💡 How Equalyze enables entrepreneurial students to become a force for local small businesses
A look inside the model of connecting student innovators with small businesses to make a meaningful local impact
Supporting local businesses isn’t charity - it’s a necessity.
This is the motto that my non-profit Emergence Baltimore adopted last Fall as we spun up various initiatives to help our city’s small business community.
How dire of a necessity? Let’s look at some numbers.
40% of the US workforce is employed by small businesses and up to 70% of local businesses may close permanently due to COVID. If this happens, 28% of all jobs around the country would disappear.
Mix in that fact that the holiday season (November 1 - December 31) makes up 20-30% of small business yearly retail sales (source). This is the time of the calendar that can normally either make or break a small business. Even without a fresh set of coronavirus-induced restrictions, Baltimore's local business community faced an uphill battle for generating usually-lucrative holiday sales. A September 2020 Dynata study found that 62% of respondents planned to do all of their holiday shopping online in 2020 (source), most of which will be gobbled up by Amazon and other corporate e-commerce behemoths.
When you add up all of these numbers, you get a clear result: small businesses are in trouble and are in dire need of support from the local community.
One of our Emergence Baltimore initiatives was called Force For Local, which had the goal of connecting talented local Baltimoreans with small business owners to help them with some of the most pressing jobs. When our team was trying to figure out the best way to facilitate these Baltimore connections, it turns out that our ideal partner was already working on this problem up the road at Loyola University Maryland.
Meet Equalyze. In their own words:
Equalyze aims to connect two unlikely communities - small businesses and university students. Baltimore-based small businesses can connect with talented university students through Equalyze's existing student database for project consultations.
Emergence Baltimore partnered with Equalyze to facilitate over 50 matches between Baltimore college students and small businesses throughout the critical holiday season. As you’ll see, this was an idea born out of a personal connection with the small business owner struggle - both before and during COVID.
Equalyze recently pitched at Loyola’s Baltipreneurs Accelerator Demo Day program and we had the chance to catch up shortly thereafter about the origins of their venture, the success of the Force For Local program, and next steps for the team. Below is the transcript of some key parts of that discussion.
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Where did the idea of Equalyze come from? Was this a personal pain point for anyone on your founding team?
Spencer: I’ve always been enamored with the gig economy apps that have emerged over the last decade or so. I love the idea of connecting communities that have a lot to offer one another, yet they hardly intersect or collaborate.
Equalyze started as a grandiose idea where I was talking with my sister and her boyfriend about designing an app where you can start a video chat to learn anything from anyone, at any time of day, from anywhere in the world.
Then I pitched this idea to Katherine first and then Franklin and Brendan because I knew if I ever was going to start something, it would be with these three.
We started working on the idea for our Building a Better World Through Business course at Loyola and made it as a finalist for the pitch competition.
Then COVID happened.
We put our heads together to really think about things. We came to understand that this original idea was too grandiose and probably wouldn’t actually provide value to anyone, because nobody’s really looking to learn how to cook chicken marsala at 7 pm from someone in Italy, so we tried to figure out what would make the most sense.
My dad is the owner of a small printing company and his business has really been struggling - and still is struggling - throughout this pandemic period. I’ve witnessed him having to wear like 19 different hats as a small business owner. He would go in and work all the time on the weekends and just didn’t have the time to focus on everything.
We saw there was a need right now for small business support, and we knew that a lot of talented college students had a lot of free time right now. So we went out to see if we can find some sort of synergy between students that have all these skills and small businesses that need the support. That’s ultimately how Equalyze came to be what it is now.
What can college students gain from this type of engagement? What do the small businesses gain?
Brendan: A lot of internships were cancelled during COVID and it was really difficult for students to find new work experiences that they could use to build out their resume. A lot of the larger internships - the ones that weren’t cancelled - weren’t really having an impact on the company but we saw that there was an opportunity to have an outsized impact from working with a small business.
As students are working for a small business, they can really point to specific data points and stories about the impact they’ve had, such as increasing engagement by x% or driving sales by x amount. Based on the conversations we’ve had, we learned students want an opportunity to talk about the experiences they’ve had that actually directly impacted a business. That often happens on the smaller scale rather than within these large companies.
And then on the small business side, a lot of the stories we heard involved them talking about long-term goals that they have in terms of growing the business but they really just didn’t have time to focus on them due to COVID. They were so focused on the day-to-day task of running the business and keeping the lights on.
