Today we’d like to introduce you to Matthew Larriva.
Matthew, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
In 2009, I graduated from The Wharton School at The University of Pennsylvania. I have a degree in Business Economics with a concentration in Real Estate. Unfortunately, when I graduated, the Real Estate space was completely in the dumps and no one was hiring.
I broadened my search slightly and ended up as a trader in Chicago. When you begin as a bond trader, often times, the senior man on the desk will have his junior members cover the European or Asian trading hours while the most senior member covers the US trading hours.
I covered the European shift, whose markets are open from about midnight (Chicago time) to 7AM. In that kind of environment, you make some really strong friendships with the other traders–the only other people awake at that time of night–and you see some interesting profiles of the city, but getting out of work at 7AM means you stay awake until about 2-3PM then go to sleep from 2-11. There’s not much to do between 7 and 2, and as someone who always liked staying busy, this amount of free time started to annoy me. I decided I’d get a second job to use up some of the time. I taught financial seminars to under-served populations for 6 months, but the engagements were so inconsistent that it didn’t scratch the itch I had to be more occupied. So I browsed Craigslist and found an ad from Kaplan test prep (they’re like the Princeton Review of the middle of the country). Kaplan was looking for ACT tutors as that’s what everyone in the Midwest tends to take. I’d never taken the ACT but had done well on the SAT, so I applied. The application process consists of giving a 5-minute presentation to a bunch of strangers. I decided to give my presentation about how to successfully skydive. At the time, I was pursuing my skydiving license, so the knowledge was fresh. I gave a great presentation emphasizing the risks, safety, and joy of skydiving (did you know you have a 5-10x higher risk of dying while driving to the skydiving location than you do actually skydiving?). The higher-ups liked it I got the job.
For the next couple of years, I traded bonds during the graveyard shift, and taught ACT during the day. In 2011, my mother got sick, and I felt the need to come back to Southern California where I was raised, and where my family still lived. I relocated, started working in the finance group of a geo-location start-up, and applied to work at one of the Kaplan satellite offices in LA, but as I was working during the day, I couldn’t make the schedule work. I still loved teaching, and had that need to fill my nights and weekends with something productive, so I decided I’d start my own company. My prospects at the time were minimal: I had no curriculum written, I had no student references, no word-of-mouth advertising, and no real results to boast of. So I took to Craigslist to try to drum up some business. My first Craigslist post went up July of 2011 and read, “Professional ACT and SAT tutor.”
I am an Ivy League graduate and Mensa member with SAT scores in the 99th percentile.
I have helped over 50 clients realize their full potential on their standardized tests. My average student experiences a 100 point increase after 3 90-minute sessions with me.
I deliver a highly focused, completely customized, proven program combining all of the best researched and developed strategies available.
I will provide you with homework, sample tests, and I will personally proctor your practice tests with the same instructions you will hear on test date. My goal is for you to feel calm and confident on test day, allowing you to reach your maximum potential.
What differentiates me from my other tutors is the amount of time I put into analyzing my students’ tests outside of our sessions. I pour over each practice test you take to find your specific weaknesses, and then deliver a curriculum which strengthens your problem areas without wasting time reteaching what you already know.
I’m very confident in my methods and guarantee your score will increase substantially.
I have no idea where I got those claims, and cringe as I look back over that. I definitely wasn’t in Mensa (I am now). I had never given a 90-minute session, and had in fact never worked one-on-one with students; my prior experience was in small-group settings. I don’t know what curriculum I was referencing. The only part of that posting that was really accurate was the part about how confident I was—that and the Ivy League name drop. I figured I’d fake it until I made it. I charged $40 an hour.
A month later I got my first student. It was a disaster. I was living at my parents’ house as, I had just moved back from Chicago, and using a guest bedroom as an ‘office.’ I use that term loosely because it consisted of a card table, no printer, and my laptop. The student who contacted me was completely divorced from reality in terms of his point target. He was starting under 1000 (out of 2400) and was looking for something in the neighborhood of 1600 in about one month’s time. Whereas now I would tell a client that was completely unrealistic and that that kind of gain would require 4-8 months of twice-a-week meetings, I told this client that we would do the best we could and try to realize his fullest potential. He was excited by my enthusiasm, and we agreed to meet at his home with his family present (as is and was always policy). The morning of the first session, I went to print materials only to find out 1) my parent’s printer was a blazing 1 page-per-minute monstrosity 2) I didn’t have any materials to print because there was nothing really helpful online to use and I hadn’t figured I’d have to generate new material. The result was a totally muddled lesson that started with a missive about the true definition of “learning” (learning is a change in behavior) and ended with about five sample essay prompts and a template of what a good essay would look like. I arrived at the student’s house early and waited in a sweltering car whose air conditioning was on the outs. The client called me from his house and said, “is that you sitting in the car across the street? You can come in if you want.” Profusely sweating, I greeted my first client.
