At 18, I flew out to St. Louis from my hometown of Philadelphia to attend Washington University in St. Louis.  Thirty days into fall semester I, along with my freshman roommates, wrote a business plan to open a refrigerator rental shop on campus—ResFridge etc.  We were successful.  By the time senior year rolled around, our business expanded to shipping and storage.  Every year, over 1500 students would use our service.  We were all-stars.
At the close of spring semester we would rally the fraternity brothers and embark on a box humping orgy.  I was the colonel leading the troops into battle.  Nothing, absolutely nothing, would stop me and my business from keeping the customer happy and executing on-time pickups and deliveries.  I’ll never forget returning to the storage lot (where we kept our temporary storage containers) screaming with my shirt off.  I was so happy to have picked up 5000 boxes in a five day period.  During move-in, mothers would literally hug me in thanks for the service we provided.

About three months before graduation, an older business partner (he was 23, and I was 21, to be exact) approached me about buying our largest competitor.  Watching Collegeboxes, the granddaddy of collegiate summer storage companies grow inspired greatness.  Quickly, my partner and I raised equity funding from friends, family, and anyone else who would listen to our pitch.  We closed the deal and proudly placed our pictures and bios on the “team” page of the website.

The dam started to crumble in the fall of 2006.  After move-in, we promise to settle all customer insurance claims within 14 days.  We were two weeks late with claim checks and a group of Harvard University students wanted to teach us a lesson.  What followed was the worst five months of my life.  The Harvard Crimson published nasty article after nasty article lambasting our business.  I felt like a child getting screamed at by an adult. It was the type of reprimand where the adult gets right in the child’s face until the child cries.  I cried.  I cried to my girlfriend the night the first article ran.  I was 24 and felt horrible.  I wasn’t the great entrepreneur everyone thought I was.

In 2007, the tidal wave hit.  We did not properly train our New York City mover.  In the fall, over 1600 Columbia and New York University students received their boxes days late.  Anxious college mothers and fathers were livid.  I spent six weeks on the road and in the warehouse trying to rectify the issue.

Inside, I felt terrible.  I wanted to do right.  I didn’t want to screw our customers, but there was nothing I could do.  I was out of energy.  My business—Collegeboxes—brought me to my knees.  It was an unthinkable place for someone with supposed limitless enthusiasm and confidence.  We sold our business to a buyer for much less then we wanted to.  We didn’t have a choice.

Business-less, I thought about what had happened.  I wasn’t a fraud as many people wished to believe.  I went to Arizona with my family to relax for a week.  Talking to them, the past three years came into focus.  It wasn’t our inexperience or youthfulness that killed us.  It was the fact we promised one thing and delivered another.  This disappointed our employees, our staff, and us.  We didn’t deliver on the promise and we paid the price.

Now, I wanted to scream.  I wanted to tell everyone I knew that I finally got it.  I knew what a business needed to do to win.  Not a small business, not a big business, not an entrepreneurial business, but every single business.  They needed to simply do exactly what they promised to do.

I was invited to speak at the Whitman School of Business at Syracuse University.  Preparing for the speech was more difficult then I expected.  Deep down, I knew I wanted to tell the audience how badly I screwed up and how much I wanted to make things right.  Consciously, though, I kept toying with contrived lessons copied from the last business speaker I heard.  Once I swallowed my pride and began to craft the presentation—the embarrassing one—I felt like I really had something to say.  Slide after slide I detailed the mistakes Collegeboxes made.  I even copied the newspaper headlines slamming us for poor service.  My favorite slide was a graph that showed how much money we lost from not delivering the service as promised.

I practiced.  Not in front of my girlfriend, though.  I was still too embarrassed.  When the event organizer asked me what I was speaking about, I simply said “Delivering on the Promise” without providing further details.