Pep Students Hit the Road and         Hit it Big

     Last summer, when three zealous Pepperdine students set out on the ultimate road trip, they didn’t plan on it leading to an entrepreneurial venture that would launch a book deal, an Internet company and a new summer business course. But it did.     

     After a professor encouraged them to get out of the classroom to learn about the business world, seniors Michael Marinner and Nathan Gebhard and business graduate Alissa Andress sent proposals for a road trip sponsorship to dozens of companies.

     Today, the three continue to work on their book, "Road Trip," which was part of the sponsorship deal.

     Gebhard, 23, and Marriner, 22, are also catapulting their own Internet company, Career Challenge Network, and creating a business course to "bridge the gap between the classroom and the real world of work." Andress, 24, works for Hydrogen Media.

     Gebhard, a business major, and Marriner, a biology and sports medicine major, recently talked to Currents about the road trip that changed their lives.

Currents: Describe the route of your trip geographically.

Gebhard: Our first stop was Canada ... Then we went to Maine, but the big company stop was Boston. I guess the highlights in Boston were Fast Company Magazine, Harvard and Monster.com.

Marinner: We basically did a figure eight around the country. We went from Los Angeles to Maine, down the East Coast, through Texas, to Seattle and back down again. (But) we went from Atlanta to Vermont in 20 hours straight, and from Vermont to Houston in 40 hours straight.

Currents: Describe your motor home. What was it like living in such a small space for more than two months?

Gebhard: Oh, you mean the "Super Fun, Painted RV!" That’s what Mike always called it.

Marinner: The reason why I called it (that) was because a really important aspect of creating and doing the project was a sense of energy. That’s a big reason why we found success with our project and how we were able to interview so many cool people.

     I mean, we’re college students — it’s not like we’re from a big consulting company interviewing these people, but what we did have going for us was a high sense of energy.

     We demonstrated that energy in everything we did, whether through e-mail or on the phone. We even painted our RV crazy colors to display our thumbprint of energy and excitement.

Gebhard: The RV was 31 feet (long). It had two couches and a bed in the back. It had minimal cooking facilities and minimal hot water supply. We spent the night in hotel parking lots.

     Alissa would use the water to take showers. Mike and I would jump in the hotel Jacuzzis — that was our shower. We’d scrub up, get all clean. We’d wake up in the morning, go on a run, then walk into the hotel like we were guests.

     The cool thing was that, yeah, we were in a RV, but we were always out and about in the city. It’s not like we were in the RV 24 hours a day.

Marinner: Besides, we were so busy working. When in the RV, (we) were either driving, sleeping or typing journals from the day before.

     After every interview we each wrote about six lines about the experience.

Currents: Which interviewees stand out?

Marinner: Jim Collins, author of the book "Built to Last." He’s in Boulder, Colorado — he trains CEOs on management.

Gebhard: He spoke to us for two- and-a-half hours, and just drilled us, just really twisted our brains apart.

Marinner: For every interview we would usually go in, sit down and start asking questions. But he sat down and we spent two-and-a-half hours never really asking him a question, but just going through an exchange of information — taking business and applying it to life.

Gebhard: He had some unbelievable insights. He drew three circles that overlap at one point.

     He said the top circle represents what you would love to be doing in your life. The next circle, what you can do best in the world. And the circle to the left is the economic engine, what will enable you to do those two other things.

Marinner: You’ve also got to give a high five to Tom Peters.

Gebhard: Tom is the best-selling business author of all time. Through a connection, we’d been trying to get a hold of him for about two months, but it never worked.

     Finally, after two months of leaving messages on his voice mail at home, he picked up the phone.

     He lives in Vermont; we were in Atlanta. We asked for an hour-and-a-half interview, he said okay. We drove twenty hours on Fourth of July weekend to get to his house.

     An hour-and-a-half interview turned into a barbecue with his family on the third of July. He was unreal, we just sat on his couch and talked about management. He ended up sponsoring the project on the way home.

Marinner: The best part is that we had to be in Houston three days later. We went from Atlanta to Vermont to Houston. We had 48 hours to make a 40-hour drive with no spare tire.

     Another really cool interviewee was John Wooden. He’s the legendary UCLA basketball coach. He won 10 national championships in 12 years at UCLA. He’s considered to be one of the greatest basketball coaches of all time.

Gebhard: He’s in his late 80s and his mind is so sharp. You could see so much experience behind what he was sharing with us.

