It has been very enjoyable to get out and speak to people about the insights from Roadside MBA – over the past couple of weeks, I have had the opportunity to participate in a few nice events and tell some of our best stories. Several of these events have been organized through the Kellogg Alumni Association. The school had a great program in downtown Chicago and I sat on a panel discussing growth opportunities and strategy. My two fellow panelists were Kellogg grads with impressive entrepreneurial resumes: Scott Dorsey, who co-founded the digital marketing company ExactTarget after graduation, … [Read more...]
Three Economists in an RV
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...]
Delivering some Roadside insights
Along with our book (update: more than half the chapters have been drafted and we are closing in!) Scott, Paul and I are hoping to convey business insights to our audience through lectures, seminars, fireside chats – basically anyone who is willing to listen! I got the opportunity over the last couple of weeks to introduce the Roadside MBA project to a couple of interesting groups of small and medium-sized companies.The first was through an organization called Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC), which according to its website (www.icic.org) is a “nonprofit research and strategy … [Read more...]
Roadside Madness
Small Business Movies
Small Business Movies:Now that we are in the thick of writing the Roadside MBA, I see the connection to small business in nearly everything I see or do. So, of course, as I was watching the Oscars last night I started to think, “What are some good movies in which small businesses feature prominently?” Here were a few nominees that I was able to come up with:1. Ghostbusters (1984) – What do you when you get fired from your university jobs? Start a ghost-extermination business, of course! Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray and Harold Ramis try to get their business off the ground – though every … [Read more...]
What We Are About
I enjoy reading Matt Yglesias’s blog on Slate, and it was exciting to see that he had a recent piece on small business. In it, he relates the process he went through to get an entrepreneurial endeavor of his own started. It was quite a hassle. Unfortunately, Matt’s experience is not uncommon. In talking with small business people all over the U.S., we heard many stories about red tape and regulation and taxes and other issues that add frustration to the challenges of building and operating a successful company. In one form or another, navigating through these challenges – along with … [Read more...]
Day 1 in Dothan complete
We just pulled into our motel for the night in Pensacola, Florida after a 2.5 hour drive from Dothan, Alabama. We had some fantastic visits in Dothan, including a company that manufactures fire hoses and one that recycles the precious metal from the catalytic converters of junked automobiles (see photos below).We had great plant tours at both of these locations, but what was really exciting was the interesting economics at play in both of these businesses and how they linked to successful business strategy. We learned that making fire hose requires substantial sunk investments, which … [Read more...]
Prepping for the Trip
For all of our trips, we start out by setting out a route. We try to pick four cities/towns, each in a different state, that are reasonable driving distances from each other. The longest drive we ever took between days was on a cold and snowy January day from Pueblo, Colorado to Garden City, Kansas (more than 4 hours!), but typically we do around two hours or do between stops. I'm excited about the upcoming trip, because it is in the part of the country where I have not spent much time - Alabama, the Florida Panhandle, and Mississippi. Once we get the locations picked, the next step is … [Read more...]