What We Learned from 100 Small Businesses

A few months ago, we had the idea to connect small and medium sized businesses with students from the top MBA programs in the world and launched HourlyNerd. The basic premise was simple: MBAs need money, have significant business acumen from previous jobs and school, want real-world experience, and have plenty of spare time. Meanwhile, small businesses, we assumed, could benefit from short-term, highly skilled labor from MBAs.

So far we have helped companies find students to market to new customers, assess ideal capital structures, evaluate deal opportunities and vet potential suppliers. All of these tasks were competitively bid in a market with more than 375 MBAs, at no upfront cost or obligation to the business owners.

To test our original hypothesis, and to begin generating tasks for our site, we first met with more than 100 small companies from Colorado to Florida, from a cupcake store in Cincinnati to a private equity firm in New York. This is what we heard:

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