The Promise of a Pencil (Chapters 1+2)

Mantra 16 READ THE SIGNS ALONG THE PATH

Mantra 16

READ THE SIGNS ALONG THE PATH

After your third year at Bain's New York office, nearly every member of the class is expected to either go on to business school and then return to the company, or avoid business school and go to work elsewhere. Recruiters knew this, so they came after us aggressively. I received calls every few days from top-tier private equity firms like Blackstone and KKR offering positions that promised the potential to make $250,000 for the first year on the job. One of these places was supposed to be the next stop on my path, providing the over-the-top earnings that I had dreamed of as a kid. For my coworkers who weren't interested in those jobs, slots at Harvard's and Stanford's prestigious business school programs awaited.

But I didn't even consider applying to any of those places. I loved what I was doing with PoP and wanted to give it a little more time to see its full potential through. I decided I would stay at Bain through August to complete the third and final year of the associate consultant program, then work full-time for one year on PoP, then determine what would come next.

As right as it seemed to return to my job, an amazing but time-consuming opportunity for PoP had just cropped up. Chase launched its first Community Giving program, which offered donations of up to $1 million to nonprofits that received the most votes through a social media campaign. Social giving was being democratized for the first time, and it couldn't have come at a more opportune moment.

I was not on Twitter, but the Chase Community Giving program gave us the impetus to sign up. A team of ten volunteers took rotations throughout the day to post on PoP's account, interacting directly with every supporter we could find. We had friends change their profile pictures to a graphic we created saying "I voted for PoP" with the URL to the voting page. They created massive Facebook event pages that invited tens of thousands of people to vote on our behalf. After two weeks of campaigning, we made it into the final round.

To prepare, I built a Bain-style Excel model to determine the likely front-runners. It would normally have taken me a day or two to fill in all the data fields (e.g., website rating, Facebook Cause members, Twitter followers), but I enlisted assistance. I put up a Facebook status saying, Who can spare a few hours to do some virtual volunteer research for PoP? Within minutes, I had twenty volunteers from California to Cambodia that I could assign five organizations each. Two hours later, I aggregated their collective research and the model was complete. We had crowdsourced our first research project.

The results showed that we'd most likely be able to finish in the top twenty. If we placed first, then we would win $1 million. Second through sixth meant $100,000. All I could think about was funding the third school, and then our fourth, and then our fifth. Five schools, I started to think, that would be crazy.

As I had expected when I left on my externship, there were no active cases leading into the holidays, so I was tasked with client-development research. When they finally staffed me on a bigger case, I was assigned to work remotely for a manager who was living in Boston. They asked me to complete a detailed analysis of a $3 billion potential client and produce the forty-slide "redbook" that would be used to brief the three senior partners who would be pitching the company.

That same week, the final round of the Chase Community Giving campaign launched. When I started pulling together the deck for the Bain pitch, I felt like pulling out my hair. I emailed my manager to tell her I was too sick to work, but that wasn't why I barely returned her emails for the next ten days. My priorities were elsewhere.

PoP was up against huge organizations with long histories and enormous mailing lists, but Brad worked with me to create a microsite that highlighted and offered prizes to the supporters who referred the most votes. We activated an army of advocates who relentlessly recruited their friends. We hit the number two spot on the opening day of the final round. By tapping into several major blog networks and social media influencers, we stayed in that position for the next three days of the competition.