Professor rides bike across country
Mike Glauser, Utah State professor and Executive Director of Entrepreneurial Programs, spent the past summer in an unconventional way. He rode his bike more than 4,000 miles on a tour to talk to small business owners across the country.
“I love to bike and I like long distance endurance biking and I always thought it would be fun to ride across the country, but I’d just never done it,” Glausser said. “The main motivator this time around was the that the jobs report last year was pretty bleak and here at the Huntsman school and in our center for entrepreneurship we are responsible for helping students find jobs and create their own jobs and create their own businesses.”
Glauser’s trek started out in Sister’s, Ore. and ended in Yorktown, Va. He rode about 600 miles a week to complete the trek, stopping to talk to 100 small business owners along the way.
“We thought, ‘What if we went across America and found people that had moved to these really attractive smaller towns where there are no jobs,’” Glauser said. “The goal is to provide more information to our students on how to create a job for yourself. So when you get out of here and you can’t find a job, but you want to go live somewhere cool, how do you create a little business?”
Glauser said that there is a widespread fear that technology is advancing faster than the job market is, making it necessary to find other means of business.
“We think that is something that we want to get a jump on,” he said. “We aren’t alarmists, some people say that we are going to hit 50 percent unemployment rate, we don’t believe that. We want to be part of the solution.”
Glauser said that more than half of America is employed by small business, and every business that he talked to had something in common.
“These 100 entrepreneurs we interviewed, not one of them mentioned money as their major motivator,” Glauser said. “They were doing things for reasons other than money.”
In Hazard, Ky., Glauser crashed. He pulled muscles in his groin, received a contusion on his thigh and hit his head on the asphalt. Glauser got up and rode 75 more miles that day. For the next five days he rode his bike with virtually one leg. Still he pressed on with his ride.
“You have to have a purpose first, and we had a very strong purpose: we want to help people,” Glauser said. “We want to discover the unsung heros of America and use them as role models to help our students.”
Glauser had help from family members and friends along the 4,005-mile ride. He said that the bike ride had many parallels with entrepreneurship.
“All of those same things we saw in businesses,” Glauser said. “The passion, the purpose, the tenacity, the planning, the teamwork, the pivoting when things don’t go right; we did all of the same things that businesses owners do as cyclists riding across the country.”
Twitter: @dahdahUSU