Healy Starts Business While Playing Football

After classes and football practice, most kids go home to study, but there is nothing ordinary about senior Thomas Healy.  A punter on the football team and a double-major in mechanical engineering and engineering and public policy, Healy founded and became CEO of Promos On Campus in his dorm room at Carnegie Mellon University in 2012.

 "Everything clicked when I realized that everyone at the university, especially students, needed a better source for promotional products," Healy said.

Playing football in the fall gave Healy a regimented schedule and the ability to escape from class work, which overall helped him decide that he had the time to start his own business.

"I noticed in the off-season that even though I'm not putting in as much time towards football, I don't feel like I have any free time either," Healy added. "I was using my time less effectively without practice every day."

After the 2012 football season Healy attended a student-government meeting, and was put in charge of finding a local company to buy some drawstring bags from.

"Pricing-wise nothing was matching up with our budget," Healy said. "This is when I came up with the idea that I could sell these promotional products at CMU."  This was the birth to Promos On Campus.

Student-Government ended up placing the order of bags through Healy and from that point forward he has been selling promotional products.  The spring of 2013 was the first official semester for Promos On Campus at Carnegie Mellon and the business eclipsed $50,000 in sales.

"Promos On Campus hires full-time college students to represent our brand and sell to their university networks," Healy explained. "Our On Campus Representatives work with student organizations, academic departments, and other student life groups to bring the best promotional product solutions to their campuses."

Promos On Campus was created by a student, for students.

"All we do is work on college campuses, so we understand what students want and we are students ourselves, so that gives us an added knowledge of what is going to work," Healy said, "Students are at the core of everything we do!"

Promos On Campus was born at Carnegie Mellon, but has already expanded to six other universities: Cornell University, Duquesne University, University of Pittsburgh, Chatham University, Penn State University, and George Washington University.  Healy believes this is just the beginning of the expansion.

"There are more than 2,000 colleges and universities in the United States," Healy said. "My goal for Promos On Campus is to continue to expand to a point where we are operating at 500 schools nationwide."

This expansion would create a lot more opportunities for college students to gain sales and marketing experience during their time in school while also enabling graduating students to move up into full-time positions within the company or in the industry.

"With everything we have been able to accomplish so far, our growth prospects seem to be almost endless."

The goal and mission of Promos On Campus is not to be your traditional 'cars salesman', but instead to make connections and get to know people on campus.

"While we sell products on campuses, the main goal of Promos On Campus is to take college students who are looking to get a little more out of their college experience, train them on sales and give them the opportunity to work in a company, and when they graduate they have learned a lot more skills than others," Healy said.

Healy will continue to run Promos On Campus as he returns to Carnegie Mellon for a fifth year to pursue a master's degree in mechanical engineering and play football in the fall.