Getting Into Harvard, The Real Plan

In January of 2007 my application was rejected by the Harvard Business School, and with good cause. In February of 2007 I charted my path to get accepted to HBS. But the post I wrote in October of 2007 may have left doubts in the minds of some as to whether I’d ever even apply to HBS. It probably doesn’t help when I write about how I think the current college system is flawed and that college in general is overrated. Scores of people (2-3, maybe more) have since asked me whether I’m still interested in going or not. The answer is “yes”, I’m still planning on going and I’m still excited about it, just as excited as I ever have been. But I recognize the need to do certain things first. Here are some of them.

1. Pay off all debts. I made a lot of mistakes when starting my business, and using SBA loans and other debt financing were some of them. I won’t apply to HBS until I have them paid off and am entirely debt-free.

2. Savings. When I go to HBS I will have saved up enough cash to pay for tuition and room and board for the entire duration of the experience. This might sound like a lofty goal but if you knew how much business debt I’ve already paid off in the last year you would understand that it’s more realistic than it sounds. Once the debt is paid off it won’t take me that long to save up enough, and that’s assuming nothing improves with my business during the next few years, and believe you me, there’s plenty of room for improvement in terms of cash flow and profitability.

3. Ironman. I’m currently half an Ironman, but I need to take care of the other half. But before that there needs to be a marathon. Maybe one in late 2009, and the full Ironman in 2010 or 2011.

4. Harvest a business. I don’t plan on running a business while in school. I’ve already done that once and it was a great experience, but…nah, I don’t want to do it again. But I don’t want to just shut my business down, I want to harvest it. That means building it up to the point where it can be sold and the experience is worth talking about. I’ve had so much failure in my career I think it would be nice to be able to say “I’ve failed a lot, but I learned my lesson and here’s how I built up a successful business and sold it for $10M.” I think that will sound a lot better to the application screeners than “I spent seven years getting into debt, three years paying it off, and now that I’m at break-even here I am! I’m ready for HBS!”

5. Write a book. I don’t feel any need to do this before I go to HBS, I just think it will happen, so I’m putting it here for good measure.

6. Retake the GMAT. Geez, not again. I’ve already taken it twice. Once to get into the graduate program at BYU, the second time when I applied to HBS for the first time. The second time I missed just one question on the qualitative (non-math) portion of the exam. I was in the 99th percentile. But I was down in the 60th percentile on math. Ironically I hardly studied for the qualitative at all. I spent easily 30 times as much time studying up on the math. I guess you can see where my natural skills lie. My overall score was decent, a 710, but I’ve got plenty of room for improvement on the quantitative so I don’t think it would be too much work to bring that score up to a 760-780.

So there’s at least a partial list of what I want to do before applying to HBS again. I’m thinking 3-4 years will probably do it.