This summer, a cohort of Georgetown students fanned out to small businesses across Washington, DC, to help them bat away challenges and improve bottom lines.
Three business students had one of the sweeter challenges: consulting with a veteran-owned donut shop with big plans to grow.
Siblings Charles Kachadoorian and Kate Murphy opened Good Company Doughnuts & Coffee (GOCO) in Arlington, Virginia, in 2019. They served up a family donut recipe that Murphy had finetuned over the years. In six years, they’ve expanded to four cafes across DC, plus a central bakery warehouse and a food truck.
With the support of Georgetown McDonough students, they wanted to double those numbers and deepen their community involvement.
“When we first started, we had 12 employees,” said Kachadoorian, an Army veteran turned restaurateur. “Now there’s 145. We are looking to grow the company, and a big part of what we’re doing this year is implementing a system … that frees up our time to focus on the growth of the business.”
(From left to right) Priya Singh (MBA’26), owners Charles Kachadoorian and Kate Murphy, Tina Yang (SFS’27, B’27) and Alex Mikhailovsky (MBA’26).
Helping Small Businesses Grow
The business students are part of the Small Business Corps (SBC), a Georgetown program founded in 2024 that supports local businesses in under-resourced areas of DC, Maryland and Virginia through student-led consulting. Since its founding, students have partnered with 41 businesses, including a barbershop, door distributor and installer, and pediatric therapy clinic, completing more than 50 projects.
“These projects are the perfect marriage between small business owners who know their craft but may not know finance, accounting or marketing, and students who don’t know the specialty but know what we’re teaching them at Georgetown. It turns out to be a very productive relationship,” said Leslie Crutchfield, executive director of Business for Impact and co-director of the Small Business Corps in the McDonough School of Business.
Every semester, students provide pro-bono consulting, and in return, receive training and personal coaching from the Boston Consulting Group, Georgetown McDonough faculty and Business for Impact staff.
The Small Business Corps cohort visits the Good Company owners at their cafe in Southwest DC.
Alex Mikhailovsky (MBA’26), a graduate student who consulted with Good Company, was drawn to Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business because of the Small Business Corps.
Prior to Georgetown, Mikhailovsky served in the Army for 11 years. During a deployment, he helped establish water sanitation projects in East Africa, and was eager to continue consulting on sustainability and social impact projects. Once at Georgetown, Mikhailovsky applied to the SBC.
“I want to consult with businesses in the DMV area because I believe that we have this education and this privilege to get these insights, but we have to deliver them to the community in which we’re embedded,” Mikhailovsky. “We’re not in an ivory tower but helping and making an impact.”
Crunching Donut Numbers
Good Company’s chocolate peanut butter donut.
Mikhailovsky, along with fellow graduate student Priya Singh (MBA’26) and undergraduate Tina Yang (SFS’27, B’27), worked closely with Good Company’s owners to develop a pricing model and relationships with community partners.
Yang, an international student in the Dikran Izmrlian Program in Business and Global Affairs, brought her own background in food to the table. In her first year at Georgetown, she was promoted to director of accounting for The Corp, a student-run nonprofit that operates coffee, dining and convenience stores on campus. She found herself consulting with students and small businesses on pricing, strategies and sales.
“That gave me exposure to running a small business, and it’s difficult — very difficult,” she said. “It made me care about the small business community.”
Tina Yang, who participated in Small Business Corps in spring 2025, brought her experience as accounting director for the Corp, a Hoya-run coffee and dining nonprofit, to Good Company.
Yang knew she could bring her coffee knowledge to bear. In partnership with her cohort, Yang created a dynamic pricing model so Good Company owners could assess how their prices stacked up against competitors’ and automatically adjust and calculate their own pricing. She also received weekly feedback from coaches at the Boston Consulting Group to enhance the model for the owners’ needs.
Singh, who’s beginning her second year in the MBA program, brought her background in consulting with Fortune 500 companies. She found an AI tool that would automate production planning so Good Company wouldn’t under- or overproduce donuts. In the process, Singh found that her own career plan shifted from consulting with big businesses to start-ups.
“You can see the end-to-end impact within a few weeks as opposed to the larger companies,” she said. “This summer definitely flipped my mindset. I feel proud to have made a concrete impact in our backyard.”
Singh and Mikhailovsky at Good Company’s 4th St. location in Southwest DC.
In addition to operations support, the students helped Good Company expand their reach in the communities it serves.
Mikhailovsky pitched New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, which runs a day center that provides food for adults who are homeless in downtown DC, to receive free donuts and pastries from Good Company. Its downtown café now donates leftover donuts to the shelter every day. He also worked on developing a partnership with DC Central Kitchen to provide a pipeline of employees and chefs.
Mikhailovsky and Kachadoorian both previously served in the military, which helped them understand each other’s operating process, they said.
“We’re excited to have incredible students – like the Good Company team – working with SBC. They build solid partnerships with these businesses and use their creativity and skills to contribute in a meaningful way to the growth of these companies,” said Joe Weinstein, managing director of Small Business Corps and senior director of Business for Impact.
The Impact
Kachadoorian and Murphy have already put the pricing model to good use.
“Growing from one to four cafes, plus the bakery and food truck, required that we put in a management system that gives us visibility into what’s going on and improves communication. Being able to have a tool like this will help us with scalability,” Kachadoorian said.
They also know growing their businesses and partnering with other organizations helps create more jobs and “greases the path for other people,” Murphy said.
“We already have a potential idea for the next one [laughs],” she said of partnering with SBC.
The owners of Good Company have plans to continue expanding their four cafes across DC.
Alumna Sooin Choi (SFS’21, G’23), who works for the Southwest Business Improvement District in the 4th St. SW neighborhood with a Good Company cafe, originally connected the donut shop owners with SBC to provide resources to small businesses in the area. She is also working with Hoyas on another research project to enhance 4th St. corridor’s foot traffic, retail presence and visitor experience.
Choi, who earned her master’s in Urban & Regional Planning from Georgetown’s School of Continuing Studies after graduating from the School of Foreign Service, knows firsthand the power of gaining experience in the field to enhance classroom learnings.
“One of the greatest things I benefited from during my time as a student was exposure to what was happening in classes,” she said. “Any chance my mentors and professors were able to connect me with what’s happening prepared me for the practice I do now.”
Sooin Choi (SFS’21, G’23), the manager of special projects for the Southwest Business Improvement District, connected Good Company’s owners to the Small Business Corps.
For Yang, the undergraduate business student, the hands-on experience solidified that she wants to work with people, not spreadsheets. She also hopes to apply her pricing model to the Corp.
“I was grateful to step outside of [Georgetown] and explore the different districts and all of the prevalent issues,” she said. “Being able to think about things on a more global, regional level is helpful, and I hope that the Corp can do more things outside of Georgetown and in the community of DC.”
