Scaling WIGU from zero to 18,000 students
A two-person startup that grew to 13 needed to put a statewide workforce platform in front of high school students, fast, without hiring in proportion. I built the systems underneath it.
- Apprenticeship America
- Chief Operating Officer
- About 12 months
18,000
high school students in about 12 months
7,000+
students given career recommendations and employer matches
$4M
venture raise these systems helped support
Context
Apprenticeship America ran WIGU, a workforce platform that connected high school students to career recommendations and employer matches across Iowa. The company has since closed. When I joined, it was me and the founder. We grew the team to 13 people, and the student count started at zero.
Problem
Every school, student, and employer adds work: sales conversations, onboarding steps, engagement follow-ups, reporting. Handled by hand, that work grows in step with the user count. A team that topped out at 13 cannot hire its way through that curve, so the platform would stall at whatever volume the team could touch manually.
Constraints
- Two people at the start and 13 at most, across the whole company, not just operations.
- Twelve months to reach statewide scale.
- Sales, onboarding, and operations all needed repeatable processes at the same time.
Approach
Build the systems before the volume arrives. That meant designing the CRM as the system of record first, writing the SOPs that sales, onboarding, and operations would run on, and automating the engagement steps that would otherwise be repeated per student. Dashboards came alongside so leadership could see what was happening without asking.
Systems built
- CRM architecture
- Salesforce and HubSpot configured as the system of record for students, schools, and employers.
- SOPs for sales, onboarding, and operations
- Written procedures so each step ran the same way regardless of who ran it.
- Automated engagement cadences
- Follow-up sequences triggered by where a student was in the process, so engagement did not depend on someone remembering.
- Analytics dashboards
- Leadership visibility into signups, activation, and matches without manual reporting.
Results
WIGU reached 18,000 high school students in about twelve months, and more than 7,000 of them received career recommendations and employer matches. Those systems were part of the case behind the company's $4M venture raise.
What I took from it
The team never had to hire to match the student count. That is the whole point of building systems first, and it is the pattern behind everything else on this site.
Apprenticeship America ran WIGU, a workforce platform that connected high school students to career recommendations and employer matches across Iowa. The company has since closed. When I joined, it was me and the founder. We grew the team to 13 people, and the student count started at zero.
WIGU reached 18,000 high school students in about twelve months, and more than 7,000 of them received career recommendations and employer matches. Those systems were part of the case behind the company's $4M venture raise.