An Uphill Battle

The results from a new study on cheating among MBA students conducted by the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University is quite disheartening. From Bloomberg.com:

The study found 56 percent of MBA students acknowledged cheating….The study offered two main explanations for the cheating: the pressure-cooker atmosphere of business school leaves many students willing to compete by any means available, and corporate scandals have distorted the standards of many business students.

So what these students are telling us is that the “ends justify the means” and “I might as well get started cheating now, because that is what I will need to do in corporate America.”
Another study found that more than 70% of undergraduate business students admit to cheating.
Corporate America has helped to corrupt our culture with all of its scandals. My only hope is that the entrepreneurial generation will create a new breed of American business leaders that seeks to do well in business without sacrificing their integrity. That is why we need to infuse not just legalistic ethics, but morality and values into business education.

The Ugly Beast

I wrote a post earlier this summer about the risks of inflation in our economy and how unprepared today’s entrepreneurs are to meet the challenges that a period of high inflation can create for small business owners. Here is a summary of my recommendations:

So what can a small business do these days to try and weather this storm?
– Keep overhead low.
– Build cash reserves to buffer short term price increases that precede higher prices on your part.
– Watch your margins carefully. Worry about growing profits, not sales.
– Don’t lock into long-term contracts that have narrow margins with large customers.
– When inflation heats up even a little, be aggressive with frequent small price increases rather than waiting and trying to catch up at some point with one big jump.
– Pay down variable interest loans ASAP. As long as there is inflation, interest rates will keep going up.

A recent survey from the NFIB raises additional concerns that inflation may be heating up.
nfib inflation.bmp
They found that about one third of small business owners plan to raise prices, mostly from small businesses in manufacturing and construction. But, these are real goods that consumers will feel in their pocketbooks. Although energy prices have eased, wage pressure is still strong due to shortages of trained, qualified, experienced workers.
Unfortunately, one of the only hopes for an easing of inflation is a recession. Some of us remember this old dance. The economy gets strong, but then it overheats causing inflation. Inflation dampens the economy, leading to a recession. Then the cycle repeats. The Fed is trying to keep control so we do not get into this old business cycle again. But, this time their interest rate policy may not be enough. Let’s hope the ugly beast of inflation can get controlled before it takes us into and economic tailspin. Stay tuned….

Extreme Entrepreneur Tour

What follows are a series of posts that summarize the inaugural stop of the Extreme Entrepreneurship Tour here at Belmont today. To follow the day’s events in order, read today’s posts from the first to the last (from the bottom up). Thanks to the EET crew for putting on an excellent program!
I am off to Florida to celebrate my Dad’s 85th birthday. Three Cheers for my favorite octogenarian (and still active) entrepreneur!!!

On Top at 23, and Still Climbing

Ephren Taylor was the final speaker of the Extreme Entrepreneur Tour. At 23, he has already achieved amazing success:
Success in business — His real estate company holds over $150 million in real estate, specializing in affordable housing for urban communities. He also has a highly successful entertainment company. He is one of the youngest CEOs of a publicly owned corporation, haven taken his business public after coming out of “retirement.”
Success in life — Ephren is active in charitable work and a frequent motivational speaker inspiring young people to strive for their own success in life. He is married and has two young children.
Ephren’s story is one of drive, ingenuity, and persistence. His is also a story of maturity and integrity beyond his years.

Entrepreneurial Careers

During the first session of today’s Extreme Entrepreneur Tour stop here at Belmont, Doug Fath shared how he came to choose an entrepreneurial career path in his life. Doug began his entrepreneurial career in 2001 at the age of 19. While in school he started an online sports apparel business. He sold that business in 2004 as he graduated college, and moved his entrepreneurial career into real estate by founding Faithful Investments, LLC. His business specializes in urban revitalization. Their mission:

Faithful Investments is committed to making a difference by building meaningful relationships and creating win-win situations with all of its business partners and customers.
To carry out this mission, Faithful Investments creates pleasurable living experiences for its tenants, innovative solutions for homeowners and money making opportunities for its investors.

He began his talk by citing a study which reported that 70% of young people are dissatisfied with their career choices early in their lives. Many of these young people end up in such unhappy circumstances by choosing careers based on what other people expect them to do. He offered words of encouragement and inspiration for young people to find happiness and satisfaction in their careers, by forging their own path by pursuing their own dreams and passions in their lives through entrepreneurship.

Belmont Welcomes the Extreme Entrepreneur Tour

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Belmont University will serve as host to the inaugural stop of the Extreme Entrepreneur Tour this afternoon from 3:00-8:00 p.m. as part of our Moench Entrepreneurship Lecture Series. We are delighted to be the first host for this exciting event. The Extreme Entrepreneur Tour brings top young entrepreneurs to college campuses to spread the entrepreneurial mindset at a grassroots level. Included in today’s program is Ephren Taylor whose business, Amoro Corporation, is headquartered here in Franklin, TN. I wrote a post a while back about his return from retirement to the business world at the ripe old age of 23.
It should be a great event. Any of you who are local are encouraged to attend. It is free and open to the public.

