Ross Geiger: HourlyNerd
Don’t start a company unless it’s an obsession and something you love. If you have an exit strategy, it’s not an obsession.
Mark Cuban
Last spring, the following conversation took place between me and The Red Headed Kid, a.k.a. Ross Geiger;
Me: “How’s the job going?”
Ross: “Great, if you don’t mind crunching numbers for a hundred hours a week and have no need for a social life.
Me: “You’re 24. You’re supposed to work a hundred hours a week.”
Ross: “And you walked to school every day in a raging blizzard. Uphill. Both ways. Anyway, I got a call this week from a Boston-based startup company looking to add staff.”
Me: “That’s cool. What’s the name of the company?”
Ross: “HourlyNerd.”
Me: “HourlyWhat?”
We had a follow-up conversation last month that went something like this:
Ross: “Hey Dad. Guess what? I got promoted today.”
Me: “Congratulations, son. You’ve worked very hard to get ahead. Don’t ever forget that your Number One priority in life is to make enough money to support your parents in the lifestyle they’ve become accustomed to.”
Ross: “Thanks for the reminder. Anyway, remember HourlyNerd, that startup company I told you about? They called today and offered me a job.
Me: “That’s great. How much money are they willing to throw at you now that you’ve climbed another rung on the corporate ladder?”
Ross: “About two standard deviations less than what I’m making now.”
Me (after tapping the phone on the desk to make sure I didn’t hear static on the line): “Ooooo-kayyyyy. So what are you going to do?”
Ross: “Quit my job.”
So what exactly is an HourlyNerd? According to Ross’s LinkedIn profile:
- HourlyNerd offers a flexible consulting platform bringing experienced professionals directly to your business.
- With over 11,000 premier consultants and alumni from the top 40 global MBA programs, our on-demand offering accommodates any and all project needs from SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses) to Fortune 50 enterprises. Simply post your project, select the most qualified candidates and manage your deliverable with the help of our intuitive software or client services team.
Put another way, HourlyNerd is an online consulting service company that provides large and small firms with the opportunity to rent a high quality MBA guru to do their consulting project at about one-tenth the cost of a tie-wearing professional from a management consulting stalwart like McKinsey, Bain or Booz. I call it the Uber-ization of the consulting industry.
HourlyNerd comes with an interesting back story. In the summer of 2013, HourlyNerd’s three co-founders sent billionaire Mark Cuban a cold call email asking him if he’d be interested in investing in their company. Fifteen minutes later, Cuban responded; he was in. Armed with $450,000 of Cuban Currency, the company was off and running. There was only one problem; the cofounders still had a year of business school left. Fast forward to February 2015, when HourlyNerd announced it had received $7.8 million in new funding to help the company grow beyond its 4,500 customer companies, including GE and Microsoft, and you can see clear evidence that HourlyNerd is growing faster than a Dunkin Donuts line next to a Colorado cannabis franchise.
Ross no longer spends his days (and, all too often, nights) slaving away in front of an Excel spreadsheet. Now he’s HourlyNerd Employee #40-something, working with some of the brightest young minds you’ll ever come across, all of whom share the same passion to work hard and reinvent the world. Ross’s job description includes convincing top-level company executives of HourlyNerd’s consulting capabilities and efficiencies, and then turning around and finding the perfect “nerd” to complete a company’s project. In essence, Ross has morphed from a data gathering and analysis geek into a hard driving salesman whose primary responsibility is to get on the phone and match HoulyNerd’s cups with saucers. And the early returns are in; he loves it.
Go ahead. Hire a nerd. Better yet, hire an HourlyNerd.