As told by Shawn Bean, president at MTI

In 2008 my wife and I had my second child on the way. I had a beautiful daughter already, and she was everything to me. Now I was about to have a second daughter, and parenting was about to get more difficult.

I was also in my 10th year of coaching girls basketball. If you’ve ever coached a sport, you understand how difficult it can be with a family, you’re gone all the time. There were days I’d see my daughter for a few minutes in the morning, then she’d be asleep when I got home from a far away game. So I decided to quit coaching. I had no idea how I would supplement that part of my income, but there had to be another way.

I also had a student teacher at that time, and I was in the middle of finishing my post masters degree graduate classes. There was a little button in the corner that allowed you to inquire about working for them teaching graduate classes.

So I took the leap. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

The first class that I taught was a hybrid course. I taught for 2 days, then they finished their work on their own. In those 2 days I made one third of my coaching salary. If I could do this again, I could teach 3 classes and make as much as I made in 10 months of coaching preseason, games, and tournaments. This was a much better use of my time.

It was in that class that I was approached by Nick Pezzuto, another teacher in my school. He was a student for the class, and although we had met before, we didn’t have a strong relationship yet. That would all change when he approached me with a business idea. One that would change my life and the financial future for my family.

Of course, the idea that he had would have been terrible. Nick had an idea for a company that hired current teachers to tutor individuals in their free time. The economy sucked still with the ramifications from the housing crash. We would have had to not only find the right customers, but also match them with teachers in that geographic area, schedule the meetings, and bill the customers/pay out the teachers. The margins were horrible. Great idea, but hard to pull off at scale.

So how did it change my life? Because the conversations we had helped us pivot to a much more profitable business plan. During one of these conversations I told Nick that we should build a company that offers graduate courses for teachers. I thought I knew enough about the logistics to get us up and running, but I didn’t have a connection with any colleges at the time. I thought we’d have to spend time and money running around to make a connection with someone important enough to get our foot in the door.

But of course, this is where everything lined up for us. Nick already had a connection with the vice president of a college in our area and was able to run the initial idea by her. Honestly, at the time we were in this way over our heads. Talk about fake it until you make it.

We were told to put a business plan together so we could present it to the president of the college. So I created an outline of what we were going to do, what types of classes we’d offer, how often they’d run, and what our financial projections looked like. Needless to say we didn’t hit our financial projections, they may have been a bit too optimistic.

Next step, meeting with a group of professors who didn’t understand us and were definitely feeling threatened by what we were presenting. Lots of questions about what we were bringing to the table, what the reasons were, etc. One professor was relentless, going so far as to say we were only there to make money and that we were capitalist pigs!

My response was pretty simple, if money didn’t matter then we wouldn’t be having the discussion for either side. I wanted to mention that he probably wasn’t teaching his students for free, but I refrained. Call it what it is, but colleges need money to stay afloat as well.

Eventually the crowd came around, and one of the oldest professors in the room helped turn the tide. He said they should hire us, not just work with us, because we were bringing in new ideas and perspectives.

Having passed that test, we were now in the driver’s seat and just had to come up with 10 classes, sign a contract, and start marketing the courses. And that, my friends, is a much longer story.