Three kids, fresh out of Pepperdine University and with no set career goals, jumped into an old motor home and drove around the country, interviewing nearly 80 people, from Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz to retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
The 2001 trip, intended to draw the road map of various careers so they could figure out what to do for a living, became the foundation of Costa Mesa-based nonprofit Roadtrip Nation, which focuses on career exploration.
Co-founders Nathan Gebhard, Mike Marriner and Brian McAllister have grown the organization to 96 employees and recently added an 8,000-square-foot satellite office to accommodate growth. They intend for Roadtrip to become the next generation of a career-planning service.
“What we’re looking to do in the future is create a robust tool that helps facilitate career exploration,” Gebhard said. “We’re the why to somebody else’s how. We’re getting to this place where we are also doing the how.”
Roadtrip is known for creating a documentary series following students across the country as they interview professionals about their career paths. Its online archive of interviews with executives like Dell Technologies founder and Chief Executive Michael Dell and comedian Wanda Sykes is one of the largest career databases, with more than 5,400 videos.
But the company wants to evolve beyond sharing inspiring stories to helping students hatch plans to land careers in line with their passions.
McAllister said it will also mean changing the conversation around college education.
“A four-year school isn’t right for everybody. So what are the other paths? Are there certain roads that can be defined with trade school? Driving more attention around employability is big for us, so it’s not just explore, explore, explore.”
The assumption that to have a good job requires a four-year college degree is changing, according to a November state-by-state study by Georgetown University that defined a good-paying job as one with a median salary of $55,000.
Though nonbachelor’s-degree workers in California lost more than 230,000 good-paying blue-collar jobs from 1991 to 2015, the state gained 265,000 skilled-service jobs, such as those in financial and health services. Researchers said the study shows there are more good jobs for people without a four-year degree than people may realize, but emphasized a dramatic decline in jobs for workers with only a high school diploma.
Racking up Miles
Roadtrip’s original neon-green RV is parked in the middle of the company’s 10,000-square-foot headquarters and serves as a conference room.
The company’s media business was a private company, but Roadtrip folded it into its education arm to make itself a nonprofit organization with annual revenue of about $4 million. It was acquired two years ago by Strada Education Network in Indianapolis, Ind., formerly USA Funds, for an undisclosed sum.
The founders said it took a year to plan the first road trip. They scheduled 45 interviews, picking up additional people to profile along the three-month journey.
“It was literally a project for us to go on the road trip, come back and say, oh, I’m going to do this career and apply for it,” Gebhard said.
The partners racked up nearly $40,000 in credit card debt to fund the trip, sneaking into hotels to use the Jacuzzi as a shower and surviving on Clif Bars; their first interview was with Clif Bar & Co. founder Gary Erickson, who gave them 2,000 bars.
“All the compartments were [filled] with Clif Bars, so we had lemon zest for breakfast and peanut butter crunch for lunch,” Marriner said.
McAllister said it was an empowering trip and showed them they weren’t alone.
“We thought we were the only ones lost and confused,” he said. “There’s a lot to be said about the power of personal stories, not just having a career profile or a day-in-the-life video.”
The founders traveled 17,000 miles and shared their experience at college campuses across the country. One month into the trip, they decided the videos should be shared with a wider audience.
The interviews started airing on public television in 2003, and it’s currently producing season 16.
McAllister said that early on after organizing into a company, it began choosing college students to hit the road in an RV themselves, at no cost.
Roadtrip partnered with 300 universities and found sponsorship with companies such as State Farm and Nike Inc.
For the first eight years, it found sponsors, picked three students at a time to use the green RV for six to eight weeks, and edited their footage to run on public television. But the business partners found the model tough to scale.
“We went from one motor home to three in a summer, and we thought, yeah, we’re scaling,” McAllister said. “We realized the way for us to scale Roadtrip was to think about other platforms we can engage where people could share their stories but didn’t have to wait for a motor home and a team to collect it.”
Roadtrip launched the Share Your Road program, which allows people to share their stories, and created the online database of interviews. Visitors can search 17 years’ worth of interviews based on various criteria, such as career field or theme, like acceptance and risk.
The videos have become the main business driver. Gebhard said Roadtrip is the default career resource for students taking the PSAT or SAT. Students gain free access to it when they sign into College Board’s website for their test results. He estimates the service helps Roadtrip reach 5 million to 7 million students each year.
It also became the default career resource for Naviance by Hobsons, a college and career-ready program purchased by schools and school districts that reaches about 10 million students, Gebhard said.
Gaining Speed
Sitting on thousands of interviews, Roadtrip executives said it was a natural progression to add an education arm to the business in 2008. It developed a classroom-based curriculum to guide students in middle school through college to plan their own local road trips.
The cost is $15 per student and includes student worksheets and training and lesson plans for educators.
Gebhard said 200,000 students have participated in it and that the interviews are hosted on its Roadtrip Nation Education website. McAllister said it plans to eventually combine the two websites.
McAllister said a big change in operations last year was the breadth of Roadtrip’s “road tripper,” from traditional college students to anyone focused on a career.
Last year, it featured military veterans trying to break into civilian life, documenting them interviewing fellow veterans who successfully transitioned from the military into corporate America. Roadtrip also filmed series around disenfranchised youth and people with learning disabilities.
It’s preparing to release an update of its 2015 book “Roadmap: The Get-It-Together Guide for Figuring Out What to Do with Your Life” in 2020.
“There are things out there to help you get a job and help you with resumes,” Marriner said. “We can’t think of anything that helps you figure out what is the right path. For 15 years, we’ve been stubbornly driving across America, providing a glimpse of what the modern-day workforce looks like.”
McAllister said it’s also committed to boosting partnerships with companies and schools in Orange County. Many of its interns hail from area schools, including the University of California-Irvine and Chapman University. It partnered with UCI on a contest this year for first-generation students to compete for a chance to ride in the green RV this summer.
“Even though we’ve grown, with more people, and we’re better capitalized, it’s still Roadtrip Nation, and we’ve still preserved the mission and culture,” Marriner said. “That’s why we have the motor home in the center of the office. It’s a reminder of how this whole thing started.”