The entire situation was so bizarre, but I didn’t have any context at the time. He had 8 brothers who were always running in and out of the kitchen. His parents would hide in a bedroom the entire time I was there, and I never met either. In the middle of our session, a siren started to sound, and continued for 2 minutes. The siren, I came to find out, was a call to prayer alarm that went off at the appropriate times. But it didn’t simply chime, it recanted the entire adhan, which can be quite beautiful, but is also 3 minutes long, in Arabic, and somewhat distracting, when one is already dripping with sweat, distracted by the running-around of the 8 brothers, and trying to remember what a strong contrapositive argument looked like. The rest of the sessions went better, I started to generate a bare-bones curriculum, and as that was my only client, he got all of my out-of-class attention. His score improved massively—nowhere near the 600 points he wanted, but far better, I realized, than any of my competitors were doing.
That session made me realize two important things that set the framework for my business’ differentiation: First, clients pay for points. No other company was advertising point-gains at the time, so I became the point-gain company. The second realization was the cache that the “Ivy League” brand held. It was like telling someone you were a doctor: it gave you carte blanche in the pre-college space (“he must know what he’s talking about, he’s an Ivy League grad”).
I built my company out of those two principles: just hire Ivy League grads and just focus on point-gains. Along the road, I realized that made us the premium provider in the market place. In a sea of Kaplans, Princeton Reviews, Elite Preps, we became the one-on-one, concierge tutors: Ivy League grads, in-home, huge point gains, and a price tag to match.
I got to a point where I was teaching 5 nights a week after work, and from 9 to 5 on Saturdays and Sundays. I hired one of my friends who had graduated from Cornell to take on some of the excesses. She did amazingly, and our company grew further. I made us a website, got a domain, and Powerful Prep was formed. The rest is history. Our client base grew, we garnered a strong Yelp review base, and stopped having to post on Craigslist. We gradually increased prices. The first time I charged $100 an hour, I thought clients would tell me I was crazy and we’d lose business, but the opposite happened.
We continued to grow in size, revenue, and teachers. Some stayed with us for years, and others only stay for a summer, but we were always very selective. To even get an interview, teachers need to have graduated from one of the nation’s top 20 schools as ranked by US News & World, have prior teaching experience, and have 99.9% scores on their standardized tests.
These were some of the most formative years of my life and for the company. I hired one of my friends to redo our website, and lost the friendship over it when the project went sideways. I was always unsure of what this side business was going to be because remember, I was working a full-time job the whole time. As a product of that, I studied for and passed the CFA exam—three tests given each only once a year, with a pass rate of between 30 and 40 percent each. I also passed the Mensa exam during that time. I didn’t like the books that were available in the marketplace for test prep so I wrote and published three of my own.
Five years after starting, I had a team of tutors, hundreds of clients a year, and a history of massive point-gains. I bill out my tutors at about $250 an hour. For clients who want to work with me specifically, I charge $600 an hour—15 times what I charged when I first started. I’ve worked with the children of high-ranking politicians, actors, and business people—names I cannot specify because of NDAs.
In many ways, I’m still incredulous of the business’ success. We invoice out tens of thousands of dollars monthly, but no one at my full-time job knows I have this side passion-project because I don’t want them to think I’m distracted or splitting my attention.
Simultaneously, most of my tutoring clients don’t realize this isn’t my full-time job. I bought my first home off of money I made from the business, and my home office is filled with books that I wrote, but every time I print off 1000 pages from my laser printer, I remember the first session I ever had, that I was almost late to because my parents’ inkjet printer wouldn’t move fast enough, and then ran out of paper.
One day, last summer, I had four 90-minute sessions in a day and made $3600, or the equivalent of 164 hours of work making what I made teaching for Kaplan. It’s been a very humbling path.
It’s a rare privilege to be trusted with a student’s future. A rarer thing still to enjoy the work, interaction, and process so many years later.
