Edifi, a name constructed from "education" and "finance", was a college financial aid services company located in Albany, New York, which operated nationally. Its legal name was CFAS (College Financial Aid Systems), LLC. Its central activity was filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, best known as FAFSA, for parents of college applicants. At the time this was a paper form.
Origins
Edifi was founded by Larry Schechter in 1991; he remained its sole owner throughout (with a hiatus in 2002–2004). It started in Wellesley, Massachusetts, but with Schechter's relocation to the Albany, New York area, it moved along with him, and operated first from a bare one-room office on Union Street in Schenectady. Growth led it to move in 2001 to an office suite located at 409 New Karner Road in an unincorporated area of Albany county (mailing address Albany); further growth led it to move in 2003 to a larger office suite at 450 New Karner Road, where it ran a call center, with five clocks - Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific, and Hawaii times - on the wall. When winding down operations it moved back to Union Street.
The company started when friends and neighbors of Schechter asked him for help in completing FAFSA forms. Sensing that money could be made, Schechter formed a company, which initially sold its services door-to-door. His primary collaborator and second-in-command, once the company had moved to Schenectady, was Maura Kastberg, who had a B.S. in mathematics. In order to grow the company, they decided to use a seminar method to make presentations to larger groups of people. This was very successful and the company had explosive growth; in the early 2000s it made the magazine Inc.'s list of the fastest-growing companies in the United States.
Edifi originally priced its services at about $495, and offered a money-back guarantee, if it could not get the family enough additional financial aid to cover its fee. It abandoned the guarantee after having to pay out on some cases.
Organization
Edifi was divided into five departments: Sales, Accounting, Reservations, which set up appointments for the seminars, Customer Service, which dealt with the clients and input data from client phone interviews and tax documents to the company's proprietary software (a customized "front end" for Microsoft Access), and Forms, which was in charge of completing financial aid forms, and whose new hires were tested for their printing (handwriting) ability.
Marketing
The company's services were hard to understand and marketing was expensive. In fact, its greatest single expense was postage for marketing materials. John Braat, whose background was in sales, was Chief Operating Officer and head of the Sales Department. The company had three teams of commissioned salespeople, many of whom made more than the employees who actually did the work. Braat spent a lot of effort analyzing where seminars (sales meetings) would best be held. It did not market in states with no clear centers of population, such as Montana. For large cities like New York, all three sales teams would work together. The seminars were scheduled so as to avoid hurricane season in the South, and winter storms in the North. Flying the salespeople all around the country was another large expense.
Names of prospects were purchased, from brokers who sold information on college prospects; most were students who had taken the College Board examinations. Edifi came up with the technique of sending invitations to students - rather than their probably more skeptical parents - to attend a free seminar where they could learn about opportunities for college grants and scholarships. The salespersons were not to lie to the families about what Edifi could do (although sometimes they apparently did). The original contracts were rewritten to say that Edifi had no special "connections" with college financial aid offices and did nothing that parents could not do for themselves, if they put in the time and effort.
There was somewhat of a disconnect, though, between what was presented to the families in the seminars and what Edifi actually did. One Edifi employee who knew the company's operations asked to join the sales team, and was a failure. It worked better if the salespeople did not know anything more than what their training classes taught them.