This weekend I coached students as part of Babson College’s Coaching for Leadership and Teamwork Program. The program is designed to help first and third year students hone their oral communication, listening, teamwork, leadership, ethics, and decision-making skills. It’s one of the many distinctive programs Babson offers in addition to it’s truly unique, cross-disciplined business education. I’ve recently more keenly appreciated how Babson’s education fosters entrepreneurialism — regardless of if you decide to take specific classes in the entrepreneurship academic division or not.
Babson was a rigorous and rewarding experience for me. I didn’t concentrate in entrepreneurship, but the implicit learning I gained from being around motivated, aspiring and current student entrepreneurs certainly left it’s mark. Babson teaches it’s students to take risks, to figure out complex business problems, how to succeed in a highly demanding environments, among many other skills. All of these skills I’d qualify as essentials to being an entrepreneur. After going the traditional consulting route after graduation, I’m now navigating my way through the startup scene in Boston and Cambridge. There’s so much I find myself applying from my education and the programs at Babson in this scene. Here are a handful of the programs that set me up best to help make Pinyadda a success:
Foundations of Management & Entrepreneurship
This is a required year-long course for freshmen, in which 60 students start with rocket pitches and vote to narrow down the pitches to two business ideas. The class splits, determines roles and positions, receives a $3,000 loan, and runs the businesses through the semester. At the end of the semester, they donate all profits to a non-profit of their choice. My company, Greenback Card Co., raked in $12,500 in revenues and donated $7,500 in profits to a local YMCA.
The biggest learning from this experience that I’m applying now at Pinyadda is know that no matter your age and experience, starting and running a business is possible.
This program includes a capstone project your junior year that runs and is administered across disciplines: finance, organizational behavior, marketing, strategy, etc. A self-selected team of students choose a company and analyze and address complex issues facing that company, ultimately presenting strategic recommendations to a panel of professors at the end of the semester. My team chose Home Depot, as Lowe’s market share was steaming ahead. We recommended a variety of strategic initiatives and answered tough questions from the panel about how these would be financed, how much we knew about the markets we were entering to name a few. We had no problem answering these questions given the thorough research we had done (we even spoke with management at Home Depot).
This program taught me the power of research and data analysis in strategic decision making. As a startup, no one tells you what to do and how to do it. As a result, we rely on data and research to drive this decision making more than anything else.
Management Consulting Field Experience (MCFE)
This advanced course pairs self-selected groups of students with an MBA student project manager. The group works with an area organization and provides consulting services. The team presents their recommendations to their client at the end of the semester. My team worked with Top Floor Learning, an adult education center facing a funding loss of $30k. They asked for our recommendations on how to make up for that loss. We performed pricing analyses, competitive analyses, demographical research, customer research, and ultimately provided implementable recommendations for making up for that loss.
MCFE allowed me to appreciate the importance of individual strengths and weaknesses in effective teamwork, especially amidst a group of friends. At Pinyadda, where we are all friends, we focus on working collaboratively towards a common goal by appreciating and honestly evaluating each others’ individual strengths and weaknesses. By doing so, we capitalize on strengths, and reach goals and develop initiatives in the most effective ways.
The Honors Program at Babson includes everything from advanced courses to networking events to a semester-long course on research methodologies. It provides an incredible support network and opportunities to get to know professors outside of the classroom. The capstone of the program is a three-semester long thesis project. My thesis analyzed the factors influencing Gen Y’s adoption of mobile payments. This thesis project taught me more than anything else how to self-start. No one was looking over my shoulder to complete the project; it was done independently and on my own time.
In a startup, you learn that the ability to re-energize and self-motivate is crucial — and entirely on your shoulders. No one is pushing deadlines and telling you when to work (maybe it’s why most startupers just work all the time?). Learning how to self-motivate is undoubtedly critical to startup success, so important that we’ve written it in our company conduct guidelines.
Woman’s Leadership Mentor Program
This program selects top well-rounded women undergraduate students at Babson and provides them with a scholarship and a vibrant support network throughout their years at Babson. Similar to the Honors Program, this program provided unmatched access to faculty, conferences, networking opportunities, a truly phenomenal support network of women, and a year long mentorship program with a seasoned female business leader in arguably your most busy time at Babson — your junior year. My mentor was an entrepreneur herself, truly got to know me as a person, and wanted nothing more than to see me find happiness and success. She helped me through a tough semester of juggling work, full course-load, several extracurricular activities, internship searching, and honing in on what exactly I wanted to do post-graduation.
The mentor program taught me how to balance things in my life. Startup life is 24-7, and when things are more crazy than “normal,” there’s no better lessons I learned from the Women’s Leadership Program than to immediately ground yourself by believing in your abilities.
As I mentioned, I took only a couple courses in entrepreneurship at Babson and didn’t take advantage of all the student-run entrepreneurial communities on campus like the E-Tower and Invenio Group. And while I knew I wanted to build a company down the road, I never anticipated doing it so soon out of school. I’m realizing now that regardless of my limited interaction with the entrepreneurially centered organizations and academic division, Babson still bred me to be an entrepreneur. The skills to succeed as an entrepreneur are built into so many of the school’s programs and classes, although I may have overlooked at the time the care at which Babson designed these programs and it’s curriculum in this way. The programs and learnings outlined above are without a doubt helping me navigate the startup scene and build Pinyadda. I now truly appreciate the #1 in entrepreneurship ranking.
Tags: Babson, entrepreneurship, Pinyadda, Startups