Consult Your Community

Kiron is the CEO and Founder of Consult Your Community. After witnessing the turnover of small businesses surrounding her college campus and seeing the impact young people were making as startup founders in Silicon Valley, Kiron started a nonprofit that  provides pro bono consulting services to small businesses now in over 26 college communities across America. An avid reader and writer, she spends her spare time writing about young community builders in the Huffington Post, where she was invited to blog after cold emailing Arianna Huffington. For the last 6 years, she and her 15-person volunteer team have run Consult Your Community while working full time jobs across the consulting, banking, and tech industries. She started her career as a healthcare management consultant at PwC before moving into workforce strategy & analytics at Google.

Kiron's Portfolio of Values

Consult Your Community's mission is to create economic breakthrough for women and minority small business owners by connecting them with a volunteer workforce to solve their biggest strategic challenges (3). During this racial and health pandemic, we are committed to extending the longevity of each black-owned business we work with to outlast the pandemic (1). After outreach to hundreds of businesses in 32 cities, 59% of 78 respondents said they expected to last <6 months: collectively 2,300 jobs lost based on their estimates. Now more than ever, data- and results-driven strategies are needed locally. With its scale and experience, CYC is uniquely positioned to provide free business consulting. In order to be effective at scale, we need to build end-to-end technical infrastructure to solicit inbound application requests from businesses, route them to volunteers based on business viability eligibility criteria, track operational checkpoints, and record evidence of financial success. (2)

Check out our work in our 2019 impact report

Scale of Problem (Total Addressable Market)

There are 1.1 million minority-owned small businesses employing 8.7M people in the United States. They are 2x as likely to be classified as “distressed” than nonminority-owned small businesses (McKinsey). That’s particularly concerning, since the US Federal Reserve also indicates that distressed companies are 3x as likely as healthy businesses to close because of a two-month revenue shock. Of 78 small businesses we surveyed across 32 cities, only 11% said they expected to make it past the year.

Current Operational Scale

Our organization currently helps 115 business annually in 26 college communities. With a 5-person chapter growth team, we can grow to 5-7 additional locations each year, each which adds an additional 50-60 businesses we can serve annually. 

Our Problem Statement: Increase the longevity of minority-owned small businesses by 2x their original estimated trajectory by implementing online sales, social media, and operational improvement strategies to increase profit.

Consult Your Community provides small businesses with a 5 person team that works with them over 3 months (~600 hrs/business) on marketing, operations, or growth strategy. We mobilize teams of undergrads to leverage their education, digital fluency, mentorship networks, and knowledge as customers to empower small business owners. Last year, our 400-person volunteer org delivered over 60,000 hours and approximately $1.1 million dollars in pro bono counsel.

Small business owners, often lacking the resources and time for strategic planning, receive the help they need through CYC. Students get the opportunity to see how a business runs from the ground up. Project teams are mentored by experienced faculty or professionals from top-tier firms.

As an example of the success of this model and the power of young people to affect change in their communities, students at the UT Austin chapter helped transition Blenders & Bowls, an acai bowl food truck, into a brick-and-mortar store through a digital marketing strategy to test demand. This business has since expanded to multiple locations in the city of Austin. CYC aims to inspire students across America to strengthen small businesses that comprise the fabric of the national economy.

• Students: We mobilize 400 students to not merely be customers of local businesses but counselors invested in contributing to the local economy
• Universities: We establish entrepreneurial hubs/experiential learning programs in 26 schools that don't have the resources or have not set the strategic priority to build that capacity, while focusing on the immediate community and building empathy in the next generation of leaders
• Small Businesses (112; ~5600 estimated employees): Difficult macroeconomic conditions such as reduced consumer spending during the pandemic and shortage of skilled labor to fill hiring needs can suppress economic potential. Minority-owned business owners may also experience lack of training/time for strategic planning, lack of capital, and missed investment opportunities. Big firms invest heavily in analytics to target individual customers. Small firms can miss their chance to reach local customers. Denied access to capital at higher rates (women receive only 12% of all credit - NAWBO 2016)), many struggle to stay in business on top of the typical challenges like staff turnover and local competition.
• We conduct monthly "congress calls" with chapter leaders and leverage the operations team to understand local dynamics. This fall, we plan to roll out national impact surveys to directly hear from businesses.

