Epiphany spurs creation of life-changing personal management tools for students and others with intellectual and developmental disabilities

Mission to equip students, family members, and caregivers with an integrated, easy-to-use “independence” platform grew out of an Auburn EAGLES article

Trent Kocurek, co-founder and CEO of Equip, recalls how a casual conversation with his wife a few years ago ignited in him a passion for helping drive meaningful change that has taken him in a direction he’d never imagined at this point in his life.

“Back in 2021,” remembers Kocurek, “I was busy running Airship and one morning my wife, Terri, and I were sitting together talking when she mentioned that she had just read an article about a young man from my hometown of Cullman, Alabama, who had gotten into the Auburn EAGLES program.”

“I had never heard of Auburn EAGLES, which was formed long after I graduated from Auburn,” continues Kocurek. “Terri said that it looked like it’s a program specifically for Auburn students with Down syndrome, and everybody was celebrating this young man’s success.”

“I was intrigued, and she sent me the link to the article. I read through it all and then went to the Auburn EAGLES website to learn about the mission, the vision, the goals, and the challenges of running organizations like theirs as well as the challenges faced by EAGLES students. I was immediately captured.”

“So, I sent a cold email to the first email address I could find. I just wanted to talk to someone there and learn more about the program and how I could help. I think I simply wrote: ‘Hey, you don’t know me, I don’t know you, but I’m an Auburn graduate and I love what you are doing. Is there somebody I can talk to?’”

“I was connected with Dr. Betty Patten, director of Auburn EAGLES and a faculty member of Auburn’s College of Education, who runs the EAGLES program at Auburn. Betty shared how the program was administered, how they worked, what tools they and others in the field used, etc. She identified several tools they employed and mentioned a few others being utilized at similar programs. Most important, she emphasized that there was nothing available that offered an all-in-one solution – nothing that met their broader administrative needs.”

“I saw an immediate and important need for an integrated, comprehensive solution to help her and her team manage the Auburn EAGLES program, and together we built an initial version for them to pilot the next year.

Auburn’s New Venture Accelerator sat down with Kocurek to find out more about why he and his co-founders decided to start Equip and what’s next for their rapidly growing company.

NVA:         What was it about your first introduction to EAGLES that was so compelling to you?

Kocurek:   The first thing, of course, was the mission – what they are doing to help Auburn students with intellectual and developmental disabilities become more independent, more self-sufficient. The focus on empowering them with some of the skills and life-tools they need to learn, grow and succeed in life stood out – but so did the lack of the kind of technology solutions that could help them even more. As a problem solver at heart with extensive experience in software design and development, I felt there was an opportunity to apply the experience and expertise I’d amassed over the years to creating solutions designed explicitly for them.

But there was something else going on in my professional life at the time that put this glaring need into an even sharper perspective. Back then, Airship co-founder Adam Aldrich (also a co-founder of Equip) and I were coming out of COVID along with the rest of the tech industry, and we were facing significant changes. Salaries had skyrocketed due to inflated valuations driven by venture capital, and work-from-home had become the norm.

It felt like money had taken over as the number one driver in our industry. In the past, culture, mission, and the work itself were at the forefront. While money had always been a factor, we were noticing more people joining the software space solely for the paycheck, lacking the deep creative drive we had seen before.

In stark contrast, here were students with intellectual and developmental disabilities doing everything they could just to get a job. They desired nothing more than gainful employment so they could live lives of significance and contribute to their communities. While several industries had open, well-paid positions that people were snubbing their noses at, these students in the EAGLES program would have cherished any opportunity even close to these. This stark disparity made me realize the importance of helping these individuals and this community succeed.

NVA:         Talk to us about how you transitioned into this new arena. You didn’t have any particular knowledge about intellectual and developmental disabilities, right?

Kocurek:   No, I didn’t, none whatsoever

Luckily for me, the person who answered my cold email was Betty. We met a couple of weeks later and it was off to the races. She walked me through all the challenges these organizations face in reaching their goals and the rudimentary tools they were using to help their students simply manage their day-to-day activities, schedules, classes, etc. They were struggling to combine information from Excel spreadsheets, Google Docs, pen and paper together – literally seven or eight different “tools.” She explained that all of this document and data shuffling was contributing to the already high rate of burnout experienced by care providers and volunteers alike.

So, I said, “what if we built something that helped you administer the program better? An integrated platform that would bring all these tools together in one place so you can track student performance data, so you can actually see the progress you and they are making, so you have the tools you need to administer the valuable services you provide effectively and efficiently.”

And at the same time, I thought, what if we also built a mobile app for the students themselves – the individuals with the disability – so that they have their schedules right on their phone? They’d have their routines, any documents that they need while living in the community, any personal and emergency contacts, right there with them all the time? An “independence companion” in their pockets.

Betty’s dozen years or so of experience as a special education teacher, as a professor and running the EAGLES program played a critical role in bringing me up to speed on the needs, challenges and factors at play in this emerging market. She was instrumental in bringing all of this into focus for me, and continues to be an irreplaceable source of subject matter expertise and wisdom to this day as one of the co-founders of Equip.

I then did what I always do when looking into a new idea – more research. My last company was a custom software development company, so we did customer discovery, UX research and usability design. I simply went through a lot of the same processes that we would take a client through – I reached out to directors of as many of these types of programs as I could find and tried to understand what their challenges were, what their budgets were, how their efforts were funded.

