The competition is the third pitch contest that the Foundry, a business incubator housed at Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business and run in collaboration with the New York City Department of Small Business Services, has held since it debuted one in April 2017.

VentureUp! organizer Albert Bartosic, GABELLI ’84, entrepreneur-in-residence at the Foundry, said this year’s contest, which comes with $40,000 in prize money, is notable because all the companies competing are already operational. That’s partially due to the Foundry’s concerted effort to involve alumni this year.

“How can we build on the strengths that differentiate Fordham and the New York City startup scene,” he said, “and try to attract people who might have the alumni connection to say, I’d like to come back?”

“We want to identify who the entrepreneurs are who are lurking in the bushes that we don’t know about.”

One of them is Busayo Ogunsanya, GABELLI ’08, ’12, who founded Ask My Uncle Sam, a website which answers basic tax question and helps accounting professionals free up time to serve more clients.

It’s Ogunsanya’s third company since he graduated with degrees in accounting. The site is an outgrowth of his first business, Big Apple Tax Return, which he started after a stint at Ernst & Young.

“What I realized during this period was a lot of clients have tax questions. For me, it was very time consuming to answer very basic questions,” he said.

“A couple of days ago for instance, a client of mine said to me, I’m thinking of buying a house; should I use my Roth IRA? The issue is, you can’t bill a client for asking a question, and your clients are not going to use Google.”

The idea was to create a database of thousands of answers to common questions and then harness artificial intelligence to create a chatbot that can be accessed on a phone or tablet. Initially, it will only be marketed as a business-to-business product, for use by practitioners such as H&R Block, not for the general public.

“I want to come back as a double Fordham alumnus to show that its possible for an alum to take chances and also be successful,” he said.

If Ogunsanya’s goal is to help people save money, Joseph Zoyhofski, a native of Buffalo and a second-year undergraduate student at Gabelli, wants to help people use that cash to bond with each other.

What’s Cooking, a meal-sharing platform that connects users through home-cooked meals, is a joint entry from Zoyhofski and classmates Liam Scott and Alex TenBarge. Users advertise on the site a meal they’d like to make at home, as well as how much they plan to charge for it. Those interested can sign on, and the site charges a small processing fee on top of the price of the meal. The group’s plan won the People’s Choice Award at the Foundry’s second pitch contest, and Zoyhofski said he feels the company’s success so far shows potential for expansion.

“There’s nothing I miss more about Buffalo than home-cooked meals,” he said.

“We have the cafeteria here, but there’s nothing like sitting in someone’s home to have a home cooked meal with them.”

What’s Cooking has coordinated 40 meals with eight to ten Fordham students since it went live. The goal is to expand it beyond Fordham to the general public. Zoyhofski, who has been working with both Fordham’s Social Innovation Collaboratory and the Law School’s Entrepreneurial Law clinic, said there’s a need for a platform to meet new people over a home-cooked meal.

“Some of the students who’ve used What’s Cooking have made really close connections with people they’ve never met before from going to these meals,” he said.

“As we scale up, this is definitely something where I can see people who live only a couple of blocks away, but never knew each other, meeting and making a connection over a meal.”

The competition will be judged by Dave Yonamine, founder of MobilityWare, John Abplanalp, former CEO and president of Precision Valve Corporation, Jim Dugan, CEO and co-founder and managing partner of OCA Ventures, Josh Futterman, founder of ParkYou! and Alicia Syrett, founder and CEO of Pantegrion Capital.

Teams will be judged on the company’s ability to scale up, the look of its team, and the look of its business model. Bartosic said judges will also be on the lookout for any intangible, “wow factor” that might make a company really stand out.

The other contestants include bizdevIQ, an on-demand marketplace for tech and business experts to meet in-person with business owners and emerging entrepreneurs, R3 Printing, an industrial 3D printing firm, Brevitē, a manufacturer of gear for the modern explorer, Bound, an app that holds people accountable to meetings and events, and Make Muse, a newspaper-meets-literary-magazine for women.

He said one measure of event’s success will be new connections between fellow entrepreneurs, as well as the future entrepreneurs it inspires.

“If you want to make a pitch, but you’re nervous and you don’t know how to do it, you can sit in the audience and watch seven people do it,” he said.

“How did they get grilled by the judges? What was the feedback that they got? What were the criteria? How do the winners come across? You can really get a sense of how you might do it if you’re planning to do it in the future.”

Additional support for the competition has been provided by the NASDAQ Educational Foundation.

In fact, Marte is by any measure a success story. After serving time in prison for drug dealing, he returned to his native Lower East Side and opened ConBody, a boutique gym where New Yorkers learn a workout regime that he taught himself in prison—one that enabled him to lose 70 pounds in six months.

“Our whole mission is to hire formerly incarcerated individuals. We have a contract where we go to Rikers Island and train inmates to become certified trainers,” he said.

“We’re giving them skills they can use when they come out.”

A Fordham Partnership

But Marte wants to take his business to the next level.