Problem: Black-/Latinx-owned businesses are disproportionately more likely to close down due to the impact of COVID-19 because they are in industries most impacted by the pandemic and because of operational constraints (e.g., food services & retail). This impacts the community since they are more likely to offer community services like free delivery and adjusted hours for elderly based a on recent McKinsey survey.

Project: We are connecting a digitally savvy talent pool with the people that are most in need of digital sales help and giving students a path forward to using their skills to advance racial equity.

CYC started out in a 2013 Leadership Seminar at UC Berkeley in Professor Dan Mulhern's class. He connected me with a senior who was graduating and joining a consulting firm after graduation who initially had the idea to start an on campus consulting club for small businesses (SBs). As there were other organizations focused on helping larger companies and startups, we both agreed there was bigger opportunity for students to help SBs most. As the Berkeley chapter president, I led a team of 5 students working in the undergraduate student lounge over the summer after our internships and summer classes. We all worked hard from 5-10 PM everyday to build a series of handbooks on marketing and consulting curriculum. My cofounder leveraged these to conduct outreach at neighboring universities in parallel. Once we graduated, no one initially had a plan to stay involved. Without national direction or coaching, the remaining chapters dwindled (15 "startups" to 4). When I moved to New York, the Columbia University chapter founders proposed reviving the organization and we decided to rebuild the organization, create more rigorous standards for selection, certification, and growth, while sustainably growing the organization from 2015-2019 from 4 to 26 universities.

I am an immigrant and daughter of immigrants who came to this country to pursue the American Dream. My dad wanted to globally scale the company my grandfather had started in India. While that did not come to pass, he always had an entrepreneurial spirit and even to this day is thinking of a new company to start. I grew up with him talking to any friendly shop owner who opined often about their business or founding story. When I was in middle school, he recommended that I help a local dry cleaner. He made the recommendation first in front of the dry cleaner so I consequently spent a week cramming web design fundamentals in a 60 hr. week. I designed and promoted the site which eventually led to the local mayor visiting the business. If as a middle schooler I could bring value to the community, why not thousands of college students in America's best universities? At UC Berkeley, I was inspired by the talent of my fellow students who would design apps in their free time and I thought to myself, "why can't we leverage these bright minds for people in our community who needs it most?"

Since 2013, our team has operated with 0% overhead and run purely on pro bono support from a dynamic volunteer base of over 300-400 students, MBAs, faculty mentors, and industry professionals from top firms. A third of our 15 person team have professionally grown up with this organization over 7 years alongside long hours in our early careers in investment banking and consulting. I am so proud of having a team that has grit like I have never seen. Our team represents a cross-section of many industries like consulting, health, tech, and finance and moonlights CYC while working at companies like Bain & Co., PwC, Google, and Bridgewater Associates. Through it all, we set up a structure to empower ~1700 student volunteers to provide 354,000 hours of pro bono consulting for local small businesses since 2013. With this wealth of experience and networks (many of us are 5-6 years out of college), we are confident we can coach our student volunteers to think more critically about impact. We developed 20 hours of curriculum for them this summer and led them to take 40 hrs of digital skills training. Lastly, our national organizing team reflects the makeup of those we serve: majority-female, minority, and immigrant. I am proud of my part in building this team and creating a psychologically safe environment such that 15 people living in 10 states can virtually lead one of the largest student organizations in America.

