I spent the summer at sustainability software company Maalka. I’d been working with Maalka on various projects throughout the academic year, so coming on board full-time in the summer allowed me to take many of the disparate areas where I’d been spending time throughout the past several months and channel them into one, cohesive push to drive our growth and expand the company’s social goals by growing our use base. What’s better, doing so relied heavily on the application of skills and direct teachings from Columbia Business School, especially the classes I took during my second year when this role was in my sights post-graduation.

Maalka is a software company that acts as a conduit between those who manage portfolios of buildings (large corporations and cities) and those who create frameworks to enable them to reach specific sustainability goals. In other words, Maalka allows building managers to put their data (from meters, smart meters, API connections, IoT devices, csv files, data lakes, etc.) into one cloud-based repository, and then analyze that data and generate projects and goals using the world’s most trusted frameworks for running resource efficiency programs. This business model, really a two-sided marketplace, creates a lot of work that falls under the category of “business development.” It was on this effort that I spent the summer, facing many challenges with the goals of attracting and retaining both new users and new program creators on our platform.

The challenges I face in this role are multi-faceted, but all arise from a need to expand our revenue base in order to realize a business model that aligns our success as a for-profit company with the impact we facilitate as a company in getting the buildings sector closer to carbon neutrality. What this entails is figuring out a product and sales strategy that works for our clientele. To better understand what this is, I held one-on-one interviews with our current customer base to hear what they liked, what needed to be changed, and what was currently out-of-scope of our product that might represent a new market that would be profitable, both by increasing the customer lifetime revenue of our existing customer base and allowing us to attract new clientele with our offerings. This resulted in a big development push toward new, modular programs in the ESG space outside the sustainability programs for which we’re known (i.e., Maalka Classic) and this new emphasis helped us to grab the attention of new clients before my summer was over.

As I had throughout the year, I reported directly into CEO Rimas Gulbinas and worked with him hand-in-hand to develop a strategy for sales and product to expand our user base through marketing, product differentiation, and user need. I also partnered directly with our program affiliates, such as Green Schools Alliance, Green Buildings Challenge, International Living Futures Institute, etc., on building new and enhancing our existing program offering.

One of the greatest challenges was identifying our ideal client portfolio, or ICP. One major reason this was difficult was because it forced me and Rimas, who entered this space with the mission is to create the greatest change possible, to focus on a specific niche where the most change can be made at the expense of other opportunities. While these trade-offs are difficult, they are an essential part of doing business and I was better equipped for the analysis this required with a Columbia MBA.

In fact, I utilized my education and background in finance to assist the company’s business development effort. Some of the classes I took during my final year at CBS, including Building the Sales Machine, Research to Revenue, Internet Wars, and Investor Influence on Corporate Sustainability, incorporated directly into my efforts. While these classes all seem completely different from one another, I drew on each in tangible ways and have, at some point over the summer, reached out to the faculty of each class for input on specific applications of the curriculum where I was facing a relevant challenge.

Having these resources really applied my education and helped coalesce a lot of what and apply it directly to how I was seeing the world through the prism of running business development for a small socially-oriented company. For example, Internet Wars taught me how to develop inbound sales strategy by beginning a social media campaign that centered around writing thought pieces to education out potential clientele around ESG strategies. My education also allowed me to develop a pricing strategy that would balance our dueling goals of attracting as many new customers, whose value is higher than simply the amount of money they pay due to their direct and indirect connection to future business, while ensuring the cash flows are essential to ensuring stability and creating the breathing room needed to try new things. And finally through my subject-matter classes on impact investing and corporate responsibility, I was better able to create materials that gave our users and grant writers a picture of our net impact, an both energy, water, waste, and emissions savings, as well as monetary savings.

By subsidizing my cost of living during the summer, Tamer enabled me to focus on the work that was needed to help move Maalka to the next stage. This work represents an application of my skills and passion for aggressive market change to enshrine circularity (i.e., no waste) and sustainability (across all dimension) into our economy. My ability to do this work would not have been possible without the subsidy and I thank Tamer for giving me this opportunity to learn and work on the challenges faced by a sustainability startup – work that I hope to continue for years to come.