Speaker promotes book, explains opportunity cost
For aspiring entrepreneurs, business, accounting and marketing majors or students wanting to learn about successful small company growth strategies, the Huntsman School hosted a Dean’s Convocation on Wednesday afternoon.
Scott Schaefer, finance professor from the University of Utah, spoke to USU students in the Orson A. Christensen Auditorium.
“I’m not going to talk at all about elections,” Schaefer said as he opened his speech. “This is an election-free zone. I’m going to talk about business. So let the election go, just let it go for now.”
Schaefer’s speech was based on a book project called “The Roadside MBA” that he is currently working on with two of his colleagues, Mike Mazzeo from Northwestern University and Paul Oyer from Stanford University. Schaefer said the three of them were at an economist conference when they visited a shoe store in Kittery, Maine. Hearing about a secret shopper program from the sales associates there, he began talking to them about the different incentives companies use to motivate their employees. His colleagues soon joined in.
Schaefer said the whole time, they were thinking about how what was being said related to economic frameworks they’d been teaching MBA students for more than a decade.
“The whole drive back to Boston, all the three of us could talk about was how awesome the secret shopper program at the shoe store in Kittery, Maine was,” Schaefer said. “One thing that we got out of that is there are so many amazing stories out there that can be tied to the economic frameworks.”
He said he wished he’d had 30 MBA students there to hear what he had learned.
“And so that was the start of this project,” he said.
In the spring of 2009, Schaefer, Mazzeo and Oyer set out on a road trip to visit small companies and learn their success strategies.
“If we learn a lot, we’ll write a book about it,” Schaeffer said he told his colleagues. “And we’ll call it Roadside MBA and we’ll sell a million copies and be rich and famous.”
The trio has one last road trip to make in the spring and the book is due out next fall. Schaefer said he will donate any royalties that come from USU student purchases to the Huntsman School of Business.
Schaefer said their goal is to write case studies on smaller companies so other new businesses can relate to them.
“One of the chapters of the book we’re working on is about why firms grow,” Schaefer said. “One of the things that we found is that every manager that we talked to has some plan for trying to grow,” he said. “But not very many of them have a solid appreciation for what it’s going to take.”
Schaefer said one of the key factors to growth is determining opportunity cost. He stressed the importance of knowing when the cost will outweigh the growth benefits and when expansion would be detrimental to a company’s profits.
Schaefer said by observing what works and what doesn’t work for large companies, small business owners can learn from the mistakes of others what not to do.
“I really thought it was interesting the way he described how small businesses – which I think would be really fun to start up pretty soon – can be able to compete with large businesses,” said junior Joseph McClatchy, an international business major.
Jesse Condie, freshman majoring in finance and economics, said he comes to all Dean’s Convocations because he can use what he learns to benefit his schooling and career.
“Because I’m only a freshman, I like to see all the different things I can do with it and keep my options open,” Condie said.
Condie said it is interesting to hear about people who are in the business fields.
“They kind of like motivate you because you go to class everyday and sometimes you just are tired and fall asleep and stuff,” Condie said.
Condie said when he goes to things like this, it shows the bigger picture.
“Like that’s going to be you in the future,” he said. “Kind of like the phrase, ‘the end justifies the means,’ it’s worth it to stay in school.”
– tmera.bradley@aggiemail.usu.edu