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Entrepreneurial Teaching
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A Typical Day
The bus arrives at 7:30 to take us to the farm, where are served breakfast in the owner/executive cafeteria. The teaching begins at 9, and we've been starting with a case discussion first thing, usually allowing the students 30-45 minutes to work in their learning teams on the numbers (which they invariably don't do themselves). The case discussion usually goes to lunch at noon, again in the cafeteria. So far, I've taught Earth Buddy on Tuesday and I'm teaching G&B Ropes today. Tomorrow is the big finale with a day-long discussion of Garlic's Restaurant business plan that the four of us will be teaching together.
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The afternoons usually begin with a lecture/discussion on some topic. I did operations on Monday, and the other guys did strategy, cash management, financial statements, etc. After the lecture comes a presentation on an entrepreneurial company that made it big, in concert with a mini-lecture on some concept. I did Dell and Entrepreneurship as an introduction on Tuesday, and the other guys have done Microsoft/Strategy/Pricing, Subway/Franchising, and Wal-Mart/Supply Chain Management.
We usually have two hours of one-on-one discussion with the students from 4-6, followed by dinner at the cafeteria and then the bus ride back to the resort. We've been getting back around 8 PM, making for solid 12 hour days.
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The students are quite a mixed bag. There are a number of undergrad students who have ideas for a business and not much else, although a couple of them have done some amazing work. There are also some older people who either have businesses that they would like to expand or would like to start a new business. One of my students - Tatiana - runs a private school and is at the stage where she needs help managing the school better. She's facing the standard entrepreneur's dilemma of having to put some structure into her management thinking and letting go of the day-to-day management. I've been working with her brainstorming on how she can create budgets for the various departments at the school and then make the directors of those departments responsible for managing the budgets fully. It's been quite a struggle, but she's finally starting to come around to the idea and I think she will be successful at implementing it.
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Another student of mine - Lena - has a PC retail shop and would like to open a computer/training "club" next door. It would be geared toward older students and adults who are looking for a quiet place to work, as opposed to the noisy, dirty gaming cafes that are swarming with children. It's a great idea and has potential, and she and her partner have put together some amazing numbers and done a lot of calculations for the business. She basically wanted me to find a weakness in her plan, which I can't, really.
On Sunday all our students got 20 minutes to present a part of their business idea, and that day went amazingly well. Despite apparently not prepping for the cases, most of the students put a LOT of work into their presentations and we were very impressed with the results.
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On the last day, Jon and Sarah had meetings with the Agro Soyuz people about corporate training next year, and the idea was received VERY favourably. It appears that they may buy a special program for US$20,000 in which 30 of their managers would get 2 weeks of training, each of the 4 LEADER teachers would provide 75 hours of consulting, and the third week would see Entrepreneurial use the Agro Soyuz site with no Agro Soyuz managers in the class. That would be absolutely ideal.
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After our final day at Entrepreneurial on Sunday, we returned Monday morning via bus to DP. There were eight students left at this point, along with Gary, Orin and me. We dropped them off at the train station, and after a number of photos, returned to the DP Rail apartments.
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©2004-2005 Kamal Gautam