Wisaam's Career Path: Campus Manager to Management Consulting
Wisaam Saleem is a Business Operations Associate at ZS - a global management consulting and technological firm. But less than 2 years ago, he was a college student trying to make the best of his circumstances.
He had started out as a Computer Science and Finance double major at Rutgers. A little over a year later, he ended up transferring to NYU as a Business and Technology Management major. Because of the shift, he ended up missing out on major opportunities.
“I never got the opportunity to do the standard internships everyone else was doing. People had already applied and taken up investment banking or consulting internships in their Sophomore year and I didn’t. That’s when Fresh Prints became my bread and butter.” Wisaam recalled.
He was offered a Fresh Prints Campus Manager (CM) position at the time and took it up. For those of you who do not know - Campus Managers are students who build and manage Fresh Prints at their schools. They get their clients custom gear (custom shirts, bottles, banners - you name it) and earn a % of the sales they make.
Wisaam was initially under the impression that it would be like a regular internship, but he was immediately proven wrong. Jessie Baren was Wisaam’s manager and he wasn’t there to play games.
“The entire company is young and very, for the lack of a better word, college-centric,’ Wisaam said, ‘So they fully understand the college market. Jessie was a recent graduate too. He knew how to help me - you know - not just sell a few custom shirts and be satisfied but actually build a business.”
Wisaam started working with student organizations but also ventured beyond campus. His first few orders, in fact, were St. Patrick’s Day shirts for a nearby bar and a bunch of shirts for students at a tutoring center. He’d pitch custom apparel as a marketing tool and often succeeded.
‘As a Muslim, I knew of this huge tournament called MIST. I reached out to the organizers of it. Merch was a part of what I pitched and they liked it. I became their go-to apparel person throughout my time in college.”
Another time, he was organizing a food festival that had vendors from around New York City set up stalls. If you were an NYU student, you got in for free and if not you paid a small fee to get in. The event was a massive success. A few days later another festival organizer reached out for his list of vendors and Wisaam told them that he’d give it if he could do their shirts. Sure enough, Wisaam was doing much more than their shirts for them and getting paid for it.
This became Wisaam’s thing. He participated in as many activities as he could and worked his merch business into it.
Wisaam did take up an accounting internship to be somewhat close to the standard route other students were taking. “It did what an internship is supposed to do - make you see if you can do that forever and I definitely knew I didn’t want to be an accountant,” Wisaam recalled, laughing.
Nearing graduation, he began interviewing at consulting firms. 'I was already coming in with a lot of the right experience but it all came from a background that interviewers weren’t used to hearing about.’ Wisaam told us, “I knew how to talk to clients and how to solve real business problems.”
When given a classic case interview question by his current employers, Wisaam confidently walked them through the approach he’d take. It was easy for him because not only was the case sales-related but he had already seen it happen within Fresh Prints and knew how the company tackled it.
“I remember them being super impressed and going, that's actually the right answer. They probably weren’t expecting me to get it right.”
That company was ZS Associates - the management consulting firm that Wisaam still works at to this day. A lot of the projects assigned to him at work are reminiscent of the projects he did as a college student, but on steroids - read: more challenging.
“The easiest way to explain what I do now is that I create detailed blueprints for my clients - here is what your marketing plans should look like and here are all the details - you know - down to the exact layout of their alert emails,” Wisaam explained.
Wisaam’s ambition and drive led him to take his skills of planning, client management, and problem-solving to a whole new level in his current job. Wisaam was, unsurprisingly, one of our best Campus Managers at the time and now continues using his skills at his current company.
A special thanks to Wisaam for sitting down with us and sharing his story. We wish him nothing but the best. Want to start your own merch business like Wisaam? Apply here.