Starting a business can be daunting, but fledgling entrepreneurs Ariel Yak Sin Nee and Saagar Kulkarni don’t seem worried. The Weinberg sophomores, who are on the brink of launching a new tutoring company at Northwestern, seem confident that NUTutors won’t become another forgotten statistic.
“We conducted all the research, we called up parents, we talked to high school students,” said Yak Sin Nee, vice president of operations and marketing strategist for NUTutors. “There seems to be a very strong interest.”
This fall, NUTutors expects to begin offering academic tutoring and SAT/ACT preparation to local middle school and high school students. According to Kulkarni and Yak Sin Nee, who together make up the executive board, NUTutors has “the Northwestern brand.”
“Our students, being from the same generation as those high school students, are able to connect and experience concepts at the same level,” Yak Sin Nee said. “We’re able to offer personalized tutoring services.”
NUTutors has something else to offer: comparatively low-cost tutoring services. Companies such as Kaplan, Inc. and the Princeton Review charge high prices for programs such as SAT prep courses and academic tutoring. Kulkarni and Yak Sin Nee claim they can do better – for significantly lower prices.
“We’re pretty much half [the cost of] most competitors,” Kulkarni said. “Kaplan and Princeton charge around $100 per hour for private tutoring. People are getting ripped off.”
Kaplan actually charges more, according to information provided by its website: The cost of a private SAT tutor ranges from approximately $122 per hour to $135 per hour. Princeton Review charges between $105 and $315 per hour for similar services. The cost-per-hour of private tutoring with NUTutors: $40 to $50.
Creating NUTutors
Kulkarni and Yak Sin Nee were recruited by Northwestern Student Holdings (NSH) to start NUTutors. NSH operates like a venture capital firm, according to incoming co-CEO Ravi Umarji, a McCormick sophomore.
“We wanted to nurture students’ entrepreneurial ideas and motivations and give them capital to watch it succeed, to help them bring their ideas to fruition,” Umarji said.
Members of NSH researched which companies have succeeded at other universities — like Columbia University Tutoring and Translating Agency (CUTTA) — and analyzed whether a similar company would be successful at Northwestern. They then recruited Kulkarni and Yak Sin Nee from more than 30 applicants to run NUTutors.
Current NSH CEO Sean Caffery pointed out that neither Kulkarni nor Yak Sin Nee actually own NUTutors. Northwestern owns all of the companies in which NSH invests, according to Caffery, a Weinberg senior.
“The inherent problem with student-run businesses is that there’s such high turnover. People are only at a school for four years,” Caffery said. “We’re not here to take students’ ideas. We’re here to support students. When it comes time for them to graduate and move on, NSH is a functioning body to help support their business past their time at Northwestern.”
Part of the essential support for student businesses comes from the NSH Board of Directors. The Board includes a lifetime Northwestern trustee, two industrial engineering professors, a faculty member of the Economics Department and Northwestern alums with successful marketing careers.
“It’s an incredibly difficult thing to start a business,” Umarji said. “I don’t have VC [venture capital] experience. I don’t have private equity experience. I’ve never started a business. What gives me the substance and knowledge to advise any of that? Nothing. And I can’t… Our Board of Directors is so experienced, and they’re so willing to roll up their sleeves and get in the trenches with us.”
What it takes to start a business with NSH
According to Caffery, you don’t have to be an Economics major to start a business, especially if you start your business under the guidance of NSH.
“We help either teach you the skill sets necessary to succeed with business, or we help find a management team that you can work with,” Caffery said. “We’ll help provide the financing, we’ll give them [students] the guidance, but we really want the students running the companies to be running the companies.”
According to Caffery, the majority of the business plans came from Kulkarni and Yak Sin Nee. They presented their plans to the Board of Directors in March, then presented them again after receiving commentary. The proposal ended up receiving partial funding from NSH, to be put towards recruitment and advertising, and the tutoring business expects to receive full funding later this year.
“I’ve worked for businesses, but I’ve never been this involved in starting one,” Kulkarni said. “You can’t get this kind of hands-on experience anywhere else.”
NUTutors hiring
The student-run company just opened recruitment for tutors, and is giving Northwestern students a pretty substantial incentive to apply: a $20- to-$30 per hour tutoring salary.
“It’s by far the best wage on campus,” said Kulkarni, NUTutors president and financial officer.
That kind of wage is designed to attract a large number of applicants. But according to the executive board, the recruitment process if far from lax, and will include a mock-tutoring case. Yak Sin Nee said that a rigorous recruitment process is conducive to ensuring the company’s success.
“We don’t want parents to perceive us as a student-run company,” Yak Sin Nee said. “We’re not just looking for purely good grades, but whether that person has the ability to teach and communicate concepts in a very effective manner.”
NUTutors is open to hiring Northwestern students from a variety of disciplines, but the company is especially interested in hiring tutors from SESP.
“Students studying to be high school teachers would obviously be good tutors,” Kulkarni said.