When You Should Grab Opportunities: The Effort:Reward Framework
By: Zehn Mehmood
Tags: Cambridge University, Charity, Opportunity, Framework, Books

This blogpost intends to outline the effort:reward framework to assess new opportunities that may arise in life and describes one way I used this framework when deciding whether to launch a charity initiative in my final year of university which eventually went on to raise over £47k.

The Interview

“So what do you make of the campaign so far?” It was a journalist who posed this question. This was my first interview I had ever done. It was with the BBC. The director of communications at Cambridge had got in touch with them the week before to organise the interview with Jade Charles, my co-founder, and I about the milestone we had just reached: £20,000. It was only 4 weeks into the charity campaign for the Big May Ball Appeal — Coronavirus or the Big MAC — (my first hand at some name-play marketing). A few weeks earlier I was messaged by Jade about the very idea. It was simple: with the end of year May Balls being cancelled and money being returned to the students, why not encourage people to donate a part of it to charity. This was a great opportunity. But this is the story of how I came to that conclusion of it being a great opportunity. The effort of this campaign was going to be commensurate with the reward. This is the story of how a simple message from a friend turned into a university-wide campaign.

The BBC article helped propel the campaign forward

The Practice Run

Rewinding a few months back, I had signed up at the start of the year to a an elective course as part of my chemical engineering master’s — called EnterpriseTECH. It was quite a new course that had only started the year prior. It was a business module taught at the Judge Business School of Cambridge University. The idea was to allow non-finance students a chance to participate in a “a team project that investigates the commercialisation potential of an early-stage or emerging technology”. The idea of doing business course sounded great. I signed up.

Jade, the team and I pitching our findings for the EnterpriseTECH pitch night

We were assigned to consult for a local free-lance workshop called Makespace — it is essentially a place with a multitude of tools, machines and gadgets (3D printers, laser cutter, lathes) used to make things. They wanted us to help assess the launch of a new series of courses at the site. We were a team of six and I led the 8-week project. It was here that I met and worked with Jade Charles, a MML (modern medieval languages) student from Magdalene College. Jade was organised, sharp and had a pragmatic approach. The project involved a 2-minute infomercial, a 3000-word report and a mock pitch night to secure government funding. It was during the infomercial where my acting abilities were put into action. Having successfully achieved a “pass” in LAMDA (an acting qualification) some 7 years ago — you could say I was somewhat overqualified for the role.

Early to the trend, covid was about to become a reality

Overall, the project was a success — we had got a distinction. More importantly though it was the unexpected dress-rehearsal for the next project. By this point it was 13th of March — a week before the UK went into lockdown and before my running journey had started. I remember this well because 1) I had been diligently tracking the covid figures that week when this article went viral and 2) I lived opposite a Chinese girl studying a PhD in physics — she had been giving us updates from her WeChat about the situation in China and had given another flat mate and I black masks a couple of days earlier. The mask had attracted more than one strange look around Cambridge. Little did they know of the impending global fashion trend set to hit a week later.

Assessing Opportunities

A couple of months earlier I had started reading “What It Takes” by Steve Schwarzman — the CEO and Chairman of Blackstone, one of the largest private equity funds in the world (c.$500bn assets under management). I bought the book from Waterstones soon after it came out. Often times we seek advice from or want to have one-on-one conversations with successful people so that we can hear their stories and learn from their successes and apply it to our own lives. Books and autobiographies allow us a window to peer into the minds and mindset of someone else and have a one-on-one conversation with them. What’s more is the added advantage of the time spent by the author when writing convey their most important message in the most succinct way possible — there is no waffle or less of it compared to a conversation.

“Books and autobiographies allow us a window to peer into the minds and mindset of someone else and have a one-on-one conversation with them. What’s more is the added advantage of the time spent by the author when writing to convey their most important message in the most succinct way possible — there is no waffle or less of it compared to a conversation.”

