Handshakes, introductions, and spirited discussion were common sights in the Oak Park room on Feb. 13 as students, faculty, staff, and local business owners had lunch and made new connections.
The luncheon was a bridge between a morning and afternoon session of discussion and listening, students and their faculty coaches supporting their assigned entrepreneur by hearing their concerns and asking questions.
The event was part of the Entrepreneurship Triad program at CUC, which began in January. Funded by a grant from the Bradley Foundation, it is a collaboration between the College of Business, the Free Enterprise Center and the Proviso Township Ministerial Alliance Network, a local organization dedicated to community transformation.
The program is an opportunity for students to get hands-on experience in business and for entrepreneurs from the Maywood area to get feedback on how to improve their businesses. Students receive their choice of a stipend or course credit for their efforts.
“What we’re actually able to do is sit down with the client, speak to them, and find out what concerns they have that we could potentially assist them with in their development of trying to be sustainable,” said adjunct business professor J.T. White, who is a faculty coach in the program.
Each of the 12 triads consists of one CUC faculty or staff coach, one student and one entrepreneur. The individual triads meet once or twice a month for business coaching sessions in addition to monthly larger group meetings in the form of peer advisory sessions.
“With the peer advising, everyone listens to the problem, asks a lot of questions first, not suggestions. And then once they’ve exhausted the topic, then people make suggestions,” said Rachel Ferguson, director of the Free Enterprise Center at CUC. “It’s very exciting because oftentimes the feedback from the other CEOs will open up whole new vistas of how the problem could be handled.”
The Entrepreneurship Triad is part of a larger, continuous effort by CUC to be involved in neighborhood stabilization efforts, Ferguson said. CUC’s ongoing partnership with the Rev. Reginald Saffo, chairman of the Proviso Township Ministry Alliance Network and a community leader in the Maywood area, helped inform the creation of the program. In May, CUC will host a fundraiser for Saffo’s program, Four by Four, which teaches entrepreneurial skills to middle and high schoolers.
“The mistake a lot of universities make is they’ve got big ideas, but it’s what they think the neighborhood needs. And so they just show up and start doing things and they don’t know anybody and they haven’t asked anybody,” Ferguson said. “A lot of times it fails and they disappear. And so it ends up being even more discouraging to the neighborhood, as opposed to building something where you’re saying, ‘we’re going to be here.’ Building that sense of trust with our neighbors is really important to me.”
As students, coaches, and entrepreneurs talk through the issues their businesses face, an emphasis is placed on listening, showing the entrepreneurs that they have support.
“It’s nice to have someone else, not to do the work for me, but to help me push a little further on the parts of the business that are really not that easy to do alone,” said Lorenzo King, the owner of delivery service Easy Does It.
That meant figuring out how to put some systems in place for the back end of the business and to build more structure to keep the business successful, King said. Among the concerns of other entrepreneurs in the program were improving the effectiveness of their advertising, setting up processes and documentation for on-boarding, and appealing to a target audience in marketing campaigns.
“A student is able to showcase themselves to a business,” White said. “Also the school with the program is saying to the neighborhood, to Maywood, ‘Hey, we’re here for you. We care about you. You’re part of our community. We want to assist you in any way we can to see what we can do to help you grow, develop, or start off.’”
Senior Emma Pflughoeft is working alongside Tandra Rutledge, founder of Avidity LLC, a faith-based mental health consulting and training agency.
“I have been learning a lot from Tandra about her own personal experience with creating her own business and the amount of promotions that you have to do for that,” Pflughoeft said. “Being super consistent