Three Kellogg MBAs Redefining ‘the Pivot': From Influencers to Entrepreneurs
- Cathy Campo
- Apr 26
- 8 min read
Updated: Apr 27
By: Shade Bullock, Co-Editor-in-Chief
They didn't come to Kellogg following the same playbook. One arrived with a celebrity client list and a CPG launch in the works. One had already traded a consulting salary for a content career before ever setting foot on campus. One showed up not totally sure what her business idea would be—and had a sold-out bagel operation running within months.
Meet Allison Sheehan, Jeein Youn, and Paige Tuchner, all verified Instagram influencers in the 2Y MBA class of 2027. Between them: engaged audiences, brand deals, product launches, and more orders than their apartments can handle. While their classmates are figuring out their post-MBA pivots, these three are executing theirs in real time—running LLCs, closing partnerships, and building the kind of personal brands that most entrepreneurs only dream about.
Between interview prep and coffee chats, they're quietly proving that the MBA doesn't have to be a detour from entrepreneurship. For them, it's the accelerator.
Allison Sheehan: From Goldman to the Baking Aisle
If the baking aisle ever gets a glow-up, you can thank Allison Sheehan. An ex-Goldman wealth management associate—she will politely correct you if you call her a former “investment banker”—started her cake company in 2020 as a junior in college in Texas where birthday parties are, in her words, "bigger and better and glitzy and glammed." The one local baker making showstopper cakes was always sold out. Allison decided she could do it customized, fresher, tastier, and delivered, starting with her sorority sisters.
She is, for the record, entirely self-taught. "I was not a Nickelodeon or a Disney Channel kid. I was a Food Network kid." She watched every episode of the iconic 15-season run of TLC’s Cake Boss, rewatching entire seasons on sketchy websites before Hulu existed, plus Ace of Cakes and The Great British Baking Show. The obsession was real long before the business was.
Word of mouth carried her from sorority sisters to all of campus, then the greater Dallas area, then New York City, where she kept going as a side hustle alongside her high-powered finance job. For four years, her Instagram hovered at 500 followers. She kept posting anyway—three times a day to no likes, no comments, no shares—because the feed doubled as her personal scrapbook. Traction finally arrived when she started sharing "morning in the life" videos of buttercream prep before heading to work. People were convinced it was fake. It was, in her words, "so avant-garde to be a baker and work at Goldman."
Soon after came the handle change to @Investment Baker, press coverage in People Magazine, Business Insider, Harper's Bazaar, and Goop, and a star-studded client list—Gigi Hadid, Tory Burch, Simon Huck, Chuck Fancy—that still makes her laugh. The way it works: an assistant DMs her without saying who it's for, an NDA is signed, and then she finds out. "Little old me from a village in Wisconsin is being stalked by Gigi Hadid's assistant."
Leaving the corporate paycheck was rougher than she anticipated, and not just financially. "I didn't realize how much I valued the structure and stability and the routine of having a finance job." Within weeks, she lost the commercial kitchen she'd been renting, forced to drop from roughly 30 cake gigs a week back down to six, and had to rebuild from scratch (pun intended). When she landed in Evanston and lost her entire New York client base, she signed up for For Goodness Cakes, a nonprofit that pairs bakers with foster kids who otherwise wouldn't have a birthday cake.
Now she's doing less of the custom work and more of the big bet: a shelf-stable cake mix and frosting line. The baking aisle, she says, is "antiquated"—muted tones, stale packaging, controversial wording like "moist" and she wants to be the bright, spunky, Gen Z brand to answer to it with no preservatives and a bakery-authentic formula.
She's building her line in public, which comes with its own added pressure. She's made promises to 50,000+ followers: great ingredients, homemade taste, user-friendly, and she takes those promises seriously. When she opened up her packaging design to her audience, she was flooded with hundreds of comments and a dozen unsolicited mockups from graphic designers who just wanted to help. "That's a really integral part of being a successful founder—making people feel heard and valued."
Ask her where she sees herself in five years, and she’s quick to lay out her future vision: "A successful CPG founder with her product in retail stores across the nation, with a healthy work-life balance, proud of the decisions she made, and happy she took the risk of leaving her corporate job and betting on herself."
For anyone eyeing a similar pivot: "Average decisions yield average outcomes. Life is short. Take the risk."
Jeein Youn: The Consultant Who Went Viral and Never Looked Back
The first video Jeein Youn ever posted was, by her own admission, horrible. First week of her consulting job, after work one night during orientation, she took out her phone and filmed a post-work routine. "I wish I'd never posted that," she laughs today. She posted it anyway...
And it landed. TikTok had just started shifting away from dancing videos toward day-in-the-life content, and almost nobody in corporate was doing it yet. "I always say it was the right time—that's kind of where luck comes in." There were only maybe three of them doing it. She was one.
What followed luck was spreadsheets. She'd always been obsessed with the numbers—she pulled up her 90-day trends right before our call—and once she saw consistent growth, she kept going. About two years in, she was making more from content than from consulting. "Obviously I'm not going to stay in consulting then." That was the wake-up call that brought her to Kellogg.
