In case you’ve been living under a rock, this story on the Ursinus website is going viral.

Actually, it’s kind of hard to find, and in the 24 hours it’s been up not one person has reached out saying “I saw you on the UC website!“, which is hard to believe.

In reality they’re now going to get a thousand referral visits from www.splittingtens.com after I post this and they’ll say it was the most successful news story they’ve ever done.

This whole thing came about after a conversation I had with coach Blickle. We were catching up and after hearing more details about our business, he thought it may be an interesting (enough) story for the UC news team. They reached out, we talked for 15 minutes, and they said “let’s do a story!“

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Me? Really??

Unsurprisingly, my feeling after the intro call was the same feeling described in this post about promoting Splitting Tens. There’s a certain insecurity that accompanies someone wanting to write this story; “Is this actually worth writing about? You’re really going to spend time and resources to like… summarize my answers and take my picture? Is this just a boring story?“. Similar to the promoting the blog, there’s a slight embarrassment, like this isn’t worth them writing or posting about.

But similar to earlier in the year, I pushed the insecurities aside and agreed to do it. Now that it’s published, my concerns have subsided. The main reason is this was really easy for them to do. I built up in my head that they’d be taking days and days workshopping this story, staying up late saying “Why did we agree to do this!!!“. But that clearly wasn’t the case.

Instead, they were professional and efficient. One writer and photographer did everything quickly. From nothing to publishing (my estimate):

• 1 hour – Researching and deciding if they want to do the story
• 4 hours – The drive out, interview, pictures, and drive back
• 1 hour – Editing the photos and choosing which ones are best
• 2 hours – Writing the story

That’s 8 hours total, or one day of work to drum up a story for their website. Seems about right!

One reason it was so efficient is because they knew exactly what they were going to write – how Ursinus prepared me for running our small business. Anything else was irrelevant. They didn’t want to hear any Reimert stories. They had no interest in my redacted 5k school record controversy. Only how did Ursinus prepare me for what I do now.

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Did Ursinus Prepare Me?

I spent some time prior thinking about how, if at all, Ursinus prepared me.

It’s hard to prove a negative, like “if I went to a big school like Pittsburgh I WOULDN’T be this good at running a business“, especially since Tom and Jeff both DID go to Pittsburgh and are (arguably) better at running the business than I am.

That said, I actually do think my UC experience prepared me well for what I’m doing now (read the story to find out why!), it’s not just propaganda. And I even got to shout out Not Dave! Go Bears!!!

Will anyone find this story interesting? Probably not. But for how easy it was, I don’t feel like I wasted anyone’s time.

I’ll show this to Harrison 30 years from now, “your old man was a big deal back in the day!“. Thank you for reading.