Enter Fordham Law School’s Entrepreneurial Law Clinic. The clinic, which is run by professor Bernice Grant recently brought together students from the Law School and the Gabelli School of Business to work on behalf of four businesses that are either just getting started, or like ConBody, looking to expand.

“Maybe a client is thinking about how to structure a new business or how to expand an existing business through franchising or opening and operating new locations. Each of those decisions has pros and cons from a business standpoint, but there are also legal issues in how to structure everything and comply with all the relevant laws,” Grant said.

“By having a joint interdisciplinary team, we’re able to advise clients on the legal side as well as the business side.”

Grant previously taught in the Entrepreneurship Legal Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and recently launched the Entrepreneurial Law Clinic at Fordham last fall. The clinic at Fordham serves two types of clients: social ventures that seek to create positive change in society, such as ConBody, and companies founded by low-to-moderate income entrepreneurs who otherwise would be unable to afford an attorney.

In addition to ConBody, the clinic provides joint legal and business advice to Silicon Harlem, a social venture that aims to transform Harlem into a technology and innovation hub; Knock Knock City, which connects travelers and locals with local merchants willing to store their bags; and Raising Cane Farms, an organization dedicated to helping veterans make a living in agriculture. The clinic also provides legal advice (without the accompanying advice from business students) to numerous other startups.

Business With A Mission

Marte, whose Broome Street gym occupies the basement below a Buddhist temple, falls into the social venture category. It’s a spartan affair, with cinder blocks painted white, grey lockers, and a refrigerator with “S%&* is not free” written in black marker on the window.

Looks are deceiving though. Dig a little deeper and it’s clear that ConBody has some serious cache. Not only does one of the Real Housewives of New York work out there, but Marte has also had pop-up fitness studios at Saks Fifth Avenue and Lord & Taylor; a documentary about his story is being made; and in March, he published ConBody: The Revolutionary Bodyweight Prison Boot Camp, Born from an Extraordinary Story of Hope (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2018).

Plans for another location in Chelsea are underway, and Marte is looking to raise $2 million to expand beyond the 17 staff members he currently has.

He had nothing but praise for the Fordham students, three of whom came from the Gabelli School, and two of whom came from the Law School.

“They’re absolutely geniuses. They shot me questions that I never really thought about, and I was like, ‘Oh, I should do that.’ They were really on top of their stuff, and really hungry in helping me,” he said.

“Some of them even came in and worked out with me.”

Marte has a business background of his own: He received business training at Defy Ventures, a non-profit that helps formerly incarcerated individuals start businesses. But the Fordham law students advised him on various legal matters, and the business students helped him finesse his fundraising pitch.

Perfecting a Pitch for Funding

One of them was Hollis Schwanz, GABELLI ’18. A 2011 graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology, Schwanz came to Fordham for graduate school after working in fragrance and cosmetic marketing. A self-described boutique gym fanatic, she was familiar with ConBody before joining the project, which was a capstone project for her MBA. She was attracted to the opportunity to work with those in other fields.

“In my line of work, you deal with a lot of different people, and you have to learn how to best navigate that relationship when you don’t have a pre-existing one with someone. That’s not only the law students we’d never met before, but with the client as well,” she said.

Among the things Schwanz said she learned from the law team was the different types of intellectual property that can be used to protect a company’s brand.

Communicating with people who work in other disciplines is exactly what Grant had in mind when she asked Gabelli to partner with her clinic.

“The world into which these students are going is an interdisciplinary one where they’ll be working in teams. This collaboration in the clinic allows the law students to learn business lingo, and the business school students to learn legal jargon,” she said.

Anthony Palma, an adjunct instructor who supervised the business students, said the collaboration was a seamless one.

“They met, they arranged their meetings around everyone’s schedules so everyone could participate. All the students worked incredibly well together,” he said.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that Coss is going to achieve his plans and his dreams. He’s on the right track.”

Lessons for the Real World

Fannie Law, a rising third-year law student, was excited to be a part of something new. She and students such as Kajon Pompey, who is pursuing a joint JD/MBA, were instrumental in helping Grant create a podcast that the clinic will launch in the fall. Like Schwanz, Law was inspired by Marte’s goal of reducing recidivism by hiring and training formerly incarcerated individuals.

“Coss and his associate Scott were really forthcoming in their ideas for the growth of the business, and how we could help them accomplish their goals. They were both really down to earth and easy to talk to,” she said.

“Being in a clinic was one of the most rewarding things and informative things I’ve done. I felt it really prepared me for the real world, and I feel a lot more confident in myself and being a lawyer.”

The Nasdaq Educational Foundation and Fordham’s Entrepreneurial Law Advisory Council have provided generous support for the Entrepreneurial Law Clinic. In addition, the clinic partnered with Fordham’s Samuelson-Glushko Intellectual Property and Information Law Clinic and received pro bono legal assistance from Akerman LLP in its representation of ConBody.