Marinner: He just wore us to the ground. Two hours in, we were exhausted, and he was still going. He would quote people left and right, giving some incredible insight.

Gebhard: Overall, this project was a time for huge self-awareness about what excited us in the world. We had completely new experiences everyday.

Currents: Was it difficult getting top CEOs to meet with you?

Marinner: Probably a 6-to-1 failure ratio. We put the trip together during finals, so it was just cold calls all day, and then studying for finals at night.

     It was really fun though, I mean, we’d get four people that would say no, and then all of a sudden the CEO of Adidas, for example, would say yes. When we left we had 30 interviews, we came back with 50, and to date we have 75.

     Another important aspect of our trip is that, yes, we learned a ton from people like Allan Webber (the founding editor of Fast Company), the CEO of Nordstrom and the CEO of Adidas, but we also learned a ton from all the normal people you meet on a road trip.

     For example, when we interviewed some of the directors of the Stanford Business School, I probably learned just as much from the secretary or from one of the assistants as I did from the people we interviewed.

Currents: How is your book coming along? How many pages will each interviewee receive?

Gebhard: Well, we’re still writing the book. I would say that the average, now that we’ve interviewed more people than we’d expected, will be three pages (per interview). It just varies on how much insight each offered and how much we want to expand on it.

Currents: Do you still plan to name the book "Road Trip"?

Marinner: That’s still the tentative title. It’s funny because we had spent so much time thinking about the perfect name, like "Career Tools." From the beginning it was "Road Trip," and then we went far away from that idea, and now we’re back to it again, because it’s exactly what we did, a road trip project.

Currents: When will the book appear on shelves?

Marinner: You can probably expect the book out mid-2001.

Gebhard: Tom Peters is writing the foreword for it. He wrote (the book) "In Search of Excellence."

Currents: Are you pleased with the outcome of the project?

Gebhard: Without a doubt there are things we could have improved, but it was nowhere near what we could have possibly imagined. It’s far beyond that.

Marinner: Especially now where we’re taking it. If you would have told me a year ago that I would be taking a road trip, writing a book, starting up a Web site and beginning a company, I would have laughed. I was expecting to be in medical school right now.

Currents: Beyond the book, the two of you are initiating a Pepperdine business course (BA 592.11 Summer Session I) and beginning a company. Describe these new projects.

Marinner: Dr. Adler will be teaching the class.

Gebhard: Mike and I came back from this trip with a year left in school. Our thought was, "School is going to be a joke." We thought we’d be sitting in class just waiting to get back out and experience what we had just had a taste of. We thought we wouldn’t be able to sit still in school. The complete opposite happened. It made my business classes 100 times more applicable.

     The first premise of the class will be to bring the applicability of the real world back into the classroom. Essentially, students will go out into the local community and pick a few local companies that they are interested in.

     The summer class is on a variable scale, so students can sign up for one to four units. A three-unit class, for example, will require a student to interview four companies.

     (He or she) will have to call up the company, schedule a meeting, conduct an interview over lunch and then bring that experience back into the classroom and mull over it a bit.

     Finally, the student’s one-page reports, one per company, will be posted on our company Web site: roadtripchallenge.com.

Marinner: Students will have their own Web pages on our site. Once they post their information, it will be searchable by viewers and possible employers.

Gebhard: Regarding the second premise of the class, we could easily say that we learned just as much from cold calling and putting the project together as we did from the interviews.

     There’s an entire skill set that (students) will be required to know upon graduation. (They will) be expected to know how to cold call; (they will) be expected to know how to sit in a meeting and either run it or understand the etiquette of how it is run.

Marinner: Another huge skill is writing a proposal. Students need to be able to write proposals that will make them stand out, one that will differentiate them from the rest. These are all skills we gained in creating the project.

     Thirdly, in this class, students will be exposed to the business environment that they are someday going to enter. Maybe they’ll like it, maybe they won’t, but it will give them clarity and understanding.

Gebhard: Your first job is basically a prearranged marriage. Before people get married they date for a while; they get to know each other’s idiosyncrasies.

     With our company we are trying to eradicate the sentence, "Had I known then what I know now." Our motto is: we exist to help you date your company or your future career.

Marinner: We are trying to connect what you do in college with what you do after college. We want to give (students) a taste of what is after the developmental process.

Gebhard: We are starting a movement right now that challenges kids to take learning out of the classroom and really get a sense of what they are working toward.