The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change (16 page)

A
fter 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.

But in the latter half of the week, bigger organizations grabbed a foothold and pulled ahead. Although we eventually dropped out of the running for the $1 million, we ended up with thirty thousand votes—enough people to fill Madison Square Garden nearly two times. We finished in eleventh place, putting the Pencils of Promise name on the map and winning $25,000—enough to build an entire school.

Our next party filled our coffers even further. Several hundred people showed up for our second annual masquerade event, guaranteeing we would close out the year with enough funds for at least three new schools. We committed to breaking ground on these new schools in Laos, which we aimed to complete by April. We had seen the power of small donations in effect, but for the first time we tasted the tremendous impact of a large donation. Of course it was secured through many small acts—in this case thirty thousand people clicking a button—and it wouldn’t have been fitting any other way. Meanwhile, I still had eight long months left at my job. An eternity.

*  *  *

When I was on the road in the RV, Hope Taitz, a mother of three who was extremely active in philanthropy, discovered our organization. She had cofounded an impactful education nonprofit twenty years earlier and was interested in our work. We met for sushi on a chilly January afternoon, and I told her of my conundrum. While PoP was growing beyond my expectations, my work at Bain was suffering immensely and was holding me back from what I wanted to do. For the first time I shared something I hadn’t told anyone: “I might want to leave Bain early.”

I decided that if we could confidently raise $100,000 that year, I would leave to pursue PoP.

“Hope, I’ve never asked anybody for anything like this before, but I am asking you for something big,” I said. “Can you help raise fifty thousand dollars this year?”

She didn’t pause. “I think I can be helpful, but I’m interested in things that are far more important than just raising funds. I’d want to help you build a world-class organization.”

I’d found the right partner. She not only offered to help open
doors, but she offered to coach me along the way. I saw the opportunity to learn from someone who could mentor me through the next several years while focusing on the best interests of the organization as well.

With Hope on the team, I had confidence that I might be able to pull this off. She was the first person with business legitimacy who was ready to invest time and money into our burgeoning organization. I walked straight back into the Bain office from our lunch and asked an HR manager if we could speak confidentially.

“What would I be giving up if I left Bain now?” I asked. “What are the numbers?”

“Between your salary and bonuses, it would be somewhere around . . .”

When I heard the number, my mouth dropped.
Shit, that’s a lot of money,
I thought.
But six months of my life is a lot of time.

If I waited that long, I wasn’t sure what would happen, but I knew that if I left Bain early and fully dedicated myself to PoP, I would be forced to make it succeed. Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, has said that an entrepreneur is someone who will “jump off a cliff and assemble an airplane on the way down.” I wasn’t ready to jump yet, but it was time to start looking for airplane parts.

I began by looking for office space. A friend of mine worked at the commercial real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield and told me about a potential space I might be able to get on the cheap. Norman Belmonte ran a women’s-garment business, but his office needs had recently shrunk.

“Norman wants to rent out his space,” my friend Ethan told me. “Go talk to him.”

We didn’t have a website or an annual report, but we did have a “media kit” displaying Nick’s recent photos that students from the
top design course at Pratt Institute’s School of Art & Design had created under Brad’s oversight. The pages shared our story and mission, and they looked gorgeous too.

During my lunch break I met Norman at his office on Thirty-second Street and Madison Avenue. As soon as I walked in, he turned away from his AOL account to ask me a direct question: “So what business is it that you want to rent a room from me for?” I had started to refine my pitch during the hundreds of coffee chats over the past year, but this one had to hit home.

Many presentations follow a traditional hero’s journey, with the presenter portraying himself or herself as the hero to win over the audience. But the best presentations—the ones that inspire action—are those where the same journey is portrayed, except the audience is the focus. It’s not about the presenter; it’s about the chance that the audience has to become the hero by completing a well-defined task.

When these presentations are given one-on-one, it’s important to first understand what the other person cares about most. I began by asking what he was passionate about. His words revealed the joy he gained from being a grandfather, and when I looked around the room, I realized we were surrounded by photos of his family. In response, I started explaining my relationship with Ma and how the first school was built to honor her. Then, I showed Norman our beautiful printed media kit, explaining each page with a story detailing the backgrounds of the kids pictured. Finally, I talked about the heavy decision I was facing—whether to leave Bain—and how transformational it would be if PoP could secure a great office space at a low rent. The stage was set for a hero, and Norman could easily step in to fill that role.

“Well, I can’t charge you what I wanted to charge you anymore,” he said. “I’m the chairman here, so let me talk to my
nephew who runs the day-to-day business and get back to you. But I want to help.”

By the time I got back to the office, I found an alarming email waiting in my inbox. It was from Dave, the new staffing manager at Bain.
Adam, we need to speak. Please come into my office.

What he said was not that surprising: “We get that you are passionate about Pencils of Promise, but you need to be a responsible employee. You haven’t been working very hard. I hear you called in sick for almost two weeks?”

“I was sick.”

“C’mon, not for two weeks.” He could see right through me.

“Okay, but I haven’t been put on a real case. If you just gave me a consistent client to work on, I don’t think this would be an issue.”

“Great, I have a case assignment for you. A large university is restructuring its budget and you’ll lead the analysis. You’ll have to be in upstate New York four days a week for the next four months.”

I didn’t see that coming. “What if I don’t take it?”

“Then you don’t stay at Bain.”

“Can I think about it?”

“It starts Monday, let me know tomorrow.”

“Can I have the weekend?” I was headed to San Francisco with Matt, my childhood friend who had seen me through so much over the years, and with whom I’d not so long ago traveled in Guatemala. He would be the perfect person to help talk me through such a big decision.

“Yes.”

*  *  *

James De La Vega is a famed street artist in New York City, known for the chalk drawings, murals, and message-based graffiti that he leaves across the East Village. Some of his works have been auctioned
at Christie’s, and some get washed away by the morning rain. As I walked home to my new apartment on Tenth Street that evening, wrestling with the decision Dave had asked me to make, I found a large cardboard box left as garbage next to my front steps. De La Vega must also have walked by this box moments before I arrived, because it was now freshly painted in his trademark bold, black letters with three of his most well-known words:
Become Your Dream.

In certain situations you ask to see a sign to guide you in the right direction. Sometimes these calls to a higher power are answered, and sometimes we are left to seek counsel from within. But if you look for them, the signs will usually present themselves to those with open eyes. This was one of those moments when the sign could not have been clearer. My answer was literally written by my front steps. As the snow began to fall later that night, I rushed outside to cut the words out of the box, vowing that one day when we opened a PoP office, I would hang this sign for others to use as guidance as well. But I still had no idea where that office would be.

As I headed to the airport the next day, I received an email from Norman:
Call me right away.

After making it through security, I called him from the gate. “I wanted to make sure I spoke to you before you headed out for the weekend,” he said. “I spoke to my nephew. We’re going to give you a free office space on our floor starting in May or June. You just let me know when you want to start.”