Shaan Patel is a famous entrepreneur, he is known for pitching his company Prep Expert, an SAT and ACT preparation institution, to ABC's Shark Tank panel. Patel managed to land a deal for Prep Expert with the famous billionaire Mark Cuban. Cuban offered $250,000 in exchange for 20% of his company, an offer that Patel accepted.
He received a quarter million dollars of college scholarships from companies like Coca-Cola, Toyota and McDonald's. In 2007, he was chosen as a White House Presidential Scholar and had the opportunity to meet President George W. Bush.
"Prep Expert almost started by accident. When I was in high school, I raised my own SAT score from around average to a perfect SAT score, which is achieved by .02 percent of students," Patel said. He gained acceptance into prestigious universities such as Brown, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins and Berkeley.
"When I was in college, I really wanted to write a SAT prep book to help other students prepare for the SAT like I did in high school. I had a lot of unique methods and things that just weren't out there from doing hundreds of hours of preparation myself." he highlighted.
"After five or six months passed, I had all this material I'd written for SAT preparation, so I decided to leverage that material and teach SAT prep courses in my hometown of Las Vegas, the summer before medical school." he added
He also used $900 of his leftover scholarship money to build the website for what be well known today as Prep Expert.
Patel only had 18 students in his first class. However, after six weeks, those students improved their scores by 376 points on average, a totally unbelievable success. Since Cuban became a supporter and investor, Prep Expert has spread to 20 cities across the United States. The company has also been extremely successful on the internet with tens of thousands of satisfied customers recommending the online courses.
Cuban's support was crucial for the future success of the company, as the company created partnerships with affiliates, schools, nonprofits, and educational organizations in many countries like China and India. "That came with the Shark Tank exposure as well as Mark Cuban, and it just added a whole new level of credibility and professionalism to our organization," Patel mentioned.
Over the next couple of years, Patel hopes to help one million students. "I measure impact not by the revenue or number of courses, but by reaching one million students and helping them in terms of the SAT, ACT," he said. "I want to improve their lives, whether it will be related to college or scholarship or testing [or] just self-development in general."
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