TAMID Group and Powerlinx: Bridging Geographical Borders

With a presence on over 60 college campuses worldwide, TAMID Group is a global community, but it wasn’t until last semester that I saw the power of this network in action.?

During the Spring of 2022, I was a Project Manager on the Consulting track at the University of Wisconsin-Madison chapter of TAMID. The TAMID Consulting Program provides members with a practical, international business education by matching Israeli companies with student teams who consult, remotely, on a range of issues that a budding startup, or even an established company, might be facing.?

As a Project Manager, the first few weeks of the semester are dedicated to finding the right project. This entails avidly searching the TAMID database and preparing a string of applications. When I couldn’t find the right “match” for my personal objectives, I sought out the wisdom of our Director of Consulting, an experienced upperclassman tasked with mentoring our consulting teams. To my surprise, she presented me with the opportunity to be a part of a unique project that involved the collaboration of 87 consultants, on 14 teams, hailing from 12 universities. With projects historically being limited to one, or occasionally two teams, there was no precedent for such a massive undertaking; I had to be a part of it. The question was: is this going to be a logistical nightmare?

Leading up to our first all-teams meeting, I was skeptical, to say the least. Why have this many teams working on a single project? I wasn’t sure how it was going to operate. As the clock struck 9 a.m., I resolved to have an open mind.?

In an instant, my screen became a gateway into the lives of a plethora of students from around the world. Meir Shachar, CEO of Powerlinx, a B2B matching platform often dubbed the “Tinder” for businesses, opened the meeting with a goal: user acquisition. I scanned the faces of my fellow project managers as it all began to register. An aha moment: the more teams, the more exposure!

Brilliantly, Shachar had structured the project as a low-stakes competition, in which each team had a personalized link to the Powerlinx website which was used to track the number of clicks and app downloads we were able to achieve as a team. This way, we could measure our efforts and determine what strategies were successful.

As the minutes ticked by, I felt a surge of motivation. This project allowed us to stray from the theoretical, and instead, have a tangible impact on the company. What was even more thrilling though, was that through this structure, we were going to be able to quantify the effect that we had both as individual teams and through our conjoined international efforts.

By the end of the semester, this proved to be nothing but true. At our final deliverable presentations, we learned that we had increased user engagement with the website and app exponentially. Not only that, but the engagement was more geographically diverse than ever. This would not have been possible without having teams in a variety of locations working to attract new users locally.

I used to feel like there were geographical borders between chapters that restricted us to the connections that we make within our specific university or city; I was wrong. This opened my eyes to the potential of TAMID's global network. When we work together, we can achieve greatness, and this program provides us with the ability to transcend state, country, and even continental borders in order to do just that. If there’s one thing I now know for sure, it’s that this network exceeds the bounds of one's imagination. TAMID means “always” for a good reason: these fruitful relationships are everlasting.

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To sign up to for a consulting project, please sign in/register?through our Matching Platform, post a project (or multiple), and one of our Company Relations team members will be in touch with you to schedule a meeting. You will then be included in the matching process to select your team(s).