Richmond's Team Excel began as a way to encourage the positive growth of local students, and has grown into an organizational tool for tracking success.
The Team Excel platform allows organizations, usually schools or nonprofits, to set up online "leagues" where users compete based on customizable metrics. Most of the organizations tend to be schools, and the students compete on metrics like grades, attendance and community service hours in exchange for periodic prizes.
Team Excel was born out of the nonprofit Excel to Excellence, which was started by former NFL star and Richmond native Michael Robinson.
While Johnathan Mayo was executive director at Excel to Excellence, his first order of business was to create a program that had an impact on kids, and thus the Team Excel model was born.
"We started the program with 30 [freshmen] at Varina High School, who were then broken into three teams," Mayo, Team Excel CEO, told Inno. "That first cohort saw a 27 percent increase in their GPA during their four year time in the program."
Mayo said an independent evaluation by Randolph Macon College found that participating students showed improvement in self-efficacy, academic motivation, leadership and citizenship.
"We had all these great metrics so the real question was, 'Ok, how do we scale this model?" he said.
To scale, Team Excel needed funding. In order to fundraise, Mayo took Team Excel out from under the Excel to Excellence umbrella and made it a stand alone company.
The new company, a Virginia Benefit Corporation, was able to maintain the social impact of their work and made decisions based on both their social mission and shareholder value. Between a grant from Facebook and a private investment, the company was able to build out a tech platform for the program with an initial $20,000 in funding.
As the company continues to grow, Mayo said the core market has become focused around student-athletes. While they have agreements with four schools in Virginia, including Varina High School where they first launched the program, they are pursuing opportunities with an organization in Toronto, the University of Virginia football program and even the National Collegiate Athletic Association.
"Student-athletes really are the core target in our current go-to-market strategy," Mayo said. "It really resonates with them because we know they like to compete; we know that they typically buy into team concepts, and frankly that's where we started before we branched out."
As the team expands their per-user fee structure in the premium version of the platform, Mayo said he is also pursuing opportunities for sponsorship-based agreements where a corporation pays the fees for a school league. Team Excel is currently in talks with Capital One and the University of Texas about possible sponsorship opportunities.
Though the platform continues to grow, Mayo said he remains focused on the core value -- helping students achieve their potential. The team-based nature of the program allows students to hold one another accountable and "fans," generally parents, coaches or teachers who support the students, are able to make an account to follow the scores and competitions.
"The one thing that I’m most proud of with our work is actually seeing how it has made an impact on the young people we have worked with," Mayo said.
One success story, Mayo said, is Alton Coston III who participated in Team Excel from eighth grade until graduating from Varina High School.
"[Coston III] just finished his freshman year at William & Mary where he attended on an academic scholarship," Mayo said. "This summer he is interning with the ACLU. I’m very proud of him and so many of our Team Excel graduates."