In an economy where 8 out of 10 businesses fail, I’m not audacious enough to think that the success Powerful Prep has had is due to some brilliance of mine. I am where I am because I stood on the shoulders of giants. My parents let me live in their house with unrealistically low rent while I reinvested money into my business. They gave me my grandfather’s car so I could drive to my appointments—the same grandfather who paid for my Ivy League education. My sister drove around hanging up fliers for my business and proctoring tests at a new-age healing center in Tustin that agreed to rent us their space during the weekends. My closest friends gave me thorough, well-thought-out advice when I had nothing to give them in return. Craigslist clients took a chance on an unproven tutor and Amazon clients gambled on an unreviewed book. I’ve been very fortunate.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
The SAT and ACT are not static. Both tests are constantly changing, sometimes in obvious, big ways, like The Collegboard did in 2005 and again in 2016, and sometimes in more subtle ways like the ACT did in 2016. Monitoring these changes, updating curriculum, and sometimes having to start from zero (circa March 2016 when the SAT decided it was changing formats entirely) is a daunting endeavor.
The biggest challenge is that people think of test prep like a utility service—a plumber, an electrician. I have a problem, you come fix it, you get paid. They think of this as a binary space, as if bad score plus money equals good score. In reality, our space is more like a professional service—lawyers, therapists, doctors. We will give you our best practice, effort, and techniques that we’ve learned that have been successful with others in your shoes, but the results are not a linear output of the inputs. How could we possibly expect that an ESL student with ADD would yield the same results after 6 hours of work as a speech&debte champ who loves math? Yet parents do expect this.
It is a perpetual struggle to have to tell parents that their goals may be unrealistic, or that their student will in all likelihood not achieve the score they wanted. Most of the time, they understand, but sometimes they rail against the news and lay the blame squarely with us. We’ve had parents write negative reviews after their student’s score increases because they had a ‘gut feeling’ that it should have increased more.
In some cases, being a test-prep provider is a no-win situation: if you ask a parent how many points they want to gain, they’ll tell you, “as many as possible.” That’s a set up for disappointment: low point-gains are a disaster while high point gains are met with, “is that all? Could my student do better?” It creates a situation where only perfect-scorers are truly happy.
Some clients decide not to pay and we had to sue a client for non-payment earlier this year. That was a terribly sad situation, and one I never hope to repeat.
Teenagers are emotional and are under an absurd amount of pressure. Every one of my teachers has had a student break down in tears mid-session. If you want to feel really helpless, watch a 16-year-old break into heaving sobs in front of you because they missed four questions on a math section.
Please tell us about Powerful Prep.
Powerful Prep is the premium provider of test-prep in Southern California. We offer one-on-one, in-home, SAT and ACT prep from Ivy League grads.
We differentiate in three ways:
1) The best point-gains. We believe test prep should not be a gamble: parents should know exactly what they can expect, and what their test-prep provider has achieved in similar situations in the past. Lawyers post win rates; surgeons have success-rates; we show our point-gains. And, we have the best point gains of any program. Students come to us when they’re looking for strong improvement instead of guarantees, gimmicks, or boot camps.
2) The best teachers. We only hire graduates of one of the nation’s top 20 schools as ranked by US News and World. All teachers have to have prior teaching experience and 99.9% scores on their tests before even getting an interview with us. We screen for communication ability, relatability, friendliness and mentor potential. We want every tutor-match to be a strong one, and realize that starts with the selection process. We also monitor all of our tutors results to ensure that all teachers are generating the point-gains that made our business successful.
3) The best reviews. We have a 5 -star rating on Yelp and google business as reviewed by over 40 of our clients. We earned these over years of hard work and they reflect the trust that the community has in us as a test-prep provider. They are firm evidence that the successes we strive for have been achieved.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
I would have networked more. So many of our successes have been because of other teachers I’ve reached out to, counselors that I’ve worked with, and high schools that we’ve partnered with. I wish I’d known that earlier and made more of a focused effort at nurturing those connections.
I would have had a more strict no-friends-in-business policy and not have hired friends to work for my company. It always seems like such a treat–getting to work with people you love to spend time with. But that business component adds a dimension to the friendship that leaves it vulnerable, and often kills it.
Pricing:
- The tuition of a three-month course at Powerful Prep is $4000
- A four-month course is $5000
- Month-long refresher courses are available from $1750
Contact Info:
- Address: 17595 Harvard Ave,
Ste C#2320
Irvine CA 92614 - Website: www.powerfulprep.com
- Phone: 8058764687
- Email: [email protected]
Image Credit:
Powerful Prep
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