Alex Frees is an HPU senior. And he has his own company.
He calls it CR Publishing, and he oversees the website, takes business calls and develops content and edits the 60-page starter guides and the 267-page books that help educate people on how to build their credit.
Frees discovered the opportunity after interning several summers in Florida. He wrote training manuals and carpooled back and forth to work with his boss who became his mentor.
He interned at Dispute Suite, a company that offers credit repair tips and software. He lived with the family of Mike Citron, the company’s CEO and president who took Dispute Suite from a start-up to one of the country’s top privately held companies.
Citron was so impressed with Frees that he offered him two years ago the chance to take the reins of CR Publishing, a small subsidiary of Dispute Suite that now is its own entity.
Citron is part owner and advisor, and Frees’ dad, David, is a part owner and advisor as well. But this consumer-tested company that has sold 14,000 publications in five years is all his.
As Frees juggles classes and exams at HPU, he talks to credit experts and manages freelancers and one part-time employee, fellow HPU senior Tanner Jensen.
That’s natural for Frees. He’s a former Eagle Scout who comes from a long line of entrepreneurs, and he came to HPU because of President Dr. Nido Qubein and the entrepreneurial spirit he found everywhere on campus.
But really, Frees first discovered his entrepreneurial drive in the simplest of ways.
Through a red envelope.
The Altruistic Lessons of Family
Frees was a fifth-grader, making extra money snowplowing driveways with a small borrowed tractor when his dad took him aside and showed him the basics of how to save.
The lessons started with a red envelope.
David Frees wrote on the envelope what he wanted his youngest son to learn. On the envelope were four boxes with edicts beside each: creating wealth, save for things I want, earn-create wealth, invest to give me income/independence.
At the bottom, David Frees wrote, “Millionaire Maker, Alex Frees.”
These life lessons are nothing new for the Frees family. They have lived for generations in Chester County, a bucolic area of rolling hills an hour west of Philadelphia. Alex represented the sixth.
His great grandfather sold shoes during World War I. His grandfather started an insurance business during the Great Depression. Frees Insurance, run by his uncle, is still in business today. His dad is an attorney and business consultant.
Nearly 20 years ago, his dad, his uncle and his grandfather started a Frees Family Fund under the auspices of the Chester County Community Foundation. They started it with $10,000 in seed money. The endowment has grown ever since.
The fund provides money to help projects that improve the quality of life in Chester County. The Frees family saw it as an obligation, and as their family made money, they added to the fund because they felt a responsibility to help those around them.
That included Alex.
“There is an element of luck in being born here, and we have an obligation to give back,” David Frees says of the family’s foundation fund. “A lot of people say that, but the foundation is an opportunity to do that and early on Alex understood that. It’s something you do.”
The Roots of Entrepreneurism
Click on the foundation’s website, and you’ll find a Frees family photo – 10 of them, three generations, with Alex seated in front row in a brown sweater.
In the photo, he is 12. Today, he is 22. He still remembers those life lessons, and he has absorbed them all.
“It gave me a motivation to be successful,” he says. “Look at where my grandpa lived his entire life in Phoenixville – in the house where his grandfather and my father lived. That house had had a Frees in it for I don’t know how many generations. But it showed me you can start something from nothing and manage your life.”
Now, back to the red envelope.
Frees slipped into it money he earned from snowplowing. He soon tired of that – too cold, he thought – and he wanted to find a moneymaking venture that didn’t freeze his fingers.
In middle school, he started going with his dad to marketing conferences. That’s where he met Dr. Qubein and heard him speak. Right then, he turned to his dad and told him he was going to High Point University – and no other place.
But he had some other ideas, too.
Frees started thinking of ways he could make money. In high school, as his friends bagged groceries and stocked shelves, Frees worked for his dad. His dad ran a management consulting company, Success Technologies, and Frees ended up copywriting for him and learning about the nuances of business.
His job gave him more money for his red envelope. But it was bigger than that. Like Citron, Frees’ dad became his mentor, and that knowledge helped Frees start his own business, Profit Systems and Solutions.
Frees became a consultant and copywriter for local businesses in Chester County. Frees still operates Profit Systems and Solutions today.
From that experience came the confidence to say yes to another endeavor – to run CR Publishing, home to the Credit Repair Intelligence System, a step-by-step book to help educate people on what to do.
Here he is a college student, one of 38 founding fathers and a founding vice president of HPU’s Kappa Alpha chapter. He is majoring in business administration with a concentration in entrepreneurship, and he is the president and treasurer of CR Publishing.
The theories he learns in class he puts into practice right away.
What a concept.
“I’ve spent four years here, and I’ve found tons of opportunities that have helped me know what I want to do,” he says. “At the same time, I’ve always had school and classwork. But soon I’ll focus 100 percent on something I’ve always wanted to focus on. And that’s what makes it interesting. I want to see where I can take these things.”
The Giving Back Begins
In his last semester before his graduation in May, Frees will start an independent study and do what he has always wanted to do: be an entrepreneurial consultant.
Through HPU’s Belk Entrepreneurship Center, he will help students start businesses and nurture their businesses. Meanwhile, he will help develop a program geared to guide student entrepreneurs after he graduates.
And he will be busy. At last count, HPU has at least 50 student entrepreneurs running their own businesses. And of course, Frees is one.
To Kathy Elliott, the center’s director, Frees’ independent study will work well.
“Alex wants to put to practical use what he’s learned, and as director of the center, I know he can take the raw talent I see every day and turn it into something concrete and help students build their portfolio,” she says.
“Alex has the talent and experience, and this (Frees’ independent study) will show what the students can do and what the school is. It’s a perfect fit.”
Frees knows entrepreneurism will always be a part of who he is. He was raised around it, saw it firsthand and tapped into it himself from his days pushing snow from driveways to his work running CR Publishing.
And now, he’ll follow what he first learned with the Frees Family Fund and heard often as a student at HPU. It’s a Bible verse Qubein quotes often whenever he talks to students on campus: To whom much is given, much is required.
Frees will do that with his independent study. He’ll give back.
And his red envelope? He still has it. He won’t get rid of it. It still has a few hundred dollars in it. But there is something more.
It’s a reminder of how he started out. That, he says, will always be a good lesson.