, who share the founder’s vision and the business’s ethos, and who are simultaneously willing to risk joining an unestablished organization with potential — is not an easy task.
In our case, in order to minimize up-front expenses, we completed our first major expansion—the addition of nine blue-chip advisors representing a range of industries and highly-selective schools — on a freelance basis. We have distributed work among them based on their individual capacity, and the need for their expertise, and we only paid them when we were also being paid. This expansion was essential to our mission, as these outstanding advisors have offered our clients invaluable insight into school selection and paths to particular industries. Clients thereby gleaned information that helped maximize extracurricular engagement, arguably the most important differentiating factor amongst high-achieving students. This structure built around freelancers has allowed us to dramatically enhance our client experience, while retaining available resources for allocation to other areas, particularly marketing.
Outside of early teasers about a product or service’s potential, the marketing process can’t begin in earnest until the aforementioned pieces of the biz-dev puzzle are more or less in place. In the modern era of social media and rampant reviewing, providing clients with an inferior product or service is one of the quickest ways to tank an otherwise successful business. At the same time, it’s better to have too many clients than too few — another knife edge for the aspiring entrepreneur to navigate. This means that thinking about how the business is likely to grow, and thus how to get word out, is essential. In some cases, word-of-mouth (or banking on something going viral) will be enough. In others, business owners might have to learn more about SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing) and a number of other internet search engine algorithm-related acronyms than they ever thought they would, or ever wanted to. Still, having a strong sense of the business’s target demographic, and determining how best to reach them—social media influencers or billboards or, more likely, some multi-pronged attack — can spell the difference between aimlessly throwing around (and losing) money, and seeing a meaningful spike in client inquiries.
Overall, entrepreneurship can feel like publicly juggling flaming torches, when you don’t know how to juggle: the materials are unwieldy, the process is uncertain, the risk is real. But growing a business is never dull, and the gratification of every minor success softens the growing pains that attend the myriad obstacles and consequent frustrations a budding entrepreneur is sure to endure. So, if you’ve got the idea, fashion a vision and ethos around it, then light the torches.
And learn to juggle.
After eight years as an independent school teacher, administrator, admissions file reader, and alumni interviewer for Yale University, Christopher Hathaway founded Dimension Admissions (formerly Advantage Ivy Tutoring) in 2019. Hathaway’s writing has been featured in CRAFT, The Hong Kong Review, and LEON Literary Review.
