Episode 27 | Part One: The Spirit of Houston

Gregory Shepard, an entrepreneur who's built and sold 12 businesses, a recipient of 4 private equity awards, TEDx speaker, and Forbes author. This is The Boss Podcast with Gregory Shepard.

On multiple occasions, we've discussed what academia is doing to improve the entrepreneurial failure rate, and this week I wanted to highlight one of the best in the country. The University of Houston's Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship has been named the number one undergraduate entrepreneurship program in the United States for 3 straight years. So how did they pull off this great feat? Joining me this week is the program's executive director, Dave Cook. Dave, welcome to the podcast.

Well, I'm delighted to be with you, and thanks for having me, Greg.

Well, let's dive in, Dave. We have to start with this incredible achievement. Uh, the Princeton Review ranked The Wolff Center for— as number 1 in undergraduate entrepreneurship programs 3 years in a row. What's in the water there in Houston? How are you pulling this off? What's happening over there that gives you the ability to rank number 1 3 times in a row?

Yeah, I think it's a long runway for us. We have started this 25 years ago. At a time when it was uncertain whether or not you could teach entrepreneurship. And so over the years, we have created a culture here in the university, and we're lucky enough to be in a city where entrepreneurship is revered and where lots of people come out of the woodwork to help us do it. So if, if our success is more a reflection of our community and the stakeholders than it is anything that we personally are doing here, for instance, you know, I've got a cohort class of 38 students, and last year we had 544 mentors come and work with these kids. There's no place else on earth.

Right.

that you're going to have that energy and commitment from mentors working with a small cohort. It is a long runway, something we've built over the years, and it is now spreading in the university to where last year we educated over 3,100 students who are taking some course Wow. Good students, good community, and a very supporting university.

So we talked about this a little bit before we started the podcast in terms of, you know, my mission and your mission are very similar in helping these entrepreneurs be successful. And what I'm wondering is what sets the Wolff Center apart from other entrepreneurship programs across the country?

We have a more holistic approach that when we look at the major ills that have befallen our society, our nation, they aren't because people weren't smart or they didn't have good business plans or models. It's because somewhere along the line, the people lost their direction and that their integrity was compromised, and so forth. So our mission is to create the next generation of entrepreneurs with the highest integrity. That's where we start, highest integrity, who can think, lead, and connect. And when you do that, it creates a whole different dimension of what you're trying to do with students. You are putting them in leadership roles. You're worrying about their ethical choices. You're worrying and concerned that they have people around them to advise them and to sort of be there when the question is, do I pay payroll taxes or do I make payroll? That there are people in their lives and support around, and that to the best we can, we simulate those experiences and those hard choices. But that's our difference. We start with core— 4 core values. You got to have purpose in your life, relationships, action, and discipline. There's 16 behavioral competencies we put under that, and we build curriculum around it. But by the time a student leaves our program, yeah, they've got everything that a typical business school would give you— marketing and accounting and presentation skills. But they also, every one of them, will have led a team. They also will have done a myriad of assessments. They'll know themselves. They'll know who they are on a team, and they'll have the ability to create visions and/or plans to get ideas into markets. And, but it's the human side that I think that differentiates us most.

So you start out with the person. And then you move into the business instead of starting with the business and moving into the person.

Absolutely, and what we— there are a lot of places where you can go and say, I want to study entrepreneurship, I want to do case studies, I want to do whatever. We absolutely, Greg, start with we're concerned about you as a person, and we're not particularly concerned with the idea you have. We want you, when you leave this program, to be able to take an idea 5 years from now, if you bump into a great idea, that you will have the confidence, the ability, the relationships to get that idea and take it into market. So yes, absolutely, we start with the people.

So you began your mentoring work in the University of Houston in 2007, and in 2 years you became the director of the Wolff Center for the mentoring programs. What are some of the changes that you've seen from student entrepreneurs in the last 14 years?

It's been an interesting flow. I mean, there— it is a reflection, I think, of the economy and the culture and But we are a reflection of what goes on in the country, and for, you know, when I started, it was all of students coming in wanting to become wealthy and wanting to sort of have a big splash. More and more as time has gone on, there's a social element to the people that come into our program. It is not enough to make a bunch of money. They want to make a difference, and so when we, when we take our program, we accommodate that sort of duality. When I started a number of years ago, a young lady came in and said, I want to start a company and I want it to be a nonprofit, and, and the director and I at the time said, hey, we're here to help you make money, not to And now, so she promptly went out and did it anyhow, created a great company, Good Sparrow, which does wonderful work providing documentaries for nonprofits and so forth, but that whole world now is table stakes that you're going to do something good in the world and that you're not in it for yourself, and that has been the most dramatic shift That I think has occurred over time.

Yeah, that's interesting. I've seen the same thing. It's a lot of even on the investor side, you know, you see social impact sort of investing and social impact entrepreneurship. I think that I agree with you 100%. It's definitely changing. And I think that's a great thing. When you look at entrepreneurship and the value of entrepreneurship to not just small businesses, but to cities, states, even the country itself, When you're teaching this, what sort of values do you see after the entrepreneur is out there and building a business that you think directly reflects, you know, in terms of contribution to cities, states, and neighborhoods?

