Hey everyone!
First of all, I just want to say it's great to have discovered this forum. I wish I'd thought to look for something like this earlier, but it's really great to see a community of go-getter's who love sharing their stories, helping each other out, and pushing like hell to bring their visions into reality. I think that's incredible, so kudos to you all for being here, for making the most of your lives, and getting involved with others trying to do the same. Fantastic stuff.
As this is an introduction, here’s a little about me...
Ever since I was a kid, I loved engaging with things, and learning more about pretty much everything. As I tell people, I always loved education, …But I always hated school. This dichotomy bothered me deeply then, and it still does to this day. I suspect I'm not alone in feeling this way about our schools, particularly on this forum.
In my early 20’s I dropped out of college out of sheer frustration at both the lack of quality content, and the brazenly open racket that was the (and still is) higher education system (for example, my 19th edition macro economics book had the IDENTICAL, WORD FOR WORD content as the 18th edition, they had merely shuffled the chapters around, and charged $265 for the 19th edition, instead of telling us to use the $3 18th edition on Amazon. And both books were so basic they were damn near useless). At the time, I said I was dropping out to get an education. Man am I glad I did.
I quickly became deeply interested in philosophy. I began to explicitly discover how the mind functions, and thereby explicitly identify and understand the problems in the way I was taught — problems which, until that point, I had only felt implicitly in the form of frustration and resentment. I knew early on that this subject was exceptionally potent, and could very well be used to fix what’s wrong with education. For 3 years I studied nearly constantly (wake up, put on headphones and listen to a lecture. Hop in the car to go to work, plug in the phone, listen to a lecture. Get to work, headphones on, listen to a lecture. Drive home, lecture. Cook dinner, headphones, lecture. Eat dinner, turn on TV…. Watch a lecture. Go to sleep… Listening to a lecture on an hour timer. Rinse, wash, repeat. Damn near every day. …Yeah I was real fun at parties, haha.). For the next few years, I began allocating time towards applying this philosophic framework to fixing the problems in education.
I started from the beginning. Nothing was assumed or taken for granted. I basically started with “Is education even necessary? If so why? If not, why not?” Over the next few years I worked and researched my way through a method of educating which made sense.
It’s been incredibly challenging. Honestly, most of the time I really thought I’d bitten off more than I could chew. I thought I’d never get it done. But after almost 7 years of tearing everything up, starting from scratch, taking nothing for granted, studying my a$$ off almost every waking second of every day, and pressing through each new step of building a proper education, piece by piece, from the very beginning, all the way to having a whole, fully integrated product at the end, and a business plan to implement it… After almost 7 years, I can finally say: The product exists. The plan exists. They exist. They are real. This is finally possible.
I can’t believe it. It’s such an incredible relief, and it’s an enormous boost to know that this finally has a chance of happening.
For the last year or so, I’ve been thinking about how to go about making a business out of this. Operating private schools is an obvious path, and I’ve decided upon starting with an acquisition model. The main reason for this is that it’s easy to verify the integrity of an existing school’s financials, and simply put a multiple on existing its existing cash flows. I see it as much less risky than opening a new location, remodeling, licensing, marketing, trying to find new customers (by pulling them away from a school that they’re probably already happy with), over a period of months, and hoping to fill to capacity. Plus you’d be missing out on the existing cash flows you’d get by purchasing an existing entity.
I plan to use the profits generated from these institutions to hire the best teachers in their fields, and work with them on developing a proper curriculum and method of delivery. My ultimate goal is to scale this curriculum to as many institutions as I can, being limited primarily by the people I can find to properly teach this curriculum. I plan to scale as hard as possible in certain regions of the U.S., and ultimately I would like to scale internationally as well.
Recently, I showed some people my full business plan (the mission one the company, the financial projections, etc.), and so far 2 our of 4 people have offered to purchase the first institution and have me run it for a share of the equity. I’ve been jerked around before, but this doesn’t feel like those times, so I’m cautiously optimistic. We’ll see in the coming weeks if all turns out well!
I’ve been working like hell to get everything finished up (writing a Limited Partnership/Operating Agreement) in time for a meeting either this or next weekend, but I couldn’t resist searching for a forum of this type once I’d had the thought to do so. And man am I glad I did! It’s a pleasure to join, introduce myself, and hopefully meet and converse with other people who are as driven to achieve their difficult goals as I am!
