Today we’d like to introduce you to Chuck Hughes.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Chuck. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I graduated from Harvard in 1992 and I was given the opportunity to return to my Alma mater as an undergraduate Admissions Officer in 1995. During my five years as an Admissions Officer, I read thousands of applications, covered Alaska, Western Washington State, Utah, Nevada, Indiana, Virginia parts of Southern California, parts of Texas, parts of Chicago and select schools in Greater Boston. In addition to my admissions responsibilities, I lived on campus as an academic advisor (Freshman Proctor) and mentored first year students as they navigated live as a Harvard freshman.
When I left Harvard in 2000, I began working on a book about the college admissions process, “What it Really Takes to get into the Ivy League and other Highly Selective Colleges”, which was published by McGraw Hill in 2003. While I was working on the book, I served as a Product Manager at Monster.com and my time focused on online career management from the top online job board in the market provided me with additional ecommerce and entrepreneurship experience. With the publishing of the book, I partnered with a good friend – Steve Pemberton who was a former Boston College admissions officer and was also working in the Product group at Monster.com – to launch Road To College.
In 2018, the company begins its 15th year of providing quality educational consulting to families around the world. With the advent of video conferencing through Facetime, Skype and Google Hangouts, our clients can have access to our team from China to Singapore to London and any location around the world.
Has it been a smooth road?
Running your own boutique business is filled with plenty of challenges. The biggest challenge for any start-up is getting through the early years of trying to grow revenues to a point that you can actually earn a salary commensurate with the salary you left behind as a 30-year-old who had established a career in the online market place for a thriving company. It took about 2 years to know that the business would succeed but I was the only partner of the three principals who could continue to maintain the business as the revenues grow slower than projections in those first two to three years.
After about the third year, we had finally figured out that our business would be a boutique consulting business that would provide great service at a reasonable cost that would put us in the mid-50% price range for this industry instead of trying to be the lost cost provider that focused on volume.
We are continually exploring the right price-sensitivity balance in what we do and in managing a small business with 5 employees and 10-12 contractors at any given time, we need to find that combination that allows us to maximize profitability while continuing to attract the right customers in terms of volume and in terms of their values with how we coach our clients.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Road To College Inc. story. Tell us more about the business.
Our Road To College™ network of former admissions officers that offer an unprecedented access to our admissions expertise and the continuously changing and increasingly complex college admissions world.
We provide personalized and comprehensive admission consulting services to students and parents in a manner that enables them to successfully navigate the college and graduate school admissions processes.
Every team member is highly capable and has a minimum of three years of actual college admission experience with team members who have worked at Stanford, the University of Chicago, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, Washington University, Case Western and other top colleges around the country.
In addition to our consulting services, we offer web-based services that allow us to offer affordable services without compromising quality.
Not only do our years of experience differentiate us but I think what truly sets us apart is our ability to relate to our clients and to customize our programs to fit their individual needs.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
There are some big shifts from the customer side, as we are seeing a massive demographic change in terms of graduating high school student population over the next 15 years. Between 2015 and 2032, the high school graduating population is going to see a decrease in white applicants by 10% offset by an increase of 10% of Hispanic applicants. This shift is also a socio-economic shift as the shifting middle class will be bringing more applicants who have a greater financial need to colleges. Added to that, these decreases are largest in the Midwest and in the northeast, so colleges in these areas are rapidly evolving their offerings and their marketing to reach out to capture the changing demographics and those who can afford to pay for college.
These changes also require Road To College to pay particular focus on the needs of our clients and being able to: (1) stay informed of how changes in how universities are recruiting students are impacting our clients; (2) keeping us thinking about value added services and offerings to attract customers who are thinking about college and its rising cost.
Pricing:
- Our services essay editing and consulting services range from $199-$1499
- We offer hourly coaching sessions: $199/hr for an admission consultant and $300/hr for a senior admissions consultant
- We offer retainer programs that range from $1999-$4999
Contact Info:
- Address: 14 Nason St. Suite 205
Maynard, MA 01523 - Website: www.roadtocollege.com
- Phone: 888-835-4620
- Email: support@roadtocollege.com
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