From day one, I was a math and science kid.
By the time I was in second grade, I would work on math after school with my dad, a former middle school teacher, because I was fascinated by the ability to take a problem and solve it in a concrete way. That’s just the way my brain worked.
As time went on, it became evident that my strengths, as well as my interests, lay in math and science. By the time I was in high school I wasn’t necessarily sure I’d spend my life in STEM, but I was pretty certain I’d continue pursuing it in college.
In those first 17.5 years of my life, four people were instrumental in my education. One was my junior year English teacher, who taught me how to write. Another was my AP Chemistry teacher, who made me fall in love with the physical world and all the ways we could explain it, which I would find out was mostly through math itself. The third and fourth were my parents, who encouraged me to pursue my talent in STEM and dedicated the majority of their decision-making to what would best serve my education and that of my sister.
With these three pillars—writing, STEM, and parental guidance—I was set up for success. Each one fed the other: I needed an environment that fostered education; I needed STEM for knowing I could solve any problem; I needed writing to be able to communicate my solutions to the world.
College
I was fortunate enough to be admitted to Washington University in St. Louis, a rigorous and competitive university in Missouri. Despite the intensity of classes, I decided that I would study Chemical Engineering within the first four weeks of my first semester. I would go on to get my degree in Chemical Engineering along with minors in Entrepreneurship and Creative Writing and would be a captain of the Men’s Track & Field Team. Those are all the accolades, but the reality behind the scenes is that studying engineering was extremely difficult and it beat me up. During my time, I needed a tutor for a few 300-level math classes like Engineering Statistics and Partial Differential Equations. Looking back, I should have gotten a tutor for all my math classes after sophomore year.
When it was all done, I had a degree and a job offer in hand. I didn’t realize yet that my decision to tough it out in engineering—or, more broadly, my lifelong focus on STEM—would pay dividends far beyond that initial job offer.
My First (and Only) Engineering Job
My first job out of college was as a project engineer working at the L’Oreal packaging facility in Little Rock, Arkansas. I was responsible for safety initiatives to protect the hourly workforce, installations of new production lines for Maybelline mascara, waste reduction projects, and reducing quality issues.
Interestingly, this job didn’t require math or even science, at least not in the way you’d expect for a job with the title Manufacturing Engineer. However, it required significant critical thinking and problem-solving, two areas of confidence for me. I fundamentally believe that math is not just a subject for engineers and high school kids needing to pass standardized tests, but is the basis of self-confidence in one’s ability to think critically. Seeing math as the study of numbers is incomplete; math is the discipline of solving problems. Because I had developed this discipline, I knew I could solve problems in a new environment like a high-stress manufacturing facility, earning the reputation of the engineer who finished his projects and finished them well.
At the same time, I learned that I wasn’t particularly good with industrial equipment, was terrible at design engineering, and was as helpless as a newborn in the machine shop. Much to my surprise, I was quite good at winning budgets for projects—internal sales, essentially.
Career Shift into Tech
Since I was not exactly good at engineering but was becoming more and more adept at communicating technical concepts to people, I switched careers to the software world after only ten months in manufacturing. I got lucky through a connection from college when I got hired and relocated to Chicago by a mid-sized HR/Accounting/Payroll tech company called Workday. My role was called Enterprise Architect, a vague title used in the Tech space to explain the person who is the technical expert on the sales team.
What is interesting about this hire? Despite being a job in communication, Workday exclusively hired engineers and computer scientists for the role, because, as they told me in the interview, “We know you can learn the tech if you are an engineer.”
I grew immensely as a professional in this role, right alongside Workday, which had 5,000 employees when I joined and more than 20,000 by the time I left six years later.
Going Off The Beaten Path
When the pandemic hit in 2020, I decided to fill the time with some basic Spanish practice. It had been on my mind for a few years, but now I had some time to do it. What started as a time filler quickly morphed into a much bigger passion for the Spanish language as well as Latin America. I often spent 2-3 hours a day learning Spanish, and when the world opened back up, I was on the first plane to Puerto Rico, followed by Mexico and Colombia. Eventually, though, I realized the 10-day stints weren’t going to cut it.
In late 2022, I made the exhilarating and terrifying decision to leave my cushy technical sales job and take a one-way flight to Mexico City. I would spend the next ten months slowly traveling throughout Latin America, meeting amazing people and having a lifetime of adventure, seeing the sights and doing the fun things you’d expect, but more frequently spending my time settled into places for a month at a time, often doing work exchanges like working reception at a hostel in Mexico, teaching English in Argentina, and tending a coffee farm in Colombia.
Eventually, the trip came to a conclusion when I craved coming home to Philly. I missed my family and friends and longed for routine. When you start having more interest in eating oatmeal every morning than in wandering through the Andes, you know it’s time.
Return
When I came home, only ten months had passed, but my ideas of what I wanted had shifted and grown. I knew that returning to my old job wasn’t really what I wanted, despite having a favorable view of my former employer and the role itself. I also knew that I had always had an entrepreneurial itch that had been lightly scratched over the years through side projects but was still a dream of mine to pursue in earnest.