So we really saw these two synergies of students wanting to gain relevant experience and small business owners wanting to focus on growth, and when you combine the two together, they can achieve the goals they’re looking to accomplish.
Katherine: I’ll also add that these students are not only making an actual impact on the business, they’re also getting an inside look at the business from start to finish.
Like say they’re a marketing major working on a digital marketing campaign - they also get to see how marketing impacts sales, customer experience, and other operations within the business. If you have an internship at a bigger company, you might just be siloed into one area and now see how your work affects other parts of the business.
So what have been some of your Equalyze favorite engagements so far?
Franklin: I’ll start with the very first engagement we made - La Loupe Designs, a small home decor store, and a Loyola junior named Grace.
This was made in August 2020, so before Force For Local started, but the project was a special moment of our team because we realized that our hard work paid off. It allowed us to grow confidence in ourselves and our mission.
In this connection Grace implemented Google Analytics and worked on a digital marketing campaign to revitalize the e-commerce experience for Jorgelina [owner of La Loupe Designs].
In the end we got a positive testimonial from Grace about the experience and she recommended Equalyze to one of her friends who we were also able to connect with one of Jorgelina’s friends who was also a small business owner.
Spencer: Another one that comes to mind is a student Claire who we didn’t even know. We just went in and made a virtual pitch in one of her classes about Force For Local and she ended up getting matched with a company called A2Z Movement that offers consulting in the sustainability space.
We didn’t hear much about the engagement until Claire reached out to me one day with one of the nicest text messages in the world, thanking our team so much for the connection because it got her an internship with the small business. We didn’t even know small businesses would offer that type of thing. But now she’s still working with that small business and was connected to another one through our program as well.
I think it just goes to show the value of this type of matching platform.
It sounds like Equalyze has really built something meaningful with this platform over the past year. But now you’re all about to graduate next month - what’s next for Equalyze?
Spencer: First off I want to thank Emergence Baltimore because Force For Local really did show that, if we can tap into the right marketing channels, there is a real demand for this type of model.
The next step is to make this intro a true marketplace. Right now, this has been a “concierge MVP”, meaning we’ve been the ones to facilitate all the matches on the back end. For anything like this to scale, that can’t be the case, so we’re looking into funding opportunities to help us develop the technology that powers Equalyze.
With Force For Local, we were able to validate that there is demand but there was a point where the infrastructure we had in place was inefficient to help us facilitate the matches. If we could do that automatically, that would be a huge help.
But the main thing is being able to continue serving small businesses in whatever capacity, even if we don’t build out a fully automated platform. We can still make these matches manually. So that’s where we’re at in terms of thinking what the next steps are going to be.
And that’s a wrap from the Equalyze team!
I have to say, it has been an absolute pleasure working with them in a joint effort to serve Baltimore’s local business community in one of their biggest times of need. I’m incredibly proud of the work they did to make 50+ matches happen during the holiday season and am excited to see what the future holds.
If you’d like to get in touch with the Equalyze team, you can do so at equalyze.it@gmail.com.
🔙 Miss something?
Last week I put out my monthly Coach’s Corner newsletter which highlighted current student funding opportunities, university entrepreneurship news, and jobs/internships (the latter of which I’m re-posting below).
🎓 Internships
I’ll be honest, Justine and Olivia Moore (twin sisters at VC firm CRV) do a fantastic job curating internship opportunities through their Accelerated Substack newsletter. Highly recommend you get that coming your way ASAP. The below list is primarily their list with a few ones I’ve heard about sprinkled in.
Monument - Social Media Intern (Remote)
500 Startups - Research Intern (Remote)
Listen Ventures - MBA VC Intern (Remote, Chicago)
Necessary Ventures - Community Engagement Intern (Remote)
Zynga - Consumer Research Insights Intern (SF)
Gametime - Corporate Strategy Intern (NYC)
Twist Bioscience - Business Analyst Intern (South SF)
Box - MBA PM Intern (Redwood City)
Toyota AI Ventures - VC Intern (Los Altos)
Block Renovation - Intern (Brooklyn)
LogRocket - Content Marketing Intern (Boston)
Good Dog - Partner Strategy Intern (NYC)
Quarter Health - Strategic Partnerships Intern (NYC)
*Requires 3+ years of experience.
ℹ️ Final CTAs
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