And I also started looking at adjacent markets to find out if there might be other organizations that have similar challenges, similar missions. It turns out that there are — residential communities for those with intellectual and developmental disabilities, special ed in high school and middle schools, and on the other end of the spectrum, elder care for those with cognitive decline who also receive support. Each of these organization has a central goal of empowering independence for those they support.

 NVA:         What similarities do you see in what appears to be such a wide array of ages, stages of human development and critical care factors across this broad spectrum of potential customers? How might the platform you’ve developed for EAGLES be applied to help serve their varied needs as well?

Kocurek:   Today, we sell to organizations that are caring for or supporting young adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities – higher education programs like Auburn EAGLES and others at campuses across the country. Now, consider residential communities and living care centers for people living with various levels of cognitive disability. These residential communities serve the same age group as programs like EAGLES but also have residents who are older. Many students who graduate from EAGLES may need continued care and a place to live away from their parents or other family caregivers. The value our core platform can provide to administrators and caregivers at these organizations and facilities mirror those that programs like EAGLES enjoy.

Then, of course, there’s elder care – everything from in-home caregivers to assisted living center administrators and support staff. That’s a huge and growing market that’s currently underserved – they lack the very same technology-enabled solutions we’ve built for EAGLES students. We are looking into how the needs of our aging population might also benefit from Equip in helping make their lives more independent and meaningful as well.

NVA:         You mentioned primary education – K-12. What’s going on there?

Kocurek:   That’s actually the next area we feel we can impact most, although we are just now diving deep into discovering how to address the specific needs of younger students with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

I don’t want to get ahead of myself here, but it is safe to say that we are very much interested in working with the Alabama State Department of Education, and to that end we have submitted a proposal to put our platform in all of the high schools in Alabama – that’s 35,000 students in 646 schools. Now, it’s only a proposal, but following discussions with them and other educators in the state, we’re already looking at what it would take to include middle schools – that would be a total of 98,000 students.

The interesting thing about this opportunity is that these initiatives would be paid for by existing transition funds appropriated at the state level to help individuals with special needs transition into independence. It helps these organizations – whether they be schools, teachers, special education organizations, parent groups, etc. – take a big step in getting these young people working – which is what they and everybody else wants.

While we currently sell almost exclusively to caregiver organizations, we envision refining our platform in the future so that we can offer individuals with cognitive challenges and their family caregivers a set of tools they can use without engaging external care providers.

NVA:         That brings us to the question of how you are financing all of this and what your plans – if any – are for raising capital?

Kocurek:   There does seem to be a wealth of opportunities in front of us, right? And, yes, there are, to be sure. We’ll need to continue to focus our attention and resources on the highest priorities and not get too far ahead of ourselves.

As for financing Equip, we’re bootstrapping the company much as we did with our previous companies, although we did bring on a minority financial partner here and there with them. That said, we also applied for and received a grant through Innovation Depot and won the $50,000 first prize at the recent Alabama Launchpad competition. These capital infusions have enabled us to take advantage of some great opportunities.

 Our current funding approach should serve us well for our core higher education market, but I expect that addressing the extraordinarily promising opportunities we see in the primary education market and perhaps elder care further down the road will require us to consider alternative external funding strategies, options and potential partners.

                  We’ll approach the timing of those funding decisions like I always have – set product development and sales milestones, reach them, and then leverage that progress to secure external funding on favorable terms when needed.

The good news is that these are the kinds of problems any founder would love to have – unmet critical core market needs, proven success driving exponential growth, new markets and applications waiting for viable solutions.

NVA:         Finally, what have you learned from starting, growing, and then selling multiple successful companies that other, less experienced entrepreneurs might want to keep in mind as they progress along their own entrepreneurial journeys?

Kocurek:   I’d say there are four things that have helped me along my way.

1. Check your validations for starting your company – early and often. Continually ask yourself if you are building something that’s truly solving a problem that needs to be solved. Don’t get distracted with what other people are saying, whether positive or negative. Focus on the mission, the people in need, and how you can help provide solutions for those needs.
2. Remember that technology isn’t everything. You can’t spend all your time developing what you think is going to be this cool new feature, developing technology for technology’s sake alone. It’s got to be tied to ROI for the customer.
3. People are going to tell you “No.” They won’t get it. You are going to have tough conversations. You can’t let that deter you in “leading through it,” addressing the inevitable obstacles as they come. And remember that there rarely is a single way to do things, so consider, embrace and lead your team through options and alternative solutions that might not seem apparent.
4. And perhaps the most important one of all – which is related to the third thing I just mentioned – learn to be humble. It’s important to be confident, but try to have enough humility to open yourself up to learning from others, which can be a challenge when you have a commanding personality like I do.

In the end, the best advice I can give is that, when given the opportunity to soak up industry knowledge or strategic advice from someone, go out of your way to assure these experts that you don’t know what you are asking about and are there to learn.

One way I’ve tried to counter that is to make it clear up front that “I’m talking to you because I don’t know the answers to the questions I have, and I’ve heard you might!”

To find out more about how Equip can help you and your team empower individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities to live more independent lives, go to https://www.equipnx.com/ or contact Trent Kocurek at trent@equipnx.com.