CALS Connection Summer 2019

"CALS Alumnus, Entrepreneur Turns Student Start-up Into Multimillion-Dollar Business"

By Zoe Bowden, agricultural education and communication master’s student

Published December 10, 2019

With just $500, University of Florida students Karthik Shanadi and Luke McGurrin began their start-up T-shirt company. Now, the UF alumni have turned that small company into a thriving business. In 2019, the duo made Inc.’s list of America’s Top 5000 Fastest Growing Private Companies, ranking in the top 20 percent and surpassing companies like Uber.

When Shanadi, a College of Agricultural and Life Sciences (CALS) alumnus, was an undergraduate student studying food and resource economics (FRE), he discovered an underserved market in apparel for college organizations through his own experience. When attempting to find a company to print shirts for his fraternity’s upcoming fundraiser, Shanadi found that local distributors struggled to meet a quick turnaround time and affordable online vendors had complex design processes. He put to use the business and marketing skills learned in his FRE classes to launch Greek House with McGurrin, a Warrington College of Business alumnus.

The two students split their time between classes to grow the new business. The goal: to provide student organizations with great customer service and high-quality apparel in a timely manner, all for an affordable price.

“We saw there was an opportunity to help student organizations and peers on campus,” Shanadi said. “Luke and I got started getting orders by texting friends. In the first year, we made $75,000 and it just increased from there.”

Upon graduation in 2014, Shanadi moved to San Francisco, CA, to work for Amazon and assisted in launching Amazon Fresh through the logistics branch of Amazon Same-Day Delivery. After a year at Amazon, Shanadi began working for Salesforce, a company known for its technological innovation in generating new customers through leads. All this time, Shanadi and McGurrin continued to work on Greek House in their evenings and weekends until they were ready to take the leap and commit to Greek House full time.

“This period of transition was hard. Coming off a very cushy job at a top tech company in the world, you’ve got a really structured way to grow your career,” Shanadi admitted. “It is a big shift going from a very structured environment with access to mentorship and resources at your fingertips, and knowing you have a paycheck week to week, to the unstructured environment of entrepreneurship without a clear path to success. While we were growing, we were still trying to figure out where to make our investments. You’re still trying to figure out your priorities as a young person; nothing goes as planned.”

Greek House has gone through three different restructurings, each time re-evaluating staffing and redefining core values, mission and purpose. For Shanadi and McGurrin, developing strong relationships within the entrepreneurial community has been a vital part of their success.

“It took a lot of hard work and open communication. We sought out advisors for our team who had been in our position before,” Shanadi said. “The community is small and tight-knit. We went on LinkedIn and found people who were chief marketing and executive officers, and then asked to meet them for coffee and seek advice. People in the entrepreneurial world are so willing to help and mentor you.”

With the technology and logistic experience Shanadi had gained at Salesforce, he was able to rebuild the Greek House software platform to be more streamlined while tightening up their supply chain. The Greek House system uses technology to organize a network of supplies, designers and printers to create custom designs in 24 hours. Orders are then distributed within one-to-two weeks.

Since becoming full-time entrepreneurs in 2016, Shanadi and McGurrin have grown Greek House to earn $2.4 million in revenue during 2018 with 24 employees. The company serves hundreds of college campuses nationwide and across five countries. In spring of 2019, Greek House earned the No. 3 spot on the Gator100 list hosted by the UF Alumni Association. The Gator100 honors the 100 fastest-growing Gator-owned or Gator-led businesses in the world.

“Owning a business and starting something has always been an interest of mine,” Shanadi said. “Most of my family in India are entrepreneurs, so the global marketplace was a hook. Making an impact on a global scale piqued my interest as a way to better serve customers.”

Looking ahead, Shanadi and McGurrin will be expanding the Greek House software platform to a new brand, Threadly. The success of Greek House motivated the duo to move beyond college campuses and expand into a larger market, providing merchandise for businesses, nonprofits and other organizations.

Shanadi said his degree in FRE provided him with the skills to get his entrepreneurial start. He recalls the two most influential courses he took as an undergraduate student were Selling Strategically and International Agribusiness Marketing.

“In entrepreneurship, sales is key. So, understanding psychology and how to value and position the product in the right way for consumers was invaluable,” Shanadi said. “The final project in Agribusiness Marketing involved creating a marketing plan. My project was on potato chips. That project made me understand what inputs go into the product – costs, packaging, shipping, materials and advertising. It was one of the hardest projects I did, but I learned a ton. It opened my eyes to resources online that everyone has access to. I didn’t know anything about a marketing plan before, but the class gave us the tools to do it. Going about solving a massive project like that progressed my entrepreneurship.”

Shanadi’s application of business and marketing principles through the FRE degree became transferable knowledge across industries. By learning how to focus on one market and understand the fundamentals using an agricultural product, Shanadi felt he could easily master another market.

“One of things I really liked was the flexibility in the classes,” Shanadi said. “I did a management and marketing specialization and it was great because it helped me hone in on the business acumen I needed. FRE gives you a very broad knowledge of business. Learning about accounting, marketing and sales, financial statements, understanding fundamentals; agriculture gives you a very real business case to experience.”

Through curriculum and experiential learning, students in the food and resource economics major develop the skills to analyze complex situations such as the allocation of natural resources to meet the needs of people in local, state, national, and global communities. Students study sales, agricultural finance, food and agribusiness marketing, agribusiness management, international agricultural policy, math and economics. Learn more about all 23 majors in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences on the CALS website.