On June 1, we began our first virtual internship and brought together nearly 50 volunteers from 18 universities to help small businesses impacted by COVID-19. That week was also one of the first weeks of protests following the murder of George Floyd, so naturally all plans went out the window. Many of our volunteers felt angry and helpless. Within 2 days, I set up a discussion forum and invited Goodwill's Global DEI Leader to listen in and hear students processing their reactions to the news and understand what they can do to help the Black community through their work. We talked about the pressure to act when it is unclear what the right path forward is. Kim mentioned something powerful that I think is important for all activists: “Take the space, the grace, and the time” to act. A month later, not wanting these messages to fall to the wayside, I spent my long weekend researching 19 academic papers and synthesizing 7 years in community organizing into a 100-page action guide on antiracism, which has since been shared on LinkedIn by executives from PwC, Walgreens, Bank of America and more.

I am not afraid to stand up for my convictions, even if that means directly speaking to individuals with power and influence. An example of this was when I emailed Arianna Huffington directly in 2016 because I believed the coverage of vaccines in layman's terms was (and continues to be) a sore gap in the news. I attached an article I had written for the occasion in approachable language and sent it to her as well as 30 other editors. Within a week, she responded and invited me to start blogging on her site. Based on other events in 2016, I used the platform to combat the narrative in some media outlets that immigrants were job-takers. While balancing a full-time job and Consult Your Community on the side, I interviewed 7 immigrant community builders and tried to give them "The New Yorker treatment", going on to launch of a 9-article campaign that was featured on the Impact section, received 200,000+ views on social media, and acknowledgement from celebrities and influencers like Daniel Roth, LinkedIn’s Editor in Chief, America Ferrera (Ugly Betty), Javier Muñoz (who plays Hamilton in Hamilton: The Musical), and others.

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Based on a competitive market scan, many existing capital and advisory resources kickstart or support early-stage startups over mature or struggling small businesses, but there is no full-service organization targeting mature small businesses in need of both capital and counsel. None currently operate in the university context on a national scale. Companies now tout the power of big data, but CYC offers clients and donors the power of “small data”: high-touch/customer-sourced insight that drives growth strategy, operational improvement, and general management advisory.

•           Digital Divide: Millennials and Gen Z have grown up in the Information Age and are tech-savvy and resourceful and know how to maneuver around social media in ways that those who are much older are not familiar with. The average small business owner is 53 years old and not leveraging digital tools to grow their business

•           Customer Voice: Students are customers of small business services in college communities and are incentivized to want better products and services from local businesses

•           Access to Resources: University students have access to incredible professors, mentors, industry advisors, college resources which many small business owners do not have access to; very few are able to effectively procure and use coaching

•           Extra Support: Many small businesses are understaffed and could use a helping hand to not only advise on strategy but assist with operational execution

Our theory of change is that through targeted business coaching (provided by digitally-savvy millennials who are often customers of these businesses) to older small business owners, we can inspire better business practices which in turn means personal empowerment of the SB owner, increased profitability for that business, and on a larger scale, more economically resilient neighborhoods.

See a visual representation on the front page of our website

Assumes current rate of growth of 5-6 universities per year without full-time staff expansion and lean budget of <$10,000 for core operations

# of Students Served

• Current: 400
• In 1 Year: 450-470
• 5 Years: 1000

# of Small Business Served

• Current: 112
• In 1 Year: ~170
• 5 Years: ~415

# Lives Impacted (Businesses we serve tend to have <50 employees and we are excluding neighborhood impact and number of customers for simplicity)

• Current: 5600 employees + 112 businesses + 400 students = 6,112
• In 1 Year: 8500 employees + 170 businesses + 450 students = 9,120
• 5 Years: 20,750 employees + 415 businesses + 1000 students = 22,165

Within Next Year:Define & Improve small business engagement quality and impact so volunteers can achieve a Client Net Promoter Score of 90%+ , 70% of businesses clients stay in business, and have their longevity doubled thanks to CYC.

• Build deep national relationships with the Small Business Administration, local small business development centers, community development financial institutions, and municipal governments to support clients with partners after engagements are complete.
• Make technological investments in a small business-facing design portal to receive inbound applications from our target need demographic, route applications to available capacity, track small business project health, and publish real-time impact case studies

Increase revenue from $28,000 (FY 2019) to $100,000 to increase growth.

