IAM1815 – Founder Helps Prepare Students with His College Admissions and Mentorship Company

Episode: https://iamceo.co/2018/07/16/030-founder-helps-prepare-students-with-his-college-admissions-mentorship-company/

Transcription:

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Jason Patel Teaser 00:00

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 love helping those people. And it's a very American concept that I found and it's something that I became one with.

Intro 00:15

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 00:40

Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I appreciate you listening to this episode. If you've been listening this year, you know that we've hit 1600 episodes at the beginning of this year. We're doing something a little bit different where we're repurposing our favorite episodes around certain categories, topics, or as I like to call them, business pillars that we think are going to be extremely impactful for CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business owners, just like you. What I like to call the CB nation architects who are looking to level up their organizations.

This month, we are focusing on CEO Hacks and CEO Nuggets. This is by far one of my favorite questions I asked on the show. In other words, I asked, what are the apps, books, and habits that make you more effective and efficient. Those were the CEO Hacks. Then I asked for a word of wisdom or a piece of advice or something that you might tell your younger business self. If you were to hop into a time machine and those were the CEO Nuggets. That's what we'll focus on this month and some of the top ones that can instantly impact your business.

I love all the questions, but with every episode, I felt I would walk away with something I could look at and implement right there to save the precious resources, time, and money, Or I would also learn about the advice, tips, and tidbits or tools of the trade on how to level up our organization. So you'll hear some of these this month. So sit back and enjoy this special episode of the I AM CEO podcast.

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 Transizion. Jason, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Jason Patel 02:16

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

Gresham Harkless 02:19

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

Jason is the founder of Transizion, a 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 jujitsu 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.

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

Jason Patel 02:55

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

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Gresham Harkless 02:57

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. What I wanted to do was just give you the floor, 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.

Jason Patel 03:07

Yeah, absolutely and I'd love to share 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. And when I was a junior, I took a job as a career ambassador. 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 where I'll work it for a semester, get paid, pay my bills, and then just move 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 love helping those people and 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 in the college and career space, I began volunteering around the Washington, D. C. community because GW is located in the heart of Washington, D. C. I wanted to become more a part of the D. C. community and help all the people who've been here for so long. Not just, the natives, the veterans, and anyone else really who wanted to better their 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 and his mom wanted me to start a business so I could actually help more people. She even poured me and encouraged me to do this. She's our biggest fan today.

So Transizion was born and not only do we provide students with college admissions and 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. All is going well, despite many of the struggles that business owners inevitably face.

Gresham Harkless 05:20

Yeah, that's awesome. So I wanted to drill a little bit deeper to ask you a little bit more about what exactly you're doing with Transizion. How are you serving your clients and your customers?

Jason Patel 05:27

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 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. So we don't charge it hourly.

That's to tell parents that every steps were incentivized to make quick, efficient, and very effective work. 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, and that has helped us create a process and a methodology to helping students that has 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 one, that's unethical and we're a very ethical honesty-based company, and 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, their cult, their themes, their background, their struggles, and their 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 someone's interference with this and that. So what we try to do is we 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. We take a lot of pride in doing that because there are many students out there who are nervous of 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 07:31

Yeah, that's a huge thing. And obviously, I'm hearing on the first client, an unofficial client that you 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 in their careers.

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

Jason Patel 07:52

Absolutely. I'm a firm believer in fundamental laws, and I'm a firm believer in keeping things simple and taking all of the pain and anxiety away from students and parents. So what we believe is our secret, and what I believe our secret sauce is, is excellent customer service. Plus excellent management of all the students, 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 that parents are nervous about, these students are anxious about this, we are that friend in a dark forest who is helping guide the way in a very tumultuous and anxiety-driven time in the student's and parents' lives, and 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 a lot of companies do that, lot of companies pledge to do that. Fewer companies actually follow through on it. What I'm very big on and 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 lives.

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 and it's very simple.

Gresham Harkless 09:31

Yeah. I love that you laid it out that way. It is very simple kind of layout, but very few people are able to actually execute it.

Jason Patel 09:38

And if I may add what I'm very passionate about is that when it comes down to it, I think a lot of companies, they 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 in 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 10:09

Yeah, I definitely agree with that. So I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO hack. This might be a book, it might be an app, or it might be a habit that you have. But the idea is it's something that you do that helps to make you more effective and efficient as a business owner.

Jason Patel 10:23

I think a big hack. It's simple in design and simple in approach, but it's difficult in execution. I think a huge, huge hack that I have that's been very important to my life has been the practice of stoicism in competition, because that is all to say. Is that when good things happen, when bad things happen, you keep on marching forward, this world and everything that we're in, it 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, the 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've stormed beaches and who've changed the world for the better.

What's happening in front of you, may seem tough, but you got to put your head down. You got to keep going. Don't get too high off a success, don't get too low off of a failure. You just have to keep moving forward. Stay driven toward the mission and hope for the best because we live in weird times right now. There are a lot of people talking about being your best self and promoting a better business or politics for people. I'm a firm believer that, 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 in 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 product, your model, all the methods you use it into making better your business will eventually flourish and it'll do great things for yourself and for your customers.

Gresham Harkless 12:31

That makes perfect sense. So 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've already 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 12:46

Sure. And I'll make this quick because I know I've been going on and on. Make a schedule and try 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 Muay Thai boxing, and now I'm a submission wrestler and Brazilian Jiu-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 and I enjoy the competition behind that. So I take time out of my busy day to do those things because I love it. I have that schedule to make sure my day is structured. I get up, I stretch, have my coffee, I do my reading with the Wall Street Journal and a couple of other outlets, and then I get to work.

Having that structure allows you to keep composure, keep a lifestyle of composure in the face of all the things that will be flying in your face when things inevitably get tough.

Gresham Harkless 13:42

That's very, very true. I think that's a phenomenal CEO nugget because often there are so many things happening, 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 and 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.

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

Jason Patel 14:17

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. And that's by leading from the front. That's what I think it's all about.

Gresham Harkless 14:48

I love it. Jason, I truly appreciate you taking some time out of your schedule to 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 ahold of you.

Jason Patel 15:01

Absolutely. I love your publication CEO blog nation. I'm on it almost every day. It's a part of my daily reading and I'm assuming there are many other young entrepreneurs or young people who are artists out there. 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 and the people who will say bad things, but those people will. They don't matter.

The people on social media, people who say bad things, they 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. If 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 at transizion.com. You can drop us a line at one of the emails that are presented there. You can also hit me up on Instagram JasonPatel13. I'd love to answer any of your questions about entrepreneurship, life, business, or martial arts if you hit me up on one of those channels.

Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

Gresham Harkless 16:04

No problem. Thank you and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day and anybody that wants to hear or wants to contact you, we'll have those links in the show notes as well.

Jason Patel 16:13

Fantastic.

Outro 16:14

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.

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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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