IAM030- Founder Helps Prepare Students with Their College Admissions & Mentorship Company

Jason is the founder of Transizion, a college admissions and mentorship company that provides boot camps and tutoring on college applications, college essays, AP exams, academic subjects, and SAT test prep. Jason is a Brazilian Jiujitsu purple belt and has appeared in the BBC, Washington Post, Forbes, Fast Company, Fox Business, and a host of other great outlets.

• CEO Hack: Stoicism in competition. When good or bad things happen, keep marching forward
• CEO Nugget: Make a schedule and add something outside of your business in your schedule
• CEO ReDefined: Taking responsibility for failures. Giving credit to your people. Leading from the front.

Website: https://www.transizion.com/
Facebook: facebook.com/transizion1
Other Link:  http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180408-five-best-countries-for-entrepreneurs
Other Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/express/wp/2018/04/12/why-you-really-should-still-be-updating-your-linkedin-profile/?noredirect=on

Transcription:

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Intro 0:02

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place, Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of.

This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 0:28

Hello, hello, hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, and I have a special guest on the show today. I have Jason Patel of transition. Jason, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Jason Patel 0:37

Hey, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here and speak to the community.

Gresham Harkless 0:41

Awesome. Well, what I wanted to do was read a little bit about Jason so you can hear all the awesome things that he's been able to do and accomplish.

Jason is the founder of a transition, college admissions, and mentorship company that provides boot camp and tutoring on college applications, college essays, AP exams, academic subjects, and SAT prep. Jason is also a Brazilian Jiu-jitsu purple belt and has appeared in the BBC, Washington Post, Forbes Fast Company, Fox Business, and a host of other great outlets, including CEO blog nation.

Jason is great to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Jason Patel 1:17

Let's do it. I'm really excited.

Gresham Harkless 1:19

Awesome. Well, what I wanted to do was just kind of give you the floor or the mic, so to speak for the first question, which is essentially your CEO story. So trying to figure out a little bit more about why you started your business.

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Jason Patel 1:30

Yeah, absolutely, and I'd love to share it with your audience. when I was a student at George Washington University, I was a working student, which meant that I had to work jobs every year, every semester in order to pay my bills. When I was a junior, I took a job as a career ambassador and that basically means that you help students write resumes and cover letters, and prepare them for interviews and graduate school, as they take the next step of their lives. I thought this job was going to be one of those jobs while working for a semester, getting paid, paying my bills, and then just moving on with it.

But it turns out, it awakened this fire, this passion inside of me that I loved building people, I love building young people and old people, anyone who wants to work for themselves and better themselves and pursue new opportunities. I loved helping those people. It's a very American concept that I found, and it's something that I became one with. As I left GW with all of my skills and the College and Career space, I began volunteering around the Washington DC community because GW was located in the heart of Washington, DC. I wanted to become more a part of the DC community and help all the people who have been here for so long, but not just the natives, the veterans, and then anyone else really who wanted to better lives and pursue new opportunities.

So I volunteered to help young men with college and career prep, and a kid that I was tutoring, I helped him with his college admissions, college selection, his essays, I just guided him through the right things, helped him structure deadlines, and dates, and mentored him through some of the questions and things not to say when you're writing an essay. It turns out that he ended up getting a full ride to one of the top schools in the country for robotics and biotech, very smart.

His mom, wanted me to start a business so I could actually help more people, she implored me and encouraged me to do this. She's our biggest fan today. And so transition was born. Not only do we provide students with college admissions, mentorship, and other services, but we also donate a portion of our profits to underserved students and veterans who are in need of college and career assistance. So I've been doing this for a couple of years. Now it's growing, we have a 100% satisfaction rate with customers, and all is going well, despite many of the struggles that business owners inevitably face.

Gresham Harkless 3:46

Yeah, that's awesome and it's an awesome story, how you've been able to kind of have the universe so to speak sometimes puts you in the right place at the right time with the right people, so that you can kind of build this business and make the impact that you are making on the DC area, but also on the overall world.

I wanted to drill a little bit deeper to ask you a little bit more about what exactly you're doing with the transition. How are you serving your clients and your customers?

Jason Patel 4:08

Well, absolutely. So a lot of this stuff is a lot of mentorship and guidance. So what we do is that when a student comes to us, or parents and students they come to us, what we do is that we set up a structure and a sort of helping ecosystem around them. So we've helped set up deadlines, we pursue different types of applications, we check the essays, and essentially, it's an end-to-end solution. So from the beginning of when you need college application assistance to when you're all the way done with your interview prep, we help with all of that for one flat fee.