That was one of the reasons for my child-like excitement when the book came out. I could have a conversation with a someone who had “made it” to the top of global finance and investing. I read the book slowly, I took notes in the margins and reflected on the words. My family jokingly recalled how I would carry around “that black book” and always asked whether I had finished it. Eventually I did (well, still a couple of pages unmarked), but one of the biggest learnings that stuck from the book was how to evaluate opportunities.

Opportunities constantly arise in life, but the way to evaluate these opportunities is important as time is a scarce resource. A resource which is constantly depleting. The book described Schwarzman’s approach to assessing opportunities: make sure the effort put in will be commensurate to the reward at the end. If the effort is 100 and the reward is 20 — don’t do it, if it’s 120, then do it. Make sure you get a bang for your buck. Work smarter than harder.

“make sure the effort put in will be commensurate to the reward at the end”

Applying the Rule

This concept goes to the heart of any investment decision— make sure you get a positive return on your investment. If you spend 100 make sure you’re getting more than 100 out. The principle is just applying it to your life decisions instead. Which makes perfect sense.

When Jade messaged me about the idea that day about the idea of the campaign, I used this effort:reward principle to assess this opportunity. Here’s what went through my mind:

Low friction to donate (Effort): This was not a usual charity campaign — we weren’t asking people to donate from scratch. Rather, money that had already been spent (up to £200 in some cases) was being returned — the effort required to tick a box was less than the effort required to transfer money Ability to Execute (Effort): Jade and I had worked very well together and had just spent the last 8 weeks learning how to effectively pitch and put an infomercial together during the EnterpriseTECH project. We had just done a dress rehearsal Sentiment (Effort): Covid was unravelling and eventually led to pushing the NHS to the brink — people were ready, willing and able to help out Network (Effort): I could and did bring in a friend from school, George Rosenfeld, to advise on the campaign. He is charity guru — he had been the head of the charity campaign during our school days and had already set up a charity in Cambridge — which has now raised over £160k and had been mentored by Rob Mather the CEO of the Against Malaria Foundation which has raised over $190m Impact (Reward): Most important was the possibility of potentially helping a lot of people. We eventually chose to support the local hospital charitable trust and a high impact research centre at the University which looked into the prevention of existential risks to humanity

Before we launched, we needed data. Would people donate and if so where would they want it to go? So we sent out a survey and got 200 responses. 70% would donate and they wanted to donate to covid-related causes. The potential reward — £50k of donations. We co-authored an article in “The Tab” , outlined our survey findings in a pitch book and managed to get on a zoom call with the Vice Chancellor to pitch the idea.

One of several Facebook posts to publicise the campaign

The Vice Chancellor loved the idea and backed the campaign giving us access to the director of communications and a fundraising director for the University. The ball was well and truly rolling by that point. We convinced the President of the May Ball Presidents’ Committee to come on board too, Charlotte Milbank — a veteran of the May Balls, President of the University Tennis Club and PhD student reading in epidemiology. She was an engine behind the whole project — rallying the key support needed of all the other May Ball presidents. We launched a video once we reached the £10k mark, publicised through the University’s Facebook page. At £20k, the BBC interviewed us. With a final push, the saga ended with a University-wide virtual May Ball which raised over £7k on the day (and involved some singing from me) aggregating to the final total of £47k split between the two causes.

Much though was spent deliberating where the money would go

Conclusion

I hope that you may take some benefit from this idea if you are considering taking up something new. You will probably face a multitude of opportunities in life and it’s good to have a framework or criteria to assess these opportunities. One way to do this is by asking yourself: is the effort required commensurate with the reward that you will get out. When reward is greater than the effort — don’t hesitate. Go for it.

Disclaimer: This end result was by no means my own dealing, rather it took a team of incredibly intelligent and motivated people: we simply created an avenue for others to exercise their philanthropy more than anything else. Those who donated are the real heroes of this episode. Many who I have not been able to mention here are thanked greatly for their efforts: they know who they are.

Last blogpost:

https://zehn-mehmood.medium.com/achieving-your-goals-the-power-of-non-negotiability-ae0884e4c066

If you’d like to hear more from me, feel free to follow me on LinkedIn, Medium:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/zehnmehmood/

https://zehn-mehmood.medium.com/