After entrepreneur Charlie Davis met MasteryPrep founder Craig Gehring at a child’s birthday party, Davis agreed to take a look at Gehring’s business idea and offer some advice about how to get started. While in high school, Gehring had earned perfect scores on both the ACT and the SAT. He never went to college, but he did create a streamlined and apparently effective ACT prep program that Davis ran past a number of educators and businesspeople.
“Frankly, I didn’t put a whole lot of weight into it [at first],” Davis recalls in a Business Report feature from the current issue. “The more I looked into it, the more I realized he had something special.”
After less than three years on the market, MasteryPrep’s products, which promise to improve scores on the ACT, SAT and other high-stakes tests, are in more than 500 schools in about a dozen states. Davis, the company’s co-founder and chief strategic officer, recently pitched MasteryPrep to venture capitalists in New York and San Francisco.
Davis calls the American education system “a trillion-dollar market.” With that sort of potential, it’s no wonder professional investors have pumped billions of dollars into “edtech” startups in recent years, and some experts say the Baton Rouge area could be an effective launching pad for such companies.
MasteryPrep is based at the Louisiana Technology Park on Florida Boulevard, which is run by the Research Park Corp. The Catalyst Fund, also an RPC project, has invested $250,000 in MasteryPrep, Davis says.
“They’re in a market with not only national demand but global demand, and it’s evident by how fast they’re growing,” says Byron Clayton, the new CEO of the Research Park Corp. The company has reached a “jumping-off point” where it has proven it has a “huge upside,” he says. Now, “they just need to scale it up.”
Clayton comes to Baton Rouge after working on cluster development at NorTech, a Cleveland-based economic development organization. A “cluster” refers to a community of businesses in a particular sector that collaborate, possibly with help from economic development officials, to grow that industry.
Clayton says clusters are driven by local needs but address a wider demand. Ideally, once companies associated with a cluster start to have success in a given area, that momentum attracts new entrepreneurs from outside the area. While he only has been working in Baton Rouge for a few months, Clayton says conversations he has had with locals indicate that education-related companies potentially could become a growth cluster for the Capital Region.
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