We don't charge hourly and that's to tell parents that we're incentivized to make quick, efficient, and very effective work and it's also all value-based. And that is all to say that we care very much about results and the guidance that we give them so we're a very process-based company that is focused on outputs. That has helped us create a process and a methodology for helping students that have given us such a great success rate with our clients. When it comes to serving the students specifically, as I mentioned before, we take a look at their applications, tell them what they're doing wrong, we guide them in the right direction, but we never tell them what to say, because that's unethical, and we're very ethical, honestly, based company.

The second part is that you want the student's voice to flourish in the application and the essays you want their desires, their ambitions, or coat their themes, background, their struggles, or setbacks, to really echo throughout the application. Because when it's all said and done, you want the application to be organic and holistic, you don't want it when someone interferes with this and that. So what we try to do is just try to bring out the student's voice. And we try to help promote their views and all the things that they learned throughout their young lives. So we take a lot of pride in doing that.

Because there are many students out there who are nervous about being judged. They might not want their parents to know about certain things. They don't know whether they're saying the right thing or elucidating it in the correct way. So we take pride in mentoring and guiding students in the right direction.

Gresham Harkless 6:16

Yeah, that's a huge thing. And obviously, hearing on the first client, I guess, an official client that you've worked with, you've had enormous success. So it's great that you're being able to do that, to set these young professionals up for their future lives and their careers.

So I want to drill a little bit deeper and ask you for what I would call your secret sauce, or kind of like, what do you feel makes your organization unique?

Jason Patel 6:38

Absolutely. I am a firm believer in fundamental laws. I'm a firm believer in keeping things simple and taking all of the pain and the anxiety away from students, and parents. So what we believe are our secrets, I believe our secret sauce is excellent customer service, plus excellent management of all the student's assets and deadlines, in order to reduce their anxiety, and reduce the parent's anxiety in the process. Because ultimately, what we're doing here, it's a thing where parents are nervous about this, and students are anxious about this. We are that friend in a dark forest or that friend who is helping guide the way in a very tumultuous, and anxiety-driven time in the student's and parent's lives. That's what the secret sauce is.

There's a technology that we use. There are different processes that we have, different methods, we have our own curriculum, but I really fundamentally believe that when you go down, you drill down to the heart of the business, it's great people, giving great customer service, managing the students well, answering all the parent's questions, and just taking all the anxiety away from their lives, a lot of your listeners and even you might be saying, well, a lot of companies do that. Well, a lot of companies pledged to do that fewer companies actually follow through on it.

What I'm very big is what I tell all of our people in the company to do is that I want them to focus on creating the magic and taking the anxiety out of the student's life, they should see this as effortless while you're pouring in a lot of effort to help the student manage that anxiety and all the troubles that come with this tumultuous time. I think that's the magic. That's very simple.

Gresham Harkless 8:20

Yeah, I love that you kind of laid it out that way, it is very simple to lay out, but very few people are able to actually execute it. So it's awesome that you guys are actually executing that because a lot of people say it, but not a lot of people actually follow through with it. So it's great to hear that you and your team are able to do that for yourself and also for the students themselves.

Jason Patel 8:40

If I may add what I'm very passionate about is that when it comes down to it, I think a lot of companies that promise these high and mighty things, or they talk about complex solutions, maybe in order to perform a bait and switch on the customer, or just to obfuscate some shortcomings of the company. I believe honesty and ethics, those two are the best policies.

If you could lay everything out there and just promise to do your best and provide the best customer service, customers really appreciate and react to that. So I'm very big on those couple of things.

Gresham Harkless 9:11

Yeah, I definitely agree with you here. A lot of clients and customers are becoming really drawn to I should say authenticity and be transparent and being able to say that, you know, this is what we're going to do, hopefully, we'll be able to accomplish this. It kind of sets your business and your company up to be one of those ethical companies, in which people inherently want to work and do business. So that's awesome that you're able to do that.

I wanted to ask you now about like what I call a CEO hack. This might be a book, it might be an app, or might be a habit that you have, but that is something that you do that helps to make you more effective and efficient as a business owner.

Jason Patel 9:44

I think a big hack is it's simple in design and simple in approach, but it's difficult in execution. I think a huge huge hack that I have, it's been very important to me in my life has been the practice of stoicism in competition. Because what that is all to say is that when good things happen, when bad things happen, they keep on marching forward, this world and everything that we're in, can seem very complex but ultimately people just want to do the best with their lives as a business. It's your job to help them because you'll reap the rewards of that later on.

