Anna Lee ’20:
Despite being only a senior in high school, Schuyler Kresge ‘18 has already made his mark on the fast-paced social media marketing industry. Kresge embarked on his business venture during the summer of 2016 when he transformed his childhood love for design, weaving it into a digital consulting firm with a team comprised of his friends and peers: John Halcovich ‘18, David Miller ‘16, and Kathryn Wilson ‘16. Kresge said that in the beginning, his startup “was basically a no risk type of thing so I started it up and it all went up from there. I run a consulting group that does social media marketing and web design for individuals and businesses in the state and nationally.”
John Halcovich ‘18, Designer of Kresge Consulting, explained that the company’s job is “taking someone’s business and figuring out how you can help it.” The consulting group helps businesses stand out by giving them a unique web presence.
Kresge explained that “essentially what we do is we provide web and social media marketing. So we’ll create a plan for you and a strategy and we’ll also execute it if you want.”
Kresge described his business as “pretty active” with at least “six clients on retainer at all times.” In the past, he has worked with both home staging designers and the Republican Party of Pennsylvania by assisting them in building an unique brand.
According to Kresge, consulting is a great first business as it does not require much front investment. To future aspiring business owners, he advises to “choose something that’s fairly low cost-low risk.” For his own startup, he simply began with “buying a web domain to start up the business,” without dealing with the complications of renting “a space or anything like that which make it kind of low risk” and potentially “high reward.” Kresge also explains that it is really important for business owners to “try to find your niche. It’s really important to find your niche in a profitable sector.”
Kresge says the challenging aspect of maintaining his business is being responsible for the livelihood of others. He said that “one thing I learned is that when I have a graphic designer and web designer that I hire, they are basically employees and I pay them a salary. Just the fact that you have people depending on you to pay them just makes it get a lot of initiative to actually do projects”.
The benefits of business owning, however, outweigh the challenges. Halcovich explained that “I got a lot of people skills; I just learned how to deal with angry people… You learn how to communicate with people and constantly emailing people back and forth, trying to figure out what’s wrong, it helped me with problem solving.”