Karen Borchert (G'09) and Martin Franklin (G'09) entered the three-year MBA Evening Program at the McDonough School of Business in 2006 with the near-term goal of acquiring skills to help them advance in their current jobs and the long-term goal of starting their own companies.

That day arrived sooner than expected in 2008 when their student team won the school’s Business Planning Residency Competition. The team developed a service offering guided museum tours for the hearing impaired using iPods and other personal media devices. Over the next few months, Bouchert and Franklin incorporated the business, assembled a formal management team and quit their jobs.

Today, the Georgetown students spend their days with two other colleagues in an office in Arlington, Va., where they work without salaries on the multiple tasks required to turn their fledgling company, Keen Guides Inc., into a viable business. When they are not fine-tuning the guided tours, they are working to sell the service, identifying new markets and raising the financing that will help the business expand and stay ahead of potential competitors.

And then, they go to class at night.

"I think you can give entrepreneurial people some tools to improve their skills, but there's also just a certain 'nonfear factor' that these people have," says Borchert, who, in addition to serving as the chief executive officer of Keen Guides and studying for an MBA, is mother to a 1-year-old daughter. "We don't always know what we're doing, but we took a leap."

Keen Guides was born out of Borchert’s friendship with Catharine McNally, a fellow graduate of Wake Forest University in North Carolina. McNally has been deaf since she contracted meningitis at 8 months old. A lover of art, McNally had grown frustrated over the poor access for the hearing impaired in museums and other public places.

After one particularly unsatisfying visit to a museum in Washington, where she had been offered a 50-page transcript in lieu of an audio tour, McNally resolved to come up with a better solution. Using the transcript the museum had provided, she went home, videotaped her own tour in sign language and then downloaded it onto her iPod.

The next day, she returned to the museum and completed her improved tour in just a few hours.

When McNally shared the idea with Borchert, the MBA student was so impressed that she told McNally, “What you need is a business plan.”

As it turned out, Borchert also needed a business plan with the residency competition coming up. She and Franklin had already bonded over their shared dream of starting a company. The two joined forces with six other classmates to turn the bare-bones tour McNally had created in her home one night into a plan to provide a much-needed product to an underserved population.

Keen Guides’ Borchert and Franklin, chief operating officer, immediately recognized that McNally’s guided tour was superior to the options most museums offered. Because the tour was accessible for portable media players, it was less conspicuous than a bulky transcript or a sign language interpreter and allowed users to move through the museum at their own pace, fast-forwarding and rewinding as necessary.

To help get the rest of the team on board, they invited McNally to pitch the project.

“At first it sounded like a nice feel-good idea,” recalls Lejla Alic, a teammate who became excited about the idea when she started learning about the pervasiveness of hearing loss and the shortage of services. “Keen is a nice hybrid between having a chance to make money and helping people.”

Over time, Alic’s conviction grew to the point that she invested $10,000 of her own money in the young business.

After the first-place win in the McDonough School of Business competition, Keen Guides’ full management team took shape, with McNally serving as president. The team redoubled its efforts. The business won a social entrepreneurship competition at Wake Forest University, raised about $35,000 in financing from friends and family and earned glowing reviews when it tested the service at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. In April, Keen Guides won an additional $20,000 for earning first place in The George Washington University’s Business Plan Competition.

Yet for all the friends, teachers and judges who liked the service, many continued to see Keen Guides as a niche nonprofit. Borchert and Franklin saw otherwise. They already had good jobs. Borchert worked as the co-founder and director of the Campus Kitchens Project, a nationwide organization that provides food to the hungry, while Franklin ran the U.S. office of Ceenex, a consulting firm based in his native South Africa. The two were not about to leave their jobs unless they saw in Keen Guides the potential to offer a product that could gain the widespread traction needed to help make the world a more accessible place.

Smith Wood, an adjunct professor in the business school, worked with the team during the competition. He says Borchert and Franklin always pushed beyond the politically correct image of a nonprofit for the deaf to focus on the top line.

“They had an understanding that if you don’t bring money in the front door, the business doesn’t make it,” Wood says. “It was a matter of looking within the unique characteristics of the business to determine the best potential markets. It looked quite promising.”

By the summer of 2008, The duo had the newly incorporated Keen Guides Inc. firing on all fronts: selecting the best technology for distributing its tours, exploring markets other than museums and developing tours to suit individual needs.

Keen Guides currently offers tours in four formats: spoken word, captioned, American Sign Language and cued speech -- a system that supplements lip-reading with a series of hand shapes in various locations near the mouth.

“Starting a business from scratch requires the thoughtful application of everything we’ve learned, from strategy and accounting to negotiations and finance,” Franklin says.

A key breakthrough has been the expansion of its market to encompass both the deaf and the hearing-impaired. This vast group, according to most estimates, includes one in 10 Americans and continues to grow as baby boomers age.

As it fine-tuned its product, the Keen Guides team also realized it could serve people who had no hearing loss at all, but preferred the convenience of an audio tour. It signed up its first paying customer when it persuaded Wake Forest University to offer campus tours so visitors could explore the campus independently when no formal tours were scheduled.

Of course, even the best businesses rarely grow exactly according to plan. While Borchert and Franklin had the good fortune to have a friend with a winning idea and a nurturing school environment in which to launch it, they kicked off their first full year of business this year in a challenging business climate.

The two know they have to expand rapidly to gain a foothold, but the current market environment has created challenges with financing difficult to come by and nonprofit organizations, such as museums, short on funds.

But Keen Guides’ management team is finding that the potential to create something from scratch and provide a valuable service outweighs the challenges of starting a business in a tough economy. “I could have continued to work for my old employer,” Franklin says, “but it is fun building your own thing and seeing how it grows.”

This story appears in the Spring 2009 issue of Georgetown Business magazine.

-- Georgetown Business

(July 23, 2009)