The Entrepreneur
Chrissybil Boulin, 32
Founder and CEO of Jump Start Tutoring and Vero Learning, Fort Lauderdale
As a straight-A student, Chrissybil Boulin was heartbroken when she didn’t get into Duke University, her dream school. An admissions counselor told her it was because her SAT score wasn’t high enough.
Boulin’s mother, a Haitian immigrant and a single parent, didn't know what an SAT was and didn’t have the money to spend on test prep. “I knew that I was smart enough to go to schools like Duke, and I decided then to create an SAT curriculum for myself initially and then ended up helping other kids get into top-20 and Ivy League schools,” Boulin says.
For this nerdy high school student, that would mark the start of her entrepreneurial life. After graduating from Florida State and then Emory University, where she got the “life-changing” opportunity to serve as an ambassador for girls’ education in India, she founded a nonprofit that provided supplies and ran summer camps for schools in Haiti.
Then in 2018, Boulin finished her master’s in economic development from the University of Cambridge and returned to South Florida, where she launched Jump Start Tutoring. “I had $500 of startup capital, no co-founder, no prior experience, but was just wanting to bring affordable, personalized learning to my community.”
To build a name in the community, she provided free talks and workshops at libraries and schools — and her company earned a following. Today, Jump Start has tutored more than 7,000 students. She’s proud to say she has hired hundreds of part-time tutors over the years, and many of them decided to become teachers.
Jump Start’s students average 220-point increases in their SAT score, two or three times that of competitors, helping them qualify for college scholarships. “We focus on pattern-based thinking strategies that help students think like the test makers, but really, really build critical thinking and reasoning skills,” Boulin says.
With a team of about 50 tutors plus staff, Jump Start provides tutoring in-person in South Florida and online throughout the nation. The company has contracts with Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach public school districts. “We are essentially providing tutoring to kids whose families wouldn't be able to afford it and who otherwise may fall behind and have to experience some of the things I went through. It's such a full-circle moment,” says Boulin.
All of Jump Start’s tutors are college graduates and 80% are certified or retired teachers. After administering assessment tests and providing parents with a list of strengths and areas for improvement, Jump Start tailors tutoring sessions to the needs of each student, testing to determine best learning styles and finding an ideal student-tutor fit. Parents receive data and progress reports throughout.
Yet during the pandemic, as more and more students fell behind, Boulin saw a need in the market to help them find career paths that didn’t require college degrees. That’s when she began building Vero Learning, a career guidance and job placement platform with a mission to help young adults successfully transition from the classroom into the workforce.
While researching her business idea, Boulin found that 80% of high school seniors reported that they’re not ready to make college or career decisions. More than half admitted to having fewer than five conversations about these topics with any adults in their lives. At the same time, hiring managers often find it too risky to hire people without college degrees even though many of their jobs don’t require them and they need workers. Some worry that recent high school graduates might not have the maturity or experience to get the job done.
Vero provides pre-employment screening to help young adults understand their interests, natural competencies and skill sets. It generates a personalized career report to identify gaps in employability and recommends learning modules from its platform and others. “As we collect this data, we aggregate it into really cool employee profiles so that we can de-risk the process for hiring managers and improve the chances of the young adult getting hired,” Boulin says. Nonprofits and school districts license the platform to offer the services to their clients and students.
Boulin and her team built the first version of their product while participating in the Techstars startup acclerator program last fall and did a full launch in March. Vero’s advisory board includes Office Depot’s VP of human resources, Visa’s head of global employee relations, an executive from the International Franchise Association and a former school superintendent, among others.
Boulin aims to provide economic mobility in underserved communities at scale. The startup’s goal for 2024 is to onboard 25,000 students. Midyear they were halfway there. Vero recently signed a contract with the American Assistance Association, which services 1.5 million Gen Z students, and has begun onboarding hundreds of its users to Vero Learning. The company is testing its solution with Office Depot to identify what skill sets and characteristics might make someone a good fit for retail, and the startup plans to launch pilots in other industries.
“The longer-term vision is for us to be able to say, ‘profile 56942 is a 90% match with tech, is an 80% match with health care, is a 70% match with retail,’ and then use AI to recommend best-fit matches for hiring managers,” Boulin says.
Message to High Schoolers:
“We are more than mere checkboxes on application forms — our identity and experiences shape us into the sum of our life’s journey," says Chrissybil Boulin. "Developing durable skills like communication, time management, problem solving, and embracing a mindset of lifelong learning is key to navigating the evolving landscape of successful careers."