10 Steps for Growth…And the New Challenges it will Create

StartupNation recommends ten steps to help grow beyond the start-up mode:
1. Measure and Analyze Current Status
2. Get Efficient through Technology
3. Enhance Your Customer Experience
4. Cozy Up with Vendors
5. Maximize Your Niche, Expand to a New One
6. Develop New Channels
7. Acquire Growth Capital
8. Create a Culture
9. Ramp Up Awareness and Demand
10. Improve Sales Techniques
For each step they offer short articles and other resources to help apply these steps to a business.
Remember, however, that starting the growth process is only the first part of the process of moving your business ahead. Growth will create a new set of challenges:
1. Beware of the Growth Myth. Focus on growing profits, not sales! Too many entrepreneurs assume that profits always follow sales. This is not always the case. And even when profits do begin to follow sales, cash flow can lag even farther behind.
2. Vision Drift. Don’t lose your way. Stay focused on your core business. It may need to adapt and change, but these must be deliberate and planned choices.
3. Cultural drift. Managing the culture of your business is your job! If you don’t manage it, your culture will take on a life of its own, which is almost never a good thing.
4. Resource crises. Securing the fuel to support growth can be a constant strain…cash, staff, space, equipment, etc., etc.
5. Systems crises. The mundane and the complex all need development. From accounts payable to planning, all systems must be updated, enhanced, and made ready for growth.
6. Muddled structure. Make sure your structure makes sense for your strategy and your culture. We make small decisions on how to organize our employees that may make sense as we make them, but they may create an overall structure that can choke future growth and profits.
7. Disjointed strategies. Your business and your strategy need to be in harmony. All aspects of your business must be consistent and geared toward meeting customer needs and expectations.
Once the business begins to grow, both the entrepreneur and his business need to begin a transformation. If not properly managed, the entrepreneur can grow himself right out of business.
(Here is a link to a summary of all of the posts I have made about the challenges of growth).

Faith, Business, and Culture

I have made some recent posts about the new book I am writing with Mike Naughton from the University of St. Thomas. It comes out of the work we did developing a class that examined the process of starting and building a business from the perspective of Christian social teaching. The class won a national award (as an entrepreneurship class) and resulted in the two of us writing several scholarly pieces related to our work together. Too often traditional approaches to business ethics are from a legalistic or a morally relativistic perspective. We believe that morality should guide our ethical decisions.
Our book brings the message of how faith can inform, guide and ground the formation and development of new ventures, to the entrepreneurs who are leading today’s entrepreneurial economy. We offer entrepreneurs both a moral perspective and practical tools that they can use in their businesses. We organize the book around the four cardinal virtues from Aquinas: Justice, Prudence, Courage, and Temperance.
Justice can come to life through innovative compensation, benefit, and profit-sharing programs. What we accomplish in our businesses is only because of the support and efforts of many other people who deserve a share of our successes. Prudence is practiced by being intentionally careful stewards of the gifts we have to work with — our talents, other people’s money, the labor of our workers, and so forth. Courage is not just the intestinal fortitude to start the business, but staying true to our vision and values to build a better place to work and become a profitable business. Temperance is understanding our wholeness as people. As I wrote a few weeks ago, there is a risk in viewing your career as a noun.
We want to find a business publisher for this book, but there seems to be an uneasiness with overtly bringing God and faith into how we do our work as entrepreneurs. I have heard this uneasiness, this uncomfortableness, in the voices of some of the editors as we have explained our book.
This agnosticism also applies to how others think we should live our lives in today’s culture. The jounalist Fred Barnes recently told a story about a famous liberal who came face to face with the reality that many want God out of our culture:

Back in the early 1990s when I was still at The New Republic, I was invited to a dinner in Washington with Mario Cuomo. He was then governor of New York, and had invited several reporters to dinner because he was thinking about running for president. At one point that night he mentioned that he sent his children to Catholic schools in New York because he wanted them to be taught about a God-centered universe. This was in the context of expressing his whole-hearted support for public schools. But from the reaction, you would have thought he had said that one day a week he would bring out the snakes in his office and make policy decisions based on where they bit him. He was subsequently pummeled with stories about how improper it was for him, one, to send his kids to religious schools, and two, to talk about it. (Imprimis, Hillsdale College).

Our values and our faith should inform our actions because all that we do, be it in our families, our businesses, or our communities, shape our character. I know we will soon find a good publisher, but it is sad that in our culture we have become so quick to compartmentalize God and faith from everyday life.

Profiles of the Entrepreneurial Generation

The Tennessean (Nashville’s’ daily newspaper) ran a profile of four young entrepreneurs in today’s paper. Each has taken a slightly different path to their entrepreneurial career.
One of the profiles is of Andy Tabar, a 19 year old entrepreneurship student here at Belmont. He is integrating his experiences as he grows his business, Nashville Creative, into various class projects.
This need for just-in-time learning is what makes today’s young entrepreneurs such a challenge when they arrive at college. Many already have an operating business when they move into the dorms as freshman. We must engage them quickly, and show them how we can integrate their business experiences into their college experiences.
For students like Andy, we plug them into our various co-curricular offerings for student entrepreneurs, including our hatchery, the practicing entrepreneurs programs, and entrepreneurship club as soon as they arrive at our doorstep. Sometimes we know they are coming, and some are “walk-ins” who show up at our Center. By the time they take their first Entrepreneurship class, usually in their Sophomore or Junior year, we already know many of them and their businesses quite well.
Effectively working with today’s young entrepreneurs requires a different approach to teaching. We offer them as much opportunity to gain knowledge and skills outside of the classroom as we do in the courses we teach. And if it works well, the two experiences blend together. What we talk about in an informal student entrepreneur roundtable discussion, may also be something they are using as the focus for a class project.