HSA is not a club on campus. It is the largest student-run company in the world. The company was founded in 1957 with the purpose of defraying the cost of a Harvard education. Over the years, HSA has served as the umbrella company for many different agencies. Some of these agencies have involved laundry, bartending, taxi cabs, travel agencies, academic tutoring, user research, and much more. Today, HSA operates 10 different agencies and employs over 700 students on Harvard’s campus over the course of a fiscal year. Over HSA lifetime, managers have been able to acquire core management skills and learn valuable business lessons.

In our time at the company, HSA has shown tremendous resilience. Despite a majority of our business lines (laundry, water services, The Harvard Shops) closing during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, student managers coming together remotely from all over the world were able to prevent the worst of the losses. In FY22, HSA was able to grow back to $4.5M in revenue while also acquiring Trademark Tours, the premier private tour company operating in Harvard Square and MIT, while also securing a new home for The Harvard Shop at 1380 Massachusetts Avenue. In FY23, we're projected to return to pre-pandemic revenue and student employment numbers. HSA's story, especially, over the last few years, has been one of perseverance. Despite the tremendous threats to our businesses and the difficulty of managing the company remotely, dedicated teams of Harvard students have been able to not only grow back HSA's businesses but keep its spirit and mission alive throughout the pandemic. 

One of things HSA has been resilient to is its turnover each year. Every year, HSA faces nearly 100% role-specific turnover across all levels of the company. This is one of the unique challenges that the organization faces. HSA, thus, places a large emphasis on the preservation of institutional memory and functional training for employees to combat this turnover. However, this training mostly focuses on first-year managers at HSA. The executive team at HSA (President, Vice President, and Chief Operations Officer) gets less structured training while also being tasked with running the transition for the entire company. 


In our project, we set out to answer the question: How can HSA best prepare for and execute on its UPM training & transition each year?
Upper Management members at HSA make the highest leverage decisions at the company and can have the largest impact at the organization. Improvements to the executive level transition will have a large, positive multiplier effect on all other levels of HSA. In the following page, we will present our blueprint for action and specific interventions to improve upon the executive level transition process.