On April 15, 2009, Alessio Manti, Kelsey Kenady, and Mike Marchese found themselves nursing a few drinks, lamenting Bill Pulte’s lost bid for ASG President. The three freshmen had worked on the campaign, and as they reflected back on it, the talk soon turned to Northwestern’s problems. “The day we lost, we starting asking why hasn’t someone done anything about this, why hasn’t someone done anything about that,” Manti says.
A few weeks later, the three rented buses to take students to the Deuce, the popular Thursday night hangout. Behind the scenes of this “Deuce Caboose,” they were envisioning much more: A group that could become “a more efficient, lightweight, effective version of student government,” Manti says. The trio named the fledgling student union MyCat Enterprises and set about building a team.
Despite these lofty goals, MyCat remains best known for the Deuce Caboose. But if Manti, Kenady, and Marchese have their way, that won’t be the case for long. After taking summer and fall to structure the road ahead, MyCat is set to launch a full line of new services in January, beginning with PantryPackers, a grocery delivery service that will start running the first day of winter quarter. But with some of the planned branches competing directly with more established brands, others being pushed onto the back burner, and doubts about the new, more profit-oriented vision, it is unclear whether the trio’s vision for MyCat will hold up.
The new branches range from an online events calendar (“WildCal”) to a Wiki-style register of classes (“LecShare”), and even plans for a campus-wide game of Assassins. Of these myriad ideas, the two most developed are NULeaf Tutors, a student tutoring agency, and PantryPackers. And while both grocery delivery and student tutoring employment are already offered on campus—the former from Peapod, and the latter from NU Tutors—the founders insist that their versions will be more efficient and effective.
With Peapod, Manti, Kenady, and Marchese argue that the delivery fees—$10 for orders under $75—are unrealistic for college students. “Nobody’s going to be buying more than $75 worth of groceries if you live in a dorm,” Manti says. “And if you’re paying a $10 delivery fee, you might as well walk your lazy ass over to Lisa’s, buy some soda and chips, and call it a day. Since we’re not aiming for the same profit margins that Peapod is, we can make our delivery fees percentage based instead of fixed cost.” And since PantryPackers is student-oriented, goods like snacks and chasers will be readily available, Kenady says.
With NU Tutors, the case is less clear cut, particularly since NU Tutors pays $20 an hour, while MyCat’s NULeaf is only offering $15. Despite this discrepancy, branch co-managers Dee Dee White and Nancy Dong have had little problem recruiting tutors. But the MyCat trio has no clear justification for the wage difference, with all three professing some uncertainty about their competitor’s model. “I don’t know what NU Tutors is doing in terms of specific numbers,” Manti says. “People are more than welcome to go to NU Tutors and earn $20 if they like, but if not they can come to us.”
Such oversight may result from an ends-oriented mindset that is both a strength and a weakness of MyCat. “Everyone thinks about these things,” says former employee Katherine Wang. “But everyone’s also so forward driven and, like, GO, that sometimes people forget about other possible problems.”
Wang first became involved with MyCat last year, a few weeks after it was formed. Along with a friend, Liz Yates, she was set to be the manager of SudBuds, a dry cleaning service that would have launched this winter with the rest of the new line. But problems with the vision soon became apparent. “Things started to fall apart,” Wang says, “Our priorities got a little different.”
For Wang, the new emphasis on profit was the main issue. According to her, “Alessio was going for maybe $1000 a month,” a number she saw as impossible. “No one’s going to have that many clothes to dry clean.”
By Nov. 9, Manti, Kenady, and Marchese had decided to either push SudBuds’ launch until spring or cut it all together. And while Kenady says that the move was a result of other issues, such as a lack of interest among local cleaners, Wang says that the split happened because of differing goals: “They wanted more profits, and [Liz and I] were like, let’s help everyone!”
The foundations for this change were set sometime during mid-summer, when Manti, Kenady, and Marchese realized that MyCat needed to become a Limited Liability Company (LLC)—that is, an official company under the law. Manti remembers the conference call, saying “when I dropped the idea of giving wages, it was this huge, revolutionary concept in the way we’d be doing our business.” A few calls later, MyCat had hired a lawyer (paid for with start-up funds from Manti’s own pocket) and was fully re-vamping operations—including the profit model.
Manti insists that becoming a business hasn’t affected the way MyCat runs, saying “Our goal here is to make Northwestern a better place.” But he provided the bulk of the initial funding—a figure he declines to disclose, but which includes compensating attorneys, accountants, branch managers, and employees. And while MyCat’s goal for winter quarter is to “pay the appropriate people, pay for our materials, and just break even,” says Kenady, at some point the fledgling enterprise will have to turn a profit to stay alive.
This is partially because MyCat isn’t affiliated with the University, and therefore lacks such student-group benefits as university funding—a disadvantage that Marchese argues is essential for the business. “We’re not bogged down by university ties,” he says. “We’re able to focus everything that we do on student life.”
Kenady agrees. “Everything we do would be really difficult for any official student group on campus to do. We have this big window to take this on.”
Sometimes, the vastness of that window is overwhelming. “In the beginning you think, oh, we need this at Northwestern, we need that, but the viability of so many things, it’s hard,” Kenady says. “It’s tough because we want to do all these things, but we’re students too.” And now that MyCat is a LLC, the burden is greater. “Last quarter, before we were official, we wanted to do well but we didn’t have the expectations that we do now,” Kenady says.
For now, Kenady says she wants everyone at Northwestern to know what the company does. But the road to that level of recognition is less clear. “We’re going to downsize in some areas, we’re going to expand in some areas, and we’re still trying to figure out internal structural differences and how we want to change even now. Over the course of a year, who knows what can happen.” Then she laughs. “Though I’m pretty sure the Deuce Caboose will stay around for a while.”
