After a long day of travel, the Roadside MBA team pulled into Tulare, CA late last evening. The plan had been for Mike and Scott to fly to SFO on the first flights of the day and head down to Palo Alto so we could get started around noon. Unfortunately, Mike awoke at 4:30am in Chicago with to a voicemail message from American Airlines. His flight to San Francisco had been cancelled, but the airline had “protected” him on an alternative – a 10 o’clock flight to Palm Springs, connecting to Phoenix, continuing onto San Francisco arriving at 6:30pm. Awesome! Fortunately, a reroute to San Jose … [Read more...]
Road Trip #7 Begins May 13
The Roadside MBA Team is pleased to announce that Road Trip #7 will go from Palo Alto, CA to Las Vegas, NV, leaving May 13 and arriving May 16! And you can join up, virtually. We'll be live blogging, tweeting, instagramming, and, well, what other apps do we have on our phones? We'll also be answering questions and/or taking dares from twitter users. Simply tweet your question/dare with hashtag #roadsidemba and if we answer-it/take-it, we will enter you in a drawing to win a free copy of our book. This trip will be a bit different from our activities to date. Stanford GSB is … [Read more...]
Jeff City: We Heart Local Chambers
It was in Jefferson City --- the Show-Me state capital --- that we learned to appreciate a good Chamber of Commerce. It was our first trip, and we didn't really know what we were doing. On a whim, I called the Jefferson City Chamber. "Hello, my name is Scott Schaefer. I'm a business professor at the University of Utah, and I'm calling with a somewhat unusual request..." In the years since, this plan --- starting each trip with calls to the local Chambers --- has become the standard operating procedure for Roadside MBA. Sometimes, this works great. Matt Parker, head of the Dothan, … [Read more...]
Council Bluffs, Iowa
Council Bluffs would appear to be just a nice, quiet suburb of Omaha, Nebraska, which sits on the other side of the Mississippi River. But Council Bluffs has a lot of charm and excitement of its own. Some people come for the casinos that sit along the river. Gambling has slowly become a larger part of the city’s economy since a dog racing park was established there in 1986. You can still catch some greyhound racing in town, but we went to the casino instead. When we visited, we spent our evening at an Italian restaurant, a casino, and watching baseball games back in our respective hotel … [Read more...]
Vegas, Baby
Oh my gosh. Road Trip #7 is coming.... Details soon! … [Read more...]
Saint Joseph, Missouri
Saint Joseph, Missouri sits on the Missouri River about 50 miles north of Kansas City. The town was once the eastern terminus of the Pony Express, and was also the "jumping off point" for the Oregon Trail. The town played an important role in the settlement of the American West. And the local residents haven't forgotten. Pretty much everything, we found, is Wild-West-themed in Saint Joe; it's a bit like living on the set of Gunsmoke. At right is a photo from the evening's lodging, the Stoney Creek Inn. Note the exposed wood beams and railings, the bear (?), and the Pony Express … [Read more...]
The Fall Line
In the song Levelland, James McMurtry wonders why the city fathers of that West Texas town decided to put the town where it is. Flatter than a table top Makes you wonder why they stopped here Wagon must have lost a wheel Or they lacked ambition. We've often pondered related questions as we've driven from town to town on our journeys. Why is Hattiesburg MS there? How did Frankfort KY come to be? And why is Liberal, KS where it is? (And why, come to think of it, is it named that? But names are a whole other blog post...) The topic arose again as we sat down to dinner in … [Read more...]
More from Slidell
On our trip from Atlanta to New Orleans this week, we met with a total of 15 businesses ranging from a solo mental health provider with a few contract workers to a few companies with about 100 employees. We saw people making fire hose, we saw pets getting treated, and we saw a lot of people buying a lot of fish. We also visited four states and drove a lot of miles.Trip ended with a drive over the Lake Pontchartrain causeway to the New Orleans airport. If you look in the lower right corner of this shot, you can see the Superdome which was going to get a lot more crowded over the next few days … [Read more...]
Slidell, Louisiana: Fight Day
I write, exhausted, from a Delta flight back home to Salt Lake. What a great week.... I'll get to the business stuff in a minute, but first let me fill you in a bit on our travels. It was sunny but cool in Slidell, LA today; really pleasant for driving around. The not-so-nice part is that it was, well, Thursday. Our six Roadside MBA tours to date have all had similar timing; we meet Sunday, travel Monday through Thursday, and return home Thursday night. We spend most of each day talking to business leaders, then drive two to four hours to the next city, compare notes and decompress … [Read more...]
Hattiesburg
Beginning of day highlight: Major thunderstorms. As a result, Paul started the day a bit grumpy because he had to run on a treadmill instead of outdoors. Also, he had to watch Today while exercising because there is no NPR station with decent reception in Hattiesburg.After this rocky start, the day was a huge success in terms of meetings. We started with a local provider of broadband internet and phone service. This is an interesting business because the technology and the best way to package products (with cable? with cell service? dial-up, DSL, fiber, etc) are changing all the time. So the … [Read more...]