Laundry List: Improving the World's Largest Student-Run Business
Hi! My name is Serhiy and I am a sophomore in Adams concentrating in Government. I am currently the Managing Director of HSA Cleaners and Dorm Essentials.
Background
My experience with two different leadership roles at Harvard Student Agencies has fundamentally changed my own Harvard journey and has impacted the experiences of the Harvard student community. Harvard Student Agencies, or HSA for short, is the world's largest student-run corporation, with twelve different agencies that encompass retail, dorm services, millennial marketing, software development, tutoring, bartending, and more. In total, HSA earned over $7,000,000 in revenue last year and employed over 650 Harvard undergraduates.
Why HSA?
HSA's Mission
The mission statement of HSA was created in 1957, and the main goal of the company is to adhere to its ideals:
“...to conduct and supervise enterprises for the benefit of students of Harvard University who are in need of financial assistance to defray the expenses of their education; to provide opportunities for such students to be gainfully employed; to study, cultivate, promote, and encourage new business ventures to afford additional employment opportunities for such students; to provide experience for its members.”
Year One
In my first year working with the company, I was the Web Fulfillment Manager for The Harvard Shop, which meant that I was in charge of online retail operations for The Harvard Shop. I managed, hired, trained, and scheduled a team of fifteen to twenty Web Fulfillment Associates to handle customer service and package, ship, and fulfill over 16,500 orders, totaling sales of over 1.01 million. I learned valuable sales, finance, teamwork, and business skills. Below is a picture of the full Fiscal Year 2019 (FY19) team.
Year Two
After a year at The Harvard Shop, I was promoted to my current role, Managing Director of HSA Cleaners and Dorm Essentials. At my current job, I am responsible for operations, marketing, logistics, and business development for a dry-cleaning storefront, a laundry delivery service that serves not just Harvard students, but Tufts students and local Cambridge businesses as well, and a MicroFridge, water delivery, fan, and linen rental service. I created and manage a $1,400,000 budget, assist the business office with managing accounts receivable and accounts payable, and hired and managed a team of three managers and sixty hourly employees. These roles have empowered me to make my mark on Harvard by impacting the day-to-day life of Harvard students. However, there are challenges that come along with working at a multi-million dollar student-run business, and I hope to use this research to address them.
Below is a picture of the current FY20 management team. This year, I am a senior manager at the company.
My Research
My objective is to use qualitative and quantitative data to create a long-term plan for the improvement of HSA. My research question is focused on what long term initiatives should be taken to improve business education, business experience, and creating employment opportunities at HSA, with a concentration on onboarding and time management for managers and hourly employee empowerment. To learn more about HSA, visit hsa.net, and to see my blueprint for action, click the button at the bottom of this page.Interview Highlights
Dara - Vice President of Harvard Student Agencies, former Managing Director of HSA Tutoring
Q: How has being a student-employee affected your Harvard experience?
A: I think it's the best part of my Harvard experience. The best part of Harvard so far has been working with other students outside of class on something we both deeply care about but don't really have incentives to accomplish from an academic point of view. I appreciate that Harvard is very supportive of extracurriculars. I think my student work experience has been my greatest takeaway from Harvard and I'm glad I was able to meet basically the smartest people through work and not necessarily class.
Q: What should HSA look like in 5 years?
A: I think that the biggest difference between HSA today and HSA in 5 years is more transparency about our impact to the Harvard community. This is something I've been personally working on. People inside HSA know exactly what we are; you know, we're not just The Harvard Shop and Cleaners, we're also Campus Insights, a UI/UX consulting firm, we're also HSA DEV, a software engineering firm. We do a lot of risky business decisions because we're a nonprofit; we make decisions because we want people to have the experience of succeeding or failing... So in 5 years, I just want a better community understanding of what HSA is.
Akanksha - Managing Director of The Academies at Harvard, former Head of Business Development at Campus Insights
Q: Do you think HSA has helped you career or network wise?
A: I think career wise, [HSA] has shown me that everything kind of is business. It's shown me the business that is present everywhere. You can think "Oh, I'm interested in writing," and you think "that doesn't involve business," but then you look at Let's Go and you're like "Oh, I guess there is business there." For instance, I'm interested in law, and coming into Harvard I thought I wouldn't do anything business related, and yet now I know that there are all of these different decisions and leadership things and you know, selling yourself, and selling a product and selling a vision is all business. I think it's shown me how those same skills apply everywhere.
George - Delivery and Logistics Manager at HSA Cleaners and Dorm Essentials
Q: Do you think HSA has helped you career or network wise? How can this improve?
A: Network wise, I definitely think I've expanded just who I know and specifically who I know as it pertains to what I'm interested in and what I want to do in the future. [To improve,] I think that communicating with people across agencies would be useful. I think HSA goes out of its way to try to make community very important here, but there are just boundaries as to who you see on a regular basis. So obviously I'm seeing people in Cleaners and Dorm Essentials more than I see people from The Harvard Shop, but I'm sure people in The Harvard Shop... have a lot of valuable insights perhaps into what I'm doing as well.