Jeein’s content is deliberately focused. She knows exactly who she's talking to: high-achieving women going after gatekept industries—the kind of person who actually thinks about their LinkedIn. She knows a broader audience would grow faster, and she's made peace with that. "My philosophy with content is to kind of be stubborn about who I make the videos for."
What most people don't realize is how much invisible work goes into a single post—you can't just pick trending music. You have to check the lyrics, verify the artist doesn't have bad PR at that exact moment, and make sure the beat drops at the right time on screen.
"Everything counts," she tells The Kelloggian.
There are trade-offs people don't talk about either. Tuesday nights she sometimes skips the Kellogg party because a brand deal is due the next morning. Depending on the job she's applying for, the content creation section sometimes comes off her resume entirely—some firms are fine with it, others aren't.
On the brand side, she only says yes when the fit is perfect. Her most recent favorite was high-end travel essentials company Away—she was heading to Korea and Japan for a Kellogg international marketing trip, already owned the mini version, and genuinely needed a bigger bag. "It fits into the story, I've already been using the product, and I would genuinely recommend it to everyone. That to me is a perfect brand deal." She came home with a suitcase full of Korean skincare.
She also started The Girls Club, which came from a simple observation: networking events with name tags don't produce real friendships. You shake hands, make small talk, and never talk to that person again. Real relationships come from shared experiences that repeat over time. That was the gap she wanted to fill. She started on TikTok specifically because Instagram felt too close to home—"that's where everyone I actually know is"—and kept it private for two years. It's her only real regret. A month before we spoke, someone DMed her saying they had a Kellogg interview the next day and had applied because of one of her videos. "Just little things like that, even if it's like just one human. It's just like, wow... it's hard for me to still comprehend that someone could watch a video and make a decision about which school they go to. Like, that's such a big life decision."
Post-Kellogg, she wants to build something of her own. She's in early stages of launching a CPG brand. After four years of making other people's brands look good, the question became hard to ignore: "If I'm advertising for your brand, why can't I create my own?"
It's early, but she already knows how to build an audience from scratch. Her advice for anyone at Kellogg sitting on a video they're too nervous to post: "Just do it. Being embarrassed to do it is the more embarrassing part."
Paige Tuchner: Kellogg by Day, Chief Bagel Officer by 5AM
On a typical Saturday, Paige Tuchner runs. Like really runs—the kind of long runs that serious runners build their whole week around. She's currently training for the Boston Marathon (which she will have already run by the time this is published). Then Sunday, she's back in her Evanston apartment measuring out dough by hand, portioning schmear to the gram, and packing up bagel orders before the pickup slots open. That's just kind of how things go right now.
Paige's Bagels has only existed since January. It started the way a lot of good things do—not with a business plan, but with a problem. Paige has a stomach that doesn't tolerate most bread, yet she's a serious runner who needs to eat before long runs. Sourdough turned out to be the one thing that worked. She made sourdough bagels constantly while living in New York. When she was accepted to Kellogg, she noticed there weren't many good bagels in Evanston, and she started playing around with recipes in her apartment. A friend tried one and said she should sell them. "That could be fun," she thought. A few weeks later, she had a website, a pop-up at E2, and about 120 free bagels for anyone who wanted to try them.
That first pop-up wasn't the overnight smash she half-expected and fully-hoped for. She'll admit the slots didn't completely sell out, and she had a moment of "maybe this is just a passion project." But she kept refining the recipe, started posting more on TikTok and Instagram, and something clicked. Now her Wednesday and Sunday slots sell out every single week. She's Uber couriering orders to people in downtown Chicago. A company found her on social media and hired her to do a corporate St. Patrick's Day event—green bagels with green schmear. People in Toronto who barely know her are asking when she'll be selling there.
All of this from an apartment. A very full apartment. "My entire fridge is just like trays of bagels," she laughs. She measures every piece of dough to make sure the bagels come out the same size. She portions every schmear, so costs stay in line and nobody gets shortchanged. And because it's sourdough, the whole process takes about three days—which means the bagels you pick up Sunday were essentially started Thursday. Most people, she notes, don't think about any of that. They just assume she rolls them and bakes them.
The menu started with plain, everything, poppy, sesame, and a salt bagel she fell in love with at PopUp Bagels in New York ("the salt one is my favorite," she confirms, when asked). She just launched bagel bites—munchkin-sized, six flavors, cinnamon sugar among them—and that first batch sold out immediately.
She came to Kellogg specifically to find her way into food and entrepreneurship after years in finance she describes simply as: "I just wasn’t passionate.” She didn't know what form it would take. It turned out to be bagels, at least for now.
After graduation, Paige aspires to continue working in the CPG space—whether that's through Paige's Bagels or something else. She's keeping it open.
Her advice for anyone sitting on a side project they're afraid to start: "Just try it—and trying it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to give up anything else."
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