The guy who is the name that we're named after was a guy named Melvin Wolfe, and he had created Star Furniture here in Houston, and he began working with our students and fell in love with the work that we do in this character development idea. The Wolffs sold the business to Berkshire Hathaway, and because of his friendship with Warren Buffett, I got to take the students every year to go spend— have lunch with Warren Buffett in Omaha and so forth. And when we were touring his offices up there, I think at the time he had like 19 people working for him. That was his organization. And so, you know, we have a guy, Brooks Bassler, who graduated from our program who started BB's Restaurant, and he's got a payroll of over $10 million and hundreds of people working for him. And, and so when, when I look at this, Yeah. a lot of what I look at is how many jobs are you creating? How many Not just financially, how are you making money, but what's your impact in the community? Are you creating good jobs with people who are looking forward to going home with their family at night and are paying taxes and, and are pushing innovation in a very healthy, holistic way into the community? So, you know, it is important to us. That we not just look at innovation, but that we look at entrepreneurship as how it's going to impact not only the community, but the families and the entrepreneur himself in changing lives. And we believe strongly in that.

What are some of the biggest challenges your organization faces in supporting entrepreneurs down this journey? When you think back and And you say, okay, well, our biggest challenges in getting an entrepreneur from I have an idea to I have a business, what would you say like the 5 top challenges are?

One is women. We do not have effective role models or participants in our program. We need more women. And in my opinion, A lot of the successful women are right in the middle of their careers, and they're thriving. And to be involved with a program like ours in any capacity, to teach, to mentor, to be engaged with our program, is very time-consuming. And so as a result, we get disproportionately a great number of people who look like me, old guys who have the time to go invest, have made their fortune and have their lives. One would be clearly that I think we need women, and you could expand that to we need better diversity. We need to have people in our program and in our communities. I have a young lady graduated from— Amanda Moya graduated from our program. Went to work in the startup world and is now working for Div Inc. here in town, and they are specializing in working with minorities and helping them start businesses. If we want to grow this diversity, it's going to take investment, and that is not only financial investment, it is investment in leaders and role models. So I put that over there. The second thing that I would say is, We need to figure out where we are in relation to Boston and Silicon Valley, and we are not in the biotech game, and we're not in Silicon Valley. And how do we create internships, and how do we get into those 2 spheres is something that for people in the middle of the country and most of the country, I think are some pretty big barriers. And so we're focusing and doing a lot of development activity, but it tends to be around small businesses and/or smaller-scale things that we're not in the game out there. 3 would be financial. We need to get more money that when we see ideas, they're not being held to some— the venture capitalists of the world have got to be able to engage universities and tap into ideas in a way that they are more willing and eager to take a risk. That's particularly true with us as an undergraduate program. The 4th thing I would say is we need better ideas. We have great entrepreneurs, You can take a team of my kids and with an idea, send them anywhere, and they will compete with anyone. We had— 2 years ago, we had a team that went to MIT and finished second in the competition. And this was clean technology contest. And the team that won the competition were 6 PhDs from MIT. So even though we're an undergraduate program, because of the mentoring, because of what we're doing, we absolutely can compete with anyone. Well, what we need to compete is we need better ideas. We need access to emerging technologies, and we need the ability to— and the investment of researchers to trust entrepreneurs. And right now, there's so many good ideas that are kind of bottled up as inventors are waiting for funding or grants that if we can figure out how to unlock that, I think it would be a game changer. I think finally, there are— I think we're maybe a little slow to the party of the emerging world that's coming up in front of us. And you look at artificial intelligence and robotics and machine learning and all the rest of that stuff. I don't know that we are connecting different parts of the university and our business community to prepare us in a way that we can take that entrepreneurial energy and put it into what is coming down the road very, very quickly. We're in work with Intel right now. I just finished a training course where we will be able to give certifications in artificial intelligence to get common people Hundreds of thousands of people are going to lose their jobs as these forces come through the economy and being able to train them to deal with the cloud and so forth. So there's a lot of big forces that are moving through, and I don't know that we're doing a particularly great job of integrating entrepreneurship, the community, and the technologies together. So, I'd say those are my top 5.

Yeah, I think it's dead on. I mean, if you start even from the beginning when you were talking about women-owned businesses, 10% of VC funds go to women-owned businesses, 1% goes to Black-owned businesses. So, you already look at it and you say, okay, what percentage of the startups with $100,000 in funding are white-owned? 82%.

Yeah.

So there's definitely a huge discrepancy between, uh, between those haves and have-nots that are, you know, but they have the same ideas. You know, we all have the same hardware, we just have different software shaped from our experiences. And that sort of answers the next question I was going to ask you. If you were to wave a magic wand and change anything or ask for anything to help out your program, what would it be? And it sounds like more diversity and more mentors with ideas outside of the ecosystem that you're in, more tech-savvy ecosystem ideas and that sort of stuff. Is that accurate, or would you like to add more to that?

No, I think that, you know, I think that's it. I mean, that if you can put the pieces together— the other thing I would say is I need better people. I need every class, my hope is that they will be more driven, more passionate than the class before them. I hope that every professor that comes in here will be better than the ones, and that, I mean, the world is changing out there rapidly. This COVID thing is, I mean, I think in '21 there were 4.3 million Americans went out and opened businesses, and a lot of them don't know what the hell they're doing. Being, being able to kind of provide resources for these folks and to, and to take that energy that people want independence. They no longer want to necessarily go and sit in an office from 8 to 5 and to kind of recharge the American dream that you can start a business, you can be your own boss. You can make a difference in the world. You individually is something that is, if we handle it right, we're in a very, very good time as a nation to reconnect with that spirit.

I couldn't agree more. Coming from that background myself, you know, I've done 12 startups and, you know, I came from nothing. So it's a It's definitely a dream that can be achieved.

Yep.

And on that note, let's take a break. But coming up in the second part of my discussion with Dave Cook, the executive director of the Wolf Center at the University of Houston, Dave talks about what he's most proud of.

I mean, it is an amazing program that when you look at that number one, there's so many great people who come here and invest their lives in changing the lives of students. Learn more about the BOSS Business Operating Support System at bossstartupscience.com, or you can reach Gregory Shepard at gregoryshepard.com. This has been a production of Forbes Books.