• Hire a part-time fundraiser and grant-writer to increase organizational capacity.

Sustain Consult Your Community growth rate of 5 locations/year in the midst of a pandemic

• Proactive sourcing of small business clients during summers
• Crisis planning task force of 7 volunteers to identify all gaps and provide guidebooks for chapter leaders on resolution

5 Years:

1. Codify experiences of hundreds of teams into knowledge management database to identify which strategies are most likely to drive improvements in small business growth
2. Increase # of small businesses by tripling our footprint in college communities from 26 to 51 college campuses, from 112 to 415 small businesses
3. Expand to 3 international locations after launching data-driven results database (1)
4. Centrally source 70% of our small business clients by becoming an official partner to the Small Business Administration and US Chamber of Commerce.

Financial: In the next year, the pandemic's impact on dampening the fundraising market and size of individual donations may limit our fundraising effectiveness as donors are increasingly selective with the causes they choose to fund.

Human Capital: New restrictions on international student visas could have far-ranging impact on the short-term culture and morale of our student volunteer teams. Even if students are able to continue virtually under some arrangement, the practical logistics of helping a business from a time zone halfway across the world will likely mean these students can no longer be part of CYC for the near-term. It is unclear how many our of volunteers this currently impacts.

Technical: In the next 5 years, if we want to provide a better experience and streamline our inbound application process for small businesses and students, we will need a portal and defined process for identifying, screening, routing, and waitlisting applications. This will be important as we centralize currently decentralized practices like small business sourcing that limit national visibility into our our ability to ensure that all small businesses we serve are scoped within our mission. In order for this to land, we also need to ensure a positive user experience for chapter leaders and without a database and workflow process, it will be cumbersome to manage an application load as our national brand grows (currently sustainable for <1000 applications).

Financial: Since our model relies on pro bono consulting and our largest value lies in our ability to attract and retain passionate undergraduate volunteers, which we do purely on word of mouth and spend-free social media, there is limited impact on our operational sustainability. That said, a dampening fundraising market may limit our potential growth since our national volunteer team will need to take on the burden of fundraising instead of outsourcing this work to a part-time grant writer. This risk is not business critical for sustainability, but will dampen our prospects for growth.

Human Capital: We have a 7-person volunteer intern team working on crisis planning that is currently working on ways to improve the volunteer recruitment timeline before students return in the fall. Since we expect some international students in leadership positions and because this would naturally disrupt their coordination, our interns are working on overcoming these barriers by starting our timeline for recruiting students and businesses in advance of the academic year's start.

Technical: If we are not able to invest in a technological investment in the short-term, we will prototype different parts of this technical solution: a front-end portal for small business applicants, limits on the number of applications we receive in a certain window, and a manual process for responding to these clients. While there are always switchover costs for making so many implementation changes, this will at least enable us to have elementary processes to service short-term demand.

Our student volunteer teams currently partner with local Chambers of Commerce on an ad hoc basis where the latter promotes them on social media to source small business clients. We are in the midst of exploring the feasibility and desirability of partnerships with community development financial institutions (CDFIs) that could refer small business applicants to us or provide ancillary services to businesses in need. Since these financial institutions are deeply embedded in local communities, they may also have a greater understanding of the capital needs of minority-owned businesses. 

Some organizations provide capital to early startups (Accion Venture Lab), but no full-service organization exists nationally to support mature small businesses with capital and counsel, and none currently operate in the university context on a national scale before CYC. Through a multi-sided platform connecting small businesses, undergraduates, and chambers of commerce, CYC offers clients and donors the power of “small data”: high-touch/customer-sourced insight that drives business growth and helps business owners make their products accessible and customized for success in their community. Our model works for the following reasons:

• Digital Divide: Millennials have grown up in the Information Age and are tech-savvy and resourceful and know how to maneuver around social media in ways that those who are much older are not familiar with
• Customer Voice: Students are customers of small business services in college communities and are incentivized to want better products and services from local businesses
• Access to Resources: University students have access to incredible professors, mentors, industry advisors, college resources
• Extra Support: Many small businesses are understaffed and could use a helping hand to not only advise on strategy but assist with operational execution

Service does not need to be about handouts. In fact, it shouldn’t be. Service is about collaboration. We strive to create inclusive collaboration within communities by mobilizing leaders who create results using empathy, active listening, and hard work.

