When entrepreneur Chris Motley thinks about his background – a black kid born to a 13-year-old mom in Chicago – he said it’s not surprising that he built his life and business around the words “access” and “culture.”
“The older I get, the more amazing it gets,” he said of his upbringing. “It’s cool to have someone close in age who plays more than just a mom role. The perspective she has always given me is to be authentic. If you are authentic and tell people what you’re trying to do, they can help you.”
Motley’s startup company Better Weekdays is strongly rooted in that advice.
It’s essentially the EHarmony for jobs, with a special focus on Gen-Y talent, said Motley, CEO and founder of the now St. Louis-based company.
When millennials are looking for opportunities, he said they are looking for a certain type of company culture that best fits their working style. And businesses are competing for that new talent. The Better Weekdays technology and online assessment tries to understand how young jobseekers prefer to get their work done and helps to make that match. Jobseekers use the service for free, but companies are charged a fee.
Universities have been obvious clients for the startup, but new federal regulations for colleges have made Better Weekdays’ technology much more enticing. The White House also recognizes Better Weekdays’ potential as a game changer.
On March 9, the White House announced its new job initiative, TechHire, which aims to empower 20 communities to get into the technology workforce – and it will use Better Weekdays’ platform to help job seekers find these jobs. The White House said that over half a million of job openings today are in fields like software development, network administration and cybersecurity, many of which did not even exist just a decade ago.
“For us at Better Weekdays, this is just a part of our story,” Motley said. “And it validating what we are trying to do with our technology.”
In October 2014, the U.S. Department of Education announced its new “gainful employment” regulations for most for-profit programs and certificate programs at private non-profit and public institutions. The department said that institutions could lose their ability to participate in taxpayer-funded federal student aid programs if the estimated annual loan payments of their graduates exceed 20 percent of their discretionary income or 8 percent of their total earnings. The regulations take effect on July 1.
The legislation also requires the institutions to pass an accreditation standard, which sets a 68 percent job-placement rate as the benchmark.
Essentially, it means students at for-profit institutions need to have good-paying jobs when graduate, and that’s where Better Weekdays comes in. Many institutions immediately balked at the requirements, saying they would go bankrupt trying to meet them. But the Department of Education emphasized that the law particularly protects lower-income students, who are often African-American and who end up with big debt from for-profit institutions. More than 80 percent of students at for-profits borrow, while less than half of students at public institutions do, according to the department.
With this new legislation, college chief financial officers will be more concerned with the job placement rate, he said.
“That affects cash coming in from student loans,” Motley said. “Our position is that it’s a good opportunity to launch a product that aligns the goal of the CFOs.”
The National Economic Council (NEC), which advises the president on global economics, emailed Motley three weeks ago about partnering in their new national initiative. He said the NEC representatives especially liked that Better Weekdays was a minority-owned startup located in a region that’s at the heart of this national employment discussion.
Chicago ‘hood to Atlanta elite
When Motley was 13, his mother heard about an opportunity to place him in an elite boarding school in Rome, Georgia, through a program called Better Chance.
“She learned about the program from a girlfriend,” he said. “That was a door that opened.”
The woman who told his mother about the program had a son his same age. When he was a sophomore, the boy became a tragic victim of violence. Motley knows that could have easily been him.
“Getting access into that program opened my eyes to exactly how big the world is and the opportunities out there,” he said. “Through that program, I learned about Goldman Sachs. That was the first place to work. I had to be exposed to have access to that. That to me is the problem.”
If people look at the trajectory of his life, he said it has always been about access. When he solves problems, he said he pulls from his personal experience.
“Diversity brings perspective,” he said. “Most businesses are successful because they solve a problem better than anyone else.”
Motley said he is dedicated to growing his business in St. Louis. Better Weekdays was among the five startups accepted into the 2014 class of Capital Innovators accelerator program, receiving a $50,000 investment from Capital Innovators in exchange for an equity stake in the company. That’s when Better Weekdays moved its operations to St. Louis from Chicago.
Now the company is a finalist in the Arch Grant competition, which will be decided in May.
“It’s a big deal to be a finalist,” he said. “Our success is going to be the result of the support we get from many organizations in the ecosystem.”
