Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Sarah Latz and Francesca Piancone. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Sarah and Francesca, thanks for joining us today. Alright, so we’d love to hear about how you got your first client or customer. What’s the story?

To start the process of recruiting students, we reached out to nearly everyone we knew. We contacted agencies that we knew were in the market for new and diverse talent. We contacted allied organizations to find talented students that needed to finish their portfolios. And we leveraged our professional network to see if they’d been mentoring rising talent who could use a new way to build a portfolio of spec work.

We will never forget the first student who ever enrolled: Hannah. Hannah was an aspiring art director who had been looking at more traditional portfolio schools, but the cost of them was concerning. We’d spoken to her before when we were at the portfolio school in Chicago. She told us this new program sounded too good to be true. But after speaking with her and her parents, we promised an extremely high touch approach, and reassurance that in six months we would get students, at minimum, a highly marketable portfolio at a greatly reduced cost.

She put her faith, money, time, and future career into our hands, and decided to enroll. That first student sign-up gave us the confidence we needed—we knew we were on to something.

Our belief was quickly rewarded. Our first semester of graduates created portfolios that were hailed by longtime industry professionals as some of the most interesting and diverse they had seen in years. The job/internship offers started rolling in. Additionally, our individualized touch for every student is one of the driving forces behind the incredible graduation and hiring rate from our school –currently 85 percent – and our students are now creatives at some of the top advertising agencies in the world, serving clients across the Fortune 500.

Sarah and Francesca, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

We’re Francesca and Sarah, the two women behind book180—the first and only 6-month, 100% female-owned portfolio school. We founded our portfolio school in 2022, with the main goal of helping reduce barriers for breaking into the advertising industry. Advertising and portfolio schools lack critical representation, particularly among caregivers, minorities, students with undergraduate debt, and students outside of major metropolitan areas. Our fully online program offers a comprehensive curriculum for students to become skilled, agency-ready copywriters and art directors in just 180 days.

Our program is 1/3 the cost and 1/4 the time of traditional portfolio schools, and it’s also fully online, as opposed to in-person. Our classes are taught by some of the world’s top advertising industry professionals working today, to build the network needed to be hired. The access we give our students has been historically gatekept, creating real barriers to entry for minorities, caregivers, and students who live outside major metropolitan areas.

We want to see the landscape of advertising become far more inclusive, and that starts with ensuring young, minority talent can actually enter the field. We think shaking the entire world up starts with a series of small ripples. There are far-reaching positive effects that our company will have on the industry, but we’ve also had a positive impact on individuals. The students who didn’t know what their career would be like, who didn’t see a portfolio school option for them, who didn’t know how to become part of the consideration set of creative hires — we’re changing the trajectory of their lives. For that, we are profoundly proud.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

We worked for many years together at a traditional, 1-year, in-person portfolio school in Chicago. We met prospective students all the time who had a lot of creative talent and needed a portfolio of spec advertising work samples to get hired, but couldn’t commit to the time, tuition, or cross-country move needed to attend. The school was only in-person, required 12-15 months to complete, and had a price tag of over $18,000. It was simply out of reach for most students, which kept them out of the hiring consideration for a creative advertising role.

We began to feel this approach to advertising education was out of touch, if not impossible, for those without cash reserves, the ability to move, and/or personal/familial obligations.

When COVID-19 sent students home for remote and virtual learning, we saw our opportunity to innovate the system and set out to change the game.

We saw a huge opportunity to build a new type of school that would eliminate the barriers to entering our field and instead, help it grow exponentially. So we sat down together and decided to venture out on our own. We wanted to provide graduates with a running start into their career. We built a new portfolio school model from the ground up—the first of its kind. And book180 was born.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

The biggest lesson we had to learn was the constant pressure to maintain the status-quo. Creating a first-of-its kind program takes a huge leap of faith. Never before had creative advertising students developed agency-ready portfolios in a six-month model. The advertising industry is notoriously slow to change, and we initially encountered a lot of resistance from hiring managers who didn’t think our graduates would be developed enough to jump into work. We also knew that industry leaders believed the way they were trained (with in-person programs) was the benchmark. We were asking a lot of agencies to trust us when hiring our candidates, and we were also asking a lot of our clients/students to trust us with their future careers.

Just because the traditional portfolio school model was working okay for some people—doesn’t mean it was working for everyone. For most people, it was an outdated, very broken, institution.

And our driving force was the steadfast belief that the old way of working was keeping some of the most talented, curious, and ambitious candidates out of the field. For our industry to survive and thrive, we need to inject it with new thinking and people who come from diverse lived experiences. We graduate the creatives who will eventually create the advertisements and campaigns that reach billions of consumers. We need diverse voices and people to create the advertisements and pop culture moments of tomorrow. We knew we could inject that adrenaline into the system.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://book180.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/book180adschool/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/book180/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR-Vyc3NTXYAP9SR64_nmBA