First of all, I just want to say it's great to have discovered this forum. I wish I'd thought to look for something like this earlier, but it's really great to see a community of go-getter's who love sharing their stories, helping each other out, and pushing like hell to bring their visions into reality. I think that's incredible, so kudos to you all for being here, for making the most of your lives, and getting involved with others trying to do the same. Fantastic stuff.
As this is an introduction, here’s a little about me...
Ever since I was a kid, I loved engaging with things, and learning more about pretty much everything. As I tell people, I always loved education, …But I always hated school. This dichotomy bothered me deeply then, and it still does to this day. I suspect I'm not alone in feeling this way about our schools, particularly on this forum.
In my early 20’s I dropped out of college out of sheer frustration at both the lack of quality content, and the brazenly open racket that was the (and still is) higher education system (for example, my 19th edition macro economics book had the IDENTICAL, WORD FOR WORD content as the 18th edition, they had merely shuffled the chapters around, and charged $265 for the 19th edition, instead of telling us to use the $3 18th edition on Amazon. And both books were so basic they were damn near useless). At the time, I said I was dropping out to get an education. Man am I glad I did.
I quickly became deeply interested in philosophy. I began to explicitly discover how the mind functions, and thereby explicitly identify and understand the problems in the way I was taught — problems which, until that point, I had only felt implicitly in the form of frustration and resentment. I knew early on that this subject was exceptionally potent, and could very well be used to fix what’s wrong with education. For 3 years I studied nearly constantly (wake up, put on headphones and listen to a lecture. Hop in the car to go to work, plug in the phone, listen to a lecture. Get to work, headphones on, listen to a lecture. Drive home, lecture. Cook dinner, headphones, lecture. Eat dinner, turn on TV…. Watch a lecture. Go to sleep… Listening to a lecture on an hour timer. Rinse, wash, repeat. Damn near every day. …Yeah I was real fun at parties, haha.). For the next few years, I began allocating time towards applying this philosophic framework to fixing the problems in education.
I started from the beginning. Nothing was assumed or taken for granted. I basically started with “Is education even necessary? If so why? If not, why not?” Over the next few years I worked and researched my way through a method of educating which made sense.
It’s been incredibly challenging. Honestly, most of the time I really thought I’d bitten off more than I could chew. I thought I’d never get it done. But after almost 7 years of tearing everything up, starting from scratch, taking nothing for granted, studying my a$$ off almost every waking second of every day, and pressing through each new step of building a proper education, piece by piece, from the very beginning, all the way to having a whole, fully integrated product at the end, and a business plan to implement it… After almost 7 years, I can finally say: The product exists. The plan exists. They exist. They are real. This is finally possible.
I can’t believe it. It’s such an incredible relief, and it’s an enormous boost to know that this finally has a chance of happening.
For the last year or so, I’ve been thinking about how to go about making a business out of this. Operating private schools is an obvious path, and I’ve decided upon starting with an acquisition model. The main reason for this is that it’s easy to verify the integrity of an existing school’s financials, and simply put a multiple on existing its existing cash flows. I see it as much less risky than opening a new location, remodeling, licensing, marketing, trying to find new customers (by pulling them away from a school that they’re probably already happy with), over a period of months, and hoping to fill to capacity. Plus you’d be missing out on the existing cash flows you’d get by purchasing an existing entity.
I plan to use the profits generated from these institutions to hire the best teachers in their fields, and work with them on developing a proper curriculum and method of delivery. My ultimate goal is to scale this curriculum to as many institutions as I can, being limited primarily by the people I can find to properly teach this curriculum. I plan to scale as hard as possible in certain regions of the U.S., and ultimately I would like to scale internationally as well.
Recently, I showed some people my full business plan (the mission one the company, the financial projections, etc.), and so far 2 our of 4 people have offered to purchase the first institution and have me run it for a share of the equity. I’ve been jerked around before, but this doesn’t feel like those times, so I’m cautiously optimistic. We’ll see in the coming weeks if all turns out well!
I’ve been working like hell to get everything finished up (writing a Limited Partnership/Operating Agreement) in time for a meeting either this or next weekend, but I couldn’t resist searching for a forum of this type once I’d had the thought to do so. And man am I glad I did! It’s a pleasure to join, introduce myself, and hopefully meet and converse with other people who are as driven to achieve their difficult goals as I am!
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