Campus Entrepreneurship

Stephen Grocer of the WSJ has a profile of PolicePrep.com over at StartupJournal.com. The trio who started the firm met while getting their MBA’s and made great use of the campus and their time in the program to plan their venture. From the piece,

“I started kicking around ideas with anyone,” Mr. Jessop says. “And one night I was out with Adam and mentioned a training program for police officers. I remember how difficult it was for me to find information about the test when I became a police officer.”

The idea turned out to be a perfect fit for the threesome. During college, Mr. Cooper had worked for a test preparation company, while Mr. Jessop brought his experience of going through the process and Mr. Rathod had key technical expertise.

The threesome researched the business over the next year. They met with colleges that ran police programs, set up focus groups with students and searched the Web to gather information they would need to design the online test-prep course. Part of their research online was tracking down questions. Many police departments will post a couple of sample questions to give recruits a general idea of what to expect. They used these samples as a template for writing their own practice tests.

“We would work on it during class,” Mr. Cooper says. “If you look at the tests, many of the names used in questions come from people in our classes.”

The profile is well worth reading. Here is Western Ontario’s MBA program.