Scaling to $10 Million from Kentucky: Steve Huey, CEO of Capture Higher Ed (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How did you acquire these customers? Can you get a bit more granular?

Steve Huey: Certainly. We were six co-founders. Two of the co-founders were sales people that had deep relationships with many schools. They simply called their best customers and said, “We have a new company. We’re doing this. We explained our strategy to them.” They agreed to test us. We signed one-year agreements when the industry average was three. We put ourselves out there and we said, “We’re going to do better for you than anyone else has done.”

For the first year, we worked hard and probably gave $200,000 worth of value. It proved that our methodology worked. I was not working day to day on the business at that time. I remember when in our first big meeting in May of the following year, I was amazed at the figures. Using our solution, many of the schools we worked with experienced a 2x increase in number of applicants. I remember sitting there and thinking, “This actually works.” It’s always surprising. I’ve done 5 to 10 businesses now. There’s always that moment where you say, “This actually works!” That was that moment for me. I decided at that moment that I wanted to be more involved in the business because I thought I could help grow the business. Shortly thereafter, I joined full time.

Sramana Mitra: When you started this, did you have some technology that you were applying to achieve this?

Steve Huey: I think this is one of the biggest lessons for me. I joined the company as its CEO full-time, starting August of 2012. From May to August, I was tidying up my affairs with my previous company. When I started, I really had to immerse myself in the art or science of enrolment management to 16-year-olds, which is very different from 35-year-old women who have kids. That was the primary demographic of people that do online education. I was staring at my whiteboard. I think that was probably in January. I was going through the elements of what we had. I said, “We have better technology.”

What I realized was the way we were pulling data in and the way we used the data was actually the key to our success. We would go to databases of everybody trying to go to college. They either take the SAT or ACT. Very few people who go to college don’t take one of the two testing services. Our approach of pulling data out of SAT and ACT was that instead of running one query on the database, we would run 200 different queries and we would append the search criteria to the data records. We developed a richer profile of these prospective students. It was my eureka moment.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Scaling to $10 Million from Kentucky: Steve Huey, CEO of Capture Higher Ed
1 2 3 4 5 6 7