Under construction: Trulaske graduate finds joy in building businesses, relationships in KC and beyond

By Stephen Schmidt

Jeremy Terman, BS BA ’16, is a rhino — and has been for a long time.

It was a distinction that was officially recognized when he was working as an intern at Verizon as a junior at the Trulaske College of Business in the summer of 2015, when his mentor handed him a copy of Rhinoceros Success: The Secret To Charging Full Speed Toward Every Opportunity by Scott Alexander.

“It talks about the ‘rhino mentality’ that you have two-inch-thick skin. You don't get dragged down. You're very aligned on what you want to accomplish, and you find other people who have that same mindset,” Terman said of the book. “It leads to a saying I’ve always loved: ‘Build great things with great people’.... It’s all about how do you find great people? How do you extract the best out of them to build something great — to help drive impact and change?

‘The fun stuff’

These days, Terman, 27, maintains a very busy schedule that centers around his service as the as the director of enterprise sales out of his home in Kansas City, Missouri, for Lunchbox, a fast-growing restaurant technology company that creates brand-specific digital customer engagement platforms including online ordering, mobile apps, and loyalty programs — for restaurants across the country.

"We're building the entire digital customer experience,” said Terman, who has been in his current role since September after working four years in various capacities for DoorDash, where he launched more than a dozen Midwest markets by signing up more than 1,000 local restaurants before taking on an enterprising role and renegotiating approximately $1.5 billion in national contracts.

Although a majority of Lunchbox’s current clients are regional chains, Terman manages a team of enterprise sales representatives whose collective mission is to work out deals with the largest national restaurant brands in the country.

“I definitely think we're building those relationships,” he said. “And we'll have the opportunity to build our business in 2022."

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg for Terman, who most recently was named as a member of the 2021 class of Ingram’s 20 In Their Twenties.

Most days, he begins his work endeavors at 6 a.m. and often finishes around 10 p.m. In addition to his duties with Lunchbox, Terman serves as an owner and advisor to the KC Pioneers esports franchise, a co-host for The Summit podcast, a mentor to several non-fungible token (NFT) projects, a mentor at a business accelerator called Techstars, and an assistant baseball coach at the high school where his wife teaches — to name a few.

"To me, building the businesses is the fun stuff,” Terman said. “I definitely sacrifice spending time with friends and family, but I feel like I'm at a point in my career right now where everything is about compounding growth and scale.

“People may say I work too much, but I'm learning so much. And I'm able to apply these learnings across different businesses…. I'm not just learning and living in one sector.”

‘You’re a builder’

Matthew Reiske, executive director of Trulaske’s Business Career Services, met Terman nine years ago. The two had frequent conversations about different career paths. Reiske also took part in several of the Cornell Leadership Program (CLP) corporate trips that Terman attended.

“Jeremy was one of those students who always had new ideas and aspirations for his career,” Reiske said. “He was always willing to take risks and I had the impression it was going to play to his favor, which it has.”

Terman credits the time he spent with CLP as playing a major role in helping him develop the confidence to “think critically and talk to executives at a young age. It always made me feel like I deserved to be in the room.”

The program also gave him the confidence to attend the Mizzou Career Fair in the fall of 2012 as a freshman and land a retail sales management internship with Verizon, an opportunity usually reserved for juniors and seniors. That first internship at a store in Overland Park, Kansas, led to a business-to-business sales internship the following summer.

In April 2016, while finishing his senior year, Terman began working with Pocket Points, a mobile app that provides rewards (discounts to local businesses) to users when they stay off their phones while in class. It was started by a group of students from California State University, Chico, who also happened to be members of the Sigma Chi fraternity — one of whom was Andrew March, who is now Terman’s co-host on The Summit podcast.

Arian Motamenzadeh, the then-vice president of sales for Pocket Points, had reached out to Terman, who at the time was the president of the local Sigma Chi chapter, looking for fellow Sigma Chis to help make inroads with the program on the Mizzou campus.

“He said, ‘Do you know anyone who wants to do it?’ I said, ‘Yes, me.’ I got lucky,” Terman said.

Terman went on to be business development manager for Pocket Points, establishing relationships with more than 30 businesses in Columbia that would offer discounts through their partnerships with the app. He managed to build a team of 25 campus representatives, while helping lead efforts to sign up approximately 27,000 MU students to the app. Based on the success of the Mizzou launch, Terman was offered a position as a regional sales manager a month before he graduated from Trulaske.

At one point, he was faced with an opportunity to take a full-time sales job at Verizon or job as a regional sales manager with Pocket Points. He remembers talking about both opportunities with Mary Beth Marrs, the Cornell Leadership Program’s director.

“She said, ‘You're a builder — go to the startup.’”

And so he did, visiting and managing the collective accounts for college and high school campuses in or near 25 cities in the Midwest, doubling the company’s market share in the region.

Raising funds, awareness

Terman has been building businesses — and networking— with a variety of people even before he earned his degree from Trulaske.

His drive to build successful business operations and raise money started in middle school at The Barstow School in Kansas City, when he volunteered at an after-school program called Operation Breakthrough for lower income families. He decided to do his bar mitzvah project with the program.

The success of that effort eventually led to Terman to start a program in 2007 called Trick or Treat So Kids Can Eat, in which he created a partnership between area grocery stores, Operation Breakthrough and Harvesters (a regional food bank) to sell prepackaged bags of food to donate to both organizations. The program ended up providing more than 45,000 pounds of food during its five-year run.

"When people would donate, they would physically be donating bags of food, so they could actually see what they were giving,” Terman said. “And that was my whole thought process, which was that people would give more if they knew tangibly what they were giving.”

Terman’s passion to fundraise continued to be bolstered by experiences at Mizzou. As a sophomore, he worked as an assistant Polar Plunge® intern for Special Olympics Missouri, and organized a group of volunteers for the organization's Spring Olympic Games.

A year later, he co-founded an event called Slap Shot Against Cancer in which his fraternity, Sigma Chi, would play another fraternity in a hockey game to raise money for MU Health Care’s Ellis Fischel Cancer Center. The two-year event would raise more than $30,000 for the center.

Like many of the steps in his business career, the podcast that he co-hosts with March came about in an organic way, stemming from an idea to record the conversations that the two would have on a regular basis relating to like minds of a similar age range and vision.

Since beginning in March 2020, they have hosted a variety of people on the podcast, which currently has a 5-star rating on Apple, including founders and CEOs of venture capital-backed startups who are in the midst of revolutionizing certain sectors of businesses, to a self-proclaimed “hybrid endurance/strongman athlete” who has been able to accomplish incredible physical feats, such as completing a marathon with a truck strapped to his back.

“It’s another way of trying to get people who have achieved really fast growth in their careers in a shorter time frame to explain what made them successful,” Terman said of the podcast.  

While he loves listening to others talk about the keys to their success, he is more than happy to give his own insight and perspective for current Trulaske students who may be cut from a similar cloth.

For starters, he said, students should never limit their potential by pigeonholing what they can do or how far they are willing to grow and expand.

“Never put yourself in a box. Don't make decisions on what you think other people will perceive you to be like, but do what you feel passionate about. College is the time to experiment, take risks and learn about yourself,” he said. “Mizzou has all the resources you could want, if you go and ask for it, or you go and search for it. Never limit your mindset.''