At that point, I said, like so many do: “I don’t have any idea what business I want to start.” This is a very real and very difficult hurdle to overcome. If I hadn’t found an answer to this question after a year of “doing an Eat, Pray, Love” as a friend of mine hilariously described it, I probably wasn’t going to figure it out sitting on the couch in suburban Philly. There had to be a different path to entrepreneurship, right?
After a few months of unsuccessfully looking at buying independent businesses, a friend of mine sent me a comprehensive white paper by some respected business professors from Yale's MBA program. In it, they debunked all the myths that persist around franchising, including the idea that it is buying a job, that there is no freedom, and that it is not real entrepreneurship. By the end of the article, I was 100% sure that I would buy into a franchise. But which one?
Choosing Mathnasium
I started on a meticulous and robust process of evaluating franchises. There are franchises for everything: painting, construction, restaurants, fitness, daycare, travel agencies, you name it. There are thousands.
Franchises in the US are required to publicly release documents called Franchise Disclosure Documents, or FDDs, which are comprehensive explanations of the franchise brand. They include details on average franchise financials, turnover of franchisees, unit growth over time, startup costs, and much more.
Why does this matter? For a highly analytical person like me, it gave me data. That data allowed me to make calibrated decisions based on my specific criteria: (1) a business that I could be proud of owning, (2) a franchise that was growing but established, and (3) a franchise that showed healthy financials. I proceeded to explore many different types of franchises, analyzing over 500 brands, reading some 40 FDDs, and engaging directly with twelve different franchises.
After engaging with the first eleven franchises, I kept hitting a wall halfway through the process. The financials were sound, I’d be good at this business, and the maturity level of the franchise was appropriate; why was I balking? I realized that I needed something that would strike a chord with me on a personal level. I needed something that wouldn’t just make me proud but would make me excited and passionate. I needed something where I knew the work I did was a genuinely positive service.
The twelfth franchise I spoke to was Mathnasium. It checked all the right boxes but most importantly it made me feel something intensely positive. I saw myself doing this, enjoying it, and being proud of it. I spoke to 25 different franchisees and former franchisees in the Mathnasium system thereafter and confirmed that it was a good fit.
In the final stage, I flew out to Los Angeles to meet the corporate Mathnasium team. Much to my surprise, Larry, the founder of Mathnasium and education genius who first created its initial curriculum, was not only there but taught us a math lesson. I will never forget when he said, “To explain to a five-year-old that two plus two equals four, only use words they understand. Say 'two and two makes four.’” He had many examples of these, which are all core to the curriculum at Mathnasium to this day. I was blown away and was completely sold at that point. A twenty-year-old international franchise system of over 1100 locations that still had its founder involved and purely focused on the education of the students sent a critical message: Mathnasium was fundamentally focused on the students, not the business. I had the necessary business background and passion, while Mathnasium had the premier math education in the industry.
It was not just a good fit. It was the perfect fit.
Becoming an Educator
Once I selected Pike Creek (see more about why Pike Creek was the perfect choice here), I knew I needed to learn the business from the ground up, which meant getting a job at a Mathnasium. While I am not the first owner to apprentice at a Mathnasium, it isn’t very common, but I thought it to be a critical step for me personally.
In my time exploring Mathnasium prior to signing, I had spoken to many owners. One was Greg, the owner of Mathnasium of Rosemont, the oldest and highest performing center in the Greater Philadelphia Area. When the new school year came, they needed extra help, so I began working there as an instructor, learning the core of the business by helping students directly.
As I got my feet under me, I continued to primarily focus on instruction, where I gained an immense amount of experience about the way the Mathnasium system and curriculum work, how to best interact with students of all kinds, and how to balance foundational needs with immediate needs in school. I also learned the ins and outs of curriculum administration and assessing students, a critical part of making sure they are working on the right content.
After I had spent about half a year in this role, the beloved center director left Mathnasium of Rosemont. Greg asked me to fill in as Interim Director, whose main responsibility is interacting with parents and making sure day-to-day in-center operations are smooth. In this role, which I still hold as of the date of publishing this article, I have spent a lot of time not only managing the instruction floor but also talking to parents. For the parents of existing students, I collaborate with them to make sure they are satisfied with the service and that their kids are getting the most out of it. With parents who have not yet enrolled their children, I help them understand if Mathnasium is the right fit and introduce them to the center when the time comes.
Now that I have spent such significant time in the Mathnasium world, I have the education background needed to make sure Mathnasium of Pike Creek is a truly impactful place.
Conclusion
Mathnasium of Pike Creek will be opening on May 1st, 2025. In the many years leading up to opening this business, I have built a foundation needed to make sure that your child is cared for. I have been in their shoes, have lived my life in STEM, and have worked in and managed one of the most well-respected Mathnasiums in the world.
Most importantly, I believe in what we are doing here. Mathnasium is not just a business to me; there are easier ways to make money. This endeavor is about impacting young people in a positive way—just as was once done for me—so that they have the confidence they need to build the life that they want.
Sincerely,
Troy Makous
Owner of Mathnasium of Pike Creek
(302) 509-2010
