FALL 2007
VOL. 8 NO. 2

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LEADERSDigest

A Passion for Entrepreneurship ♦ Turning Trash Into Treasure ♦ Sports Management at Smith
Global Security & Enterprise Resilience ♦ Global Supply Chain Game
Bringing Global Learning to Life ♦ Global Consortium MBA ♦ First Shanghai EMBA Class Graduates
National Association of Women MBAs ♦ Mergers & Acquisitions Competition

SKIP YOWELL, FOUNDER OF JANSPORT, TURNED HIS PASSION FOR HIKING INTO THE WORLD’S DOMINANT DAYPACK BRAND.

Entrepreneurs find success by working hard at something they love. This same drive and passion pushed a group of undergraduate students at Smith’s Shady Grove campus to form a club and spend months planning an entrepreneurship conference, held April 14.

The conference, titled “Turning Your Passion Into Profit,” attracted nearly 250 people who took part in presentations and breakout sessions conducted by successful entrepreneurs. Skip Yowell, co-founder of JanSport, delivered the keynote address, sharing how he turned a passion for hiking into the No. 1-selling daypack brand in the world. The event also featured a former Marine with his own career consulting firm, a founder of a private global investment firm, the head of a toy company, and a restaurateur.

“The goal was to get real-world experience,” said conference chair Eric McCoy, now a Smith senior and one of the founding members of the club that planned the event, a chapter of the national Collegiate Entrepreneurs’ Organization (CEO). The club founders are all members of the Entrepreneurship Fellows track of the Smith School’s overarching Undergraduate Fellows Program, designed to give students hands-on co-curricular experiences in specific concentrations.

The Entrepreneurship Fellows each have an eye toward running their own ventures and the CEO members figured setting up a conference with diverse entrepreneurs as speakers was a great way to gain insight into starting a business. They set their sights on organizing the conference almost immediately after forming the club last fall.

“All the members of the club worked so hard – it was really a collaborative effort,” said Laila Wardak, now a senior at Smith, who served as chair of the logistics committee for the conference. The student organizers used their own connections and some Smith School connections to recruit speakers and line up catering and event supplies. They did a lot of guerilla marketing by hanging signs, sending e-mails, even creating FaceBook and MySpace pages about the event. One club member’s sister even designed the conference Web site remotely from Guam. The group also lined up an hour-long stint as in-studio guests on a Washington-area radio program to publicize the event.

“If you watched all our members, it was just an amazing experience. Almost all were working one-on-one with CEOs and negotiating deals,” McCoy said.

He said it was these “real deals” that will really build the resumes of the students and give them a leg up in job interviews. The skills they practiced—networking, closing deals, event planning—will prepare them for the business world. And McCoy said some of their experiences were unforgettable, such as sharing dinner with Yowell of JanSport after the conference.

Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs Pat Cleveland—along with Luke Glasgow, Smith program director at Shady Grove, Jay Liwanag, assistant director of undergraduate programs at Shady Grove, and Tyser Teaching Fellow Oliver Schlake—championed the club and the conference from the start and helped the students plan and publicize the event.

But Cleveland gives all the credit to the students.

“They’re the ones who have done all the work. ... I just said ‘go, guys, go’ and they really made this all happen,” she said.

Beyond the conference, the CEO club has remained active, helping with entrepreneurship activities at some Montgomery County high schools. And nearly immediately after their first conference success, the group was already talking about planning next spring’s event.-- CT

CEO Conference

If you can stand the heat, seems you’re well-suited for the kitchen—and perhaps have the passion for the restaurant business.

“Inevitably you’re either cutting yourself or burning yourself, but it’s an overwhelming passion,” says Eric McCoy, a chef whose love of cooking and restaurants took him to a culinary academy after high school, on to the kitchens of numerous four-star restaurants, and 11 years later landed him at the Smith School’s Shady Grove campus.

McCoy, now a senior at Smith, wants to get back to industry he left. He came to Smith to learn the skills necessary to run the back-end business of a restaurant with the plan of opening his own fine-dining and wine bar establishment after he graduates next spring.

“As a nontraditional student, my priorities are a bit different,” says McCoy, who at 31 is the oldest member of the CEO club in Shady Grove. When he’s not attending classes, club meetings or studying, he spends his time chasing after his 2-year-old son, Connor.

After taking classes at Montgomery College, McCoy applied to Smith and received the Ralph J. Tyser Regents Scholarship, covering the entire estimated costs of his education and giving him the option of taking classes at Smith’s College Park or Shady Grove campus. He opted to enroll at Shady Grove because of the Entrepreneurship Fellows program, a track of the school’s Undergraduate Fellows Program offered exclusively at the campus in Rockville, Md.

McCoy helped found Shady Grove’s CEO club chapter, and emerged as the chair of last April’s entrepreneurship conference. He spearheaded the organization of several committees to plan individual conference elements and, like a proud father, delighted in the group’s success.

“What I walked away with and how I felt most satisfied was seeing the group come together — pure pride in seeing the group work together,” he says.--CT