3 minute read
Nick Gourley ’18
• Nick Gourley ’18 during his tennis-playing days at WMA.
With COVID-19s grip firmly around the neck of the world, Wilbraham & Monson Academy’s Nick Gourley ’18 wanted to help in some capacity.
But how? The former president for the Class of 2018 had no experience in the medical field. What could he do?
Mr. Gourley looked within, found some skills and interests he thought could be helpful, made the difficult choice to take a gap semester from college and opened his own startup company late in the summer of 2020.
Arcadium—named after the band Red Hot Chili Peppers’ ninth album—was born, as Mr. Gourley and three of his classmates at Tufts University opened a strategic consulting company, with its sights set firmly on how they could aid struggling companies near the Medford, Massachusetts, campus.
“I figured I could help with my business experience,” Mr. Gourley explained. “It would have been cool to get involved in the medical side; but since there was very little I could do on that end, I took what business knowledge I had and ran with it in the fall.”
Mr. Gourley had started a three-month internship at the Boston Food Allergy Center in the spring semester of his sophomore year at Tufts when COVID-19 slammed into the United States. His responsibilities shifted at the clinic, but he was happy to aid the facility in any way during the pandemic.
“It almost felt like a wartime effort with the first responders and people in health care,” the economics and international relations double major said. “I wanted to get involved, so I did some economic consulting for this clinic, working on the business end figuring out ways to increase company revenue.”
As the summer drew closer to the start of school, Mr. Gourley faced a difficult decision: take a gap semester Tufts was offering to its students or attend online classes. From his off-campus apartment, he took a bold step and created his startup, registering his consulting business with the state and putting school on hold.
Then came the real hard part—finding clients. After a month of knocking on doors of local businesses, a personal training company in neighboring Somerville took on Mr. Gourley and his team.
• Nick Gourley ’18, right, with Head of School Brian P. Easler at Commencement in 2018.
• Nick Gourley ’18, left, with a pastry shop owner, a client of his startup company Arcadium.
“We went to 30 people before someone said they’d be interested in working with us,” he said.
Arcadium landed five clients: a Danish pastry shop owner, interior designer, vinyl record company, a startup looking to sell its unproduced caffeine spray, and the personal training company. Mr. Gourley worked 60–70 hours per week and his staff grew to 11. Mr. Gourley and his team conducted specific research for each company, developed applications, created social media accounts, investigated marketing strategies, and mapped out revenue possibilities and financial responsibilities.
The business slowed in January as Mr. Gourley and his classmates prepared to go back to school.
“The clients expressed a lot of gratitude over time,” Mr. Gourley said. “Once, a close friend of one of our clients came up to me and said the work Arcadium did completely saved her business from closing. Hearing things like that is the coolest thing in the world.”
Launching a startup as a 20-year-old during a pandemic, with people’s tensions at an all-time high, usually isn’t a recipe for success. How did Mr. Gourley pull it off?
“The AP Seminar and AP Research classes I took at WMA engrained in my mind that I could go out and do anything,” Mr. Gourley praised. “It sounds like a generality but the point of those classes was to create an original piece of research from a vast field of existing work.
“Obviously, that doesn’t translate directly to a business, but navigating those courses definitely gave me the confidence I needed to start with a completely blank slate and create something out of it.”
Behind his ingenuity, intelligence and drive, Mr. Gourley created something—something helpful for struggling businesses during one of the most trying times in the history of the world.