Our model is naturally de-risked because many undergraduate students are able to leverage the resources of their university for basic needs and physical space to self-organize. However, most of the consulting work can happen virtually over low-cost virtual collaboration tools like Google Meet.

Most of our revenue to date has come from periodic grants and individual donations. To complement our revenue streams, we are considering leveraging our great network on the national organizing team and alumni to create professional skills training and charge non-volunteers as a donation strategy.

In the future, if we are able to materially show that we have increased small business revenue and ensured their financial sustainability, we have also considered charging a small percentage of these profits. Until the pandemic is over, we will not consider this. 

In FY2019 we raised $28,927 largely from 2 grants and individual donations.

In 2018, we were awarded the Global Good Fund/Diana Davis Spencer Foundation Fellowship of $20,000 and a remaining $5000 were disbursed in Q1 2019. We also received a $20,000 grant from PwC Charitable Foundation for sponsorship of a national conference we organized bringing together student volunteers and businesses across the country.

We also conduct fundraisers like the one we launched in 2020 to help support women-owned and minority-owned businesses impacted by COVID-19.

A majority of our expenses will go towards hiring contractors on Upwork as a result of strategies our volunteer consultants recommend based on their projects (a total of $10K).

With the funding available through The Elevate Prize, we can invest in technical infrastructure and organizational capacity to scale our programs across the country.

We estimate needing $36,000 for hiring a developer to build out an online portal and accompanying mobile app to solicit inbound application requests from businesses, route them to volunteers based on business viability eligibility criteria, track operational checkpoints, solicit real-time feedback from businesses we serve, solicit survey data to provide ground truths insights evolving customer preferences in local markets, and record evidence of financial success. 

$40,000 would help us invest in hiring a grant writer and fundraiser to build organizational capacity and hire part-time staff in the next 1-2 years to support operational growth and service quality improvements. We estimate this will enable us to apply for 40 grants, which is currently not possible with our current team structure.

The remaining $224,000 will be distributed to black-owned and minority-owned businesses through $1,000-10,000 grants. Volunteer consultants and national advisors will jointly decide which opportunities and businesses among our 115 annual clients are eligible to receive funds based on business viability and growth potential. With the promise of funds, we hope this attracts businesses that are more likely to be transparent with their financial and operational data so our volunteers can do more with this information to add value.

Objective: Become a national resource partner to the Small Business Administration, the Minority Business Development Agency, LISC, and US Chamber of Commerce.

Key Result: Procure a network of 10,000 small businesses across cities across the country for outreach to screen for business viability, transparency, and consultant-readiness/time commitment. 

Objective: Partner with Upwork to identify high caliber consultants across most needed categories of service for minority-/women-owned businesses.

Key Result: Extend the quality of service after our undergraduate volunteer consultants identify highest opportunities for growth for businesses, so businesses continue getting the support they need after 600 hours with Consult Your Community.

We would like to assess the viability of national partnerships with major community development financial institutions like the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) and the Opportunity Finance Network who have large networks of minority-owned businesses they serve and have better insight into the capital needs of these groups and can potentially refer small businesses. A current pain point our students have is the time-intensive process of sourcing and vetting clients, and having a national partner to refer struggling but high potential businesses could provide critical support while increasing the quality of our projects. The 2 weeks of time lost in the semester due to sourcing, vetting, and selecting businesses can then go towards extending the timeline of serving these small businesses (that's an additional 104 weeks of organizational time per year across our 26 existing chapters).