How to succeed in business by really trying: innovation, language, family

Gloria and Terry Crawford

Terry Crawford, the CEO of InitialView changes lives. Including his own. In the interview that follows anyone who wishes to learn about the start-up culture that is now a vital part of the US economy should read closely.  

His transformation from a great job in large law firm to an entrepreneur demonstrates courage, innovation, and flat out smarts. His thriving business helps all the parties involved: schools, students, and even the relationships between two countries.

He is living in Beijing and has founded a business together with his wife that is addressing issues of veracity that often arise in international admissions. What follows are some questions that he answered for the blog. Not only is his business model unique, his unconventional career path to entrepreneurship will also be of interest to many.

**********************************************************************************

Tell me a little about your background.

I am originally from Atlanta, Georgia, and I had the honor of going to the University of Virginia for my undergraduate degree. It was a tremendous four years. I was able to take classes from great professors like Civil Rights Activist and Politician Julian Bond and the renowned philosopher Richard Rorty. I was also able to study abroad in Japan. After graduating I moved to Japan for three years, where I taught English and studied Japanese. I returned to law school at the University of Michigan, during which I shifted my language focus to Chinese. After graduating I put my start date at the law firm on hold so that I could go to Tsinghua University for a year to intensively study Chinese. 

That changed everything. Not only did I get my level of Chinese to where it could (barely) pass for professional use, I also decided to start my legal career in the Hong Kong office of my law firm. Right before I left to move to Hong Kong, I met my wife in Beijing, and we were married a little over a year later.

How did you make the transition from being a lawyer to being an entrepreneur?

After some years in a big law firm (parts of which I really enjoyed), I decided it was time for a change. At the time I was in the Beijing office of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, doing Mergers &Acquisitions and private equity deals. It doesn’t take long to notice that many aspects of Chinese society lack transparency, and I was particularly interested in the question of why, with so many people using online video, it still wasn’t used often in “people decisions” (i.e., hiring and admission decisions). When I thought I had a good solution to that question, I quit to give it a shot.

And what is that solution?

Well, it did take some time to figure it out, and as it so happened we had already been working with video at the time that the number of applicants from China to US schools took off at rocket pace. While admission officers at U.S. universities realize that the educational system in China is very different, many admission officers are struggling with how to make good decisions when, at times, they are unsure of the accuracy of transcripts and recommendations. In addition, they needed cost-effective ways to confirm language ability. As a result, a handful of schools began recommending our interviews. The best students were very happy to do an interview, and as a result they started requesting that we send their interview to as many schools as they were applying to. Before we knew it, most of the top schools in the U.S. were accepting our interviews.

What have you seen over this year?

We get to talk to amazing students all the time, and we are even more impressed with students from China than before we started (I personally did hundreds of interview this year). We also saw how second and third tier cities have some of the most impressive students, which was admittedly unexpected but inspiring. From an admissions standpoint, we now have numbers from the year, and they indicate that students with our interviews had a much higher rate of admission. We’ve also starting doing interviews in other countries and for high schools and graduate schools.

What is something that you learned this year from talking with students?

Many people talk about how students from China are all alike, and I had expected the interviews to start to blend together after a while. Instead, I started to feel like I was doing a sociology experiment, and that with each interview I was getting a privileged look into a country and a generation that will literally change the world. While of course some students were more eloquent than others, on the whole I was impressed with the variety and thought that went into the students’ answers. Sometimes it was when we would throw them curveballs that we would get the best answers.

What is it like starting a business with your wife?

It required big changes in our lifestyle and in how we organized our family life, but we greatly prefer the current arrangement to what life was like when I was a corporate lawyer. I enjoyed many things about being a corporate lawyer—I liked the fast pace, I liked my colleagues—but ultimately a lawyer’s job is one that requires you to always be responsive to the needs of your client. For my family’s sake, I wanted something that would allow me more control, and personally, I wanted to spend my time doing something that was more creative.

My wife deserves credit for being willing to “go back to work” and sacrifice the stable salary that we had when I was a lawyer. We joke that we are the perfect partners—because as a family our “interests are aligned”—but it is actually true. We are able to move faster and do things better because we are both 100% committed to the success of the business and we 100% trust each other. It’s a tremendous competitive advantage.

What advice would you give to someone who is thinking about starting a business in China?

While perhaps obvious, I would recommend starting a business in an area where one has a competitive advantage—and by that I mean that they shouldn’t do something that a local Chinese individual would be able to do better. For example, our credibility in China comes from the endorsement of U.S. universities. We are able to get that endorsement because we are transparent in the way we do business in China and because we have a track record of delivering high quality services for a reasonable price (in the education field, to be frank, there are very few companies which can do both). Had we decided to do something else—like online social networking in China—we wouldn’t have any competitive advantage. A local Chinese citizen would be much better at that than we would be. Thankfully, since China is becoming more economically powerful and its citizens need to interact with the rest of the world, there is actually quite a bit of opportunity for foreigners who want to play a “bridge”-type role.

Terry’s business success provides inspiration. More importantly, perhaps, his personal experience with students proves the importance of getting past generalizations and stereotypes. His comments on the exceptional quality and diversity of students from China should convince everyone these students are ready to contribute to a campus and then to a profession in every conceivable way. His words dismantle the often times quick fix of lumping Chinese students into a one size fits all category. 

I have spent thousands of hours talking with students from China and it was this experience that taught me how inaccurate the descriptions about Chinese students are.

I would like to thank Terry and his wife for sharing their time and expertise. I have learned much from them that I hope will make me approach challenges with courage and people with humanity and openness.

                                               'inconcevable' = a lack of imagination