Young guns: a new generation of college students makes entrepreneurship its business

Entrepreneur, Oct, 1996 by Lynn Beresford

The faculty members at Babsons Center for Entrepreneurial Studies are serious about small business. For one thing, most of them have run entrepreneurial businesses themselves and now want to pass on their knowledge to the next generation. Babson graduate Steve Spinelli, for instance, returned to the school to teach after helping found oil-change franchisor Jiffy Lube and establishing a network of 47 franchises. Bygrave himself started two small businesses before joining the faculty at Babson.

Bouncing their ideas off Babson's professors and students helped Michael Healey and Robert Lofblad launch their Needham, Massachusetts, company, PC-build Upgrade Centers Inc., before they graduated with MBAs in 1992. The laboratory atmosphere at Babson taught the partners a lot about problem-solving - and gave them a safe place to work out the kinks. "It's a lot easier to defend potential fatal flaws in your business with a professor than to actually be sitting behind the desk when that situation comes up and threatens your business," says Healey, the company's president. "Graduate school makes you [consider potential] problems ahead of time and forces you to work through different scenarios."

Healey says the practical nature of Babson's graduate program also helped inoculate them against failure in the real world. "One of the reasons I went back to school was because I knew I wanted to start my own business, but I lacked marketing skills; I didn't know what it took to launch a business or how to look at and assess opportunities," says Healey. "I had the drive, but I couldn't take that and turn it into a business." That's where Babson came in. Now, five and a half years later, Healey and Lofblad's $4.5 million company has three locations and shows no signs of slowing down.

Theirs is not the only apres-graduation success story. The Entrepreneur Program at USC hosts an annual networking day where graduates compete with each other to present their stories to their fellow alumni. In March, more than 110 alums competed for 10 spots. The chosen businesses ranged from a coffeehouse and an auto towing business to several Internet companies.

Entrepreneur Program director Tom O'Malia says more and more students are showing interest in USC's undergraduate and graduate entrepreneurship disciplines. Why? "They're being realistic," says O'Malia. "Our full-time MBA students are looking to join emerging firms. They know they don't want to end up working for a large, bureaucratic company. And our night-time graduate students know what they don't want to do. The cubicle [they sit in during the day] is a little too tight and stifling."

Of course, USC's Entrepreneur Program is no walk in the park. Completing the courses in the face of the typical college distractions is almost as challenging as, well, running a small business. The average student spends 300 to 400 hours writing a business plan in the second semester of their undergraduate year," O'Malia says. "We're competing, against the beach and the beer, and to get that many hours out of somebody is pretty incredible."