From Teammates To Co-Founders
At my first BOND project meeting, I would never have believed that my team members would become some of the people I spend most of my time with. We spent the semester working with an Ann Arbor bar and grill, and when I started that semester, I knew almost nothing about restaurants, consulting, or working with real businesses. Despite that, my team took the time to teach me everything I needed to know. Over the course of just a few weeks, I engaged in a crash course of Excel, Powerpoint, presenting, and developing real analyses. During that time, I am certain that I learned more than in any class I was taking at the time- and everything I learned had a real value.
By the final presentation, not only did I learn about the glaring inefficiencies in the restaurant industry, but I also had gained some of the skills I needed to fix them. I teamed up with two of my other teammates from that project and started working on a startup to fix the industry issues we uncovered while researching the project. We saw each other almost every day for months, and spent around twenty hours every week together working on the company. While this might seem similar to a time consuming, part-time job to some, I loved every minute of it. Eight months later, the company has changed quite a bit, but I still use the skills I learned on that project every day.
While I am exceedingly grateful to BOND for introducing me to my co-founders, I am much more grateful for the introduction to the people who would become some of my best friends. From living in Boyne over the summer with the other newbie on that project to competing in an Atlanta-based case competition with the senior consultant at the time, I am closer than ever to the other members of my team. I know that if I ever have an issue, a competition opportunity, or ever just want to go out to eat, any number of my team members will be there as soon as they can.
My project members were there for me through it all: my first awful presentation, me learning how to use R, and even the typical freshman year mono scare. And when I moved back to Ann Arbor for my sophomore year, the first thing I did was text one of my old team members and visit the same restaurant that I had first worked with.