So when it comes down to it, I really implore other CEOs, other business owners other first-time founders, and entrepreneurs, just to take this mindset that there are going to be failures and setbacks and challenges that come along the way. Don't let those things break you. Human beings are, very hard creatures, we are creatures that have competed and survived terrible things. Throughout history there have been women who marched and men who stormed beaches and who have changed the world for the better. What's happening in front of you, it may seem tough, but you got to put your head down, you got to keep going. Don't get too high off, success doesn't get too low off of failure, you just have to keep moving forward to drive toward the mission, and hope for the best because we live in weird times right now.

A lot of people talk about being your best self and promoting a better business or politics or people. I'm a firm believer that you know, heroism and public service is probably the ultimate thing someone can do for their country or community running into a burning building or fighting overseas and war. But as average civilians like us, what we can do is be the best version of ourselves in politics and business, because that allows us to be better toward each other. If you're good to yourself, and you don't beat yourself up over the failures, you will be able to perform better in business, perform better in the face of failure, and your products, your model all the messages using to into making better your business will eventually flourish.

It'll do great things for yourself and for your customers.

Gresham Harkless 11:55

That makes perfect sense. Yeah, never get too high or too low. And making sure to always continue to press on and persevere despite what good or bad may happen is phenomenal advice.

I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. This might be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice that you might have already touched on. But you might have something else that you want to add to what you said before about how people can be more effective and efficient as entrepreneurs and business owners.

Jason Patel 12:20

Sure. And I'll make this quick because I know I've been going on and not making a schedule and trying to fit something you love outside of business into your daily schedule. As you mentioned in the intro, I'm a martial artist. I've fought for a national title in white Thai boxing. Now I'm a submission wrestler and Brazilian Jui-Jitsu, martial artist. I love competition. I love fighting. I love being in the thick of things.

I do that, I practice every day if I'm not doing that I'm Olympic lifting because I just enjoy the struggle. I enjoy the competition behind that. So I take time out of my busy day to do those things because I love it. And I had that schedule to make sure my day was structured, I get up, I stretch, I have my coffee, I do my reading with a Wall Street Journal and a couple of other outlets. Then I get to work and having that structure allows you to keep composure, keep a lifestyle composure in the face of all the things that will be flying in your face when things inevitably get tough.

Gresham Harkless 13:15

That's very, very true. I think that's a phenomenal CEO Nugget. Because often there are so many things that happen. But if you can stay true to the plan, stay true to your time blocking or whatever you're doing in your schedule, so to speak, then that can make you more effective and efficient. You can get everything you want to get done. But also make sure that you take care of the most important things in your life. So I think that's a phenomenal nugget.

What I wanted to ask you now is probably one of my favorite questions, which is kind of like the definition of what it means to be a CEO. By having different types of CEOs on the podcast, we're hoping to kind of redefine what that means. So I'm hoping that you can kind of give us an insight into what you would say and how you would define being a CEO,

Jason Patel 13:53

Taking responsibility for the failures, giving credit to your people, when we succeed together, and putting yourself out there for the whole world to see, failing if necessary. But getting back on that saddle when things get tough, or when you fail, and then riding your horse to victory. Because ultimately, this is a difficult thing. But you choose this life. And if you choose this life, you have to persevere. You have to lead the right way. And you have to show your people the right way to do things. That's why leading from the front, and that's what I think it's all about.

Gresham Harkless 14:24

I love it.  Well, Jason, I truly appreciate you taking some time out of your schedule to kind of speak with us. I wanted to give you the mic so to speak one more time to see if there's anything additional you want to let our readers and our listeners know and then how people can best get a hold of you.

Jason Patel 14:38

Absolutely. I love your publication CEO Blog Nation. I'm on it almost every day as part of my daily reading and I'm assuming there are many other young entrepreneurs or young people who are artists out there and I just want to tell them that it is difficult. You are going to fail, you will most likely fail when you want to start your own thing or start your own venture or put yourself out there. I know people who will say bad things But those people, don't matter to people on social media, people who say bad things don't matter.

What matters is the man in the arena who's willing to put himself out there for the whole world to see. You fail, you fail, you become better at it, you learn from your failures and you move forward, you will be better for this experience. Then in terms of contacting me, you can visit our website www.transizion.com You can drop us a line at one of the emails that are presented there. Or you can also hit me up on Instagram, @jasonpatel13.

I'd love to answer any of your questions about entrepreneurship, life business, and martial arts, if you hit me up on one of those channels, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

Gresham Harkless 15:42

No problem. Thank you. I appreciate all the words of wisdom that you provided but also all the awesome things that you're doing for the world. So hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day and anybody that wants to hear from or wants to contact you will have those links in the show notes as well.

Jason Patel 15:55

Fantastic.

Outro 15:57

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless.

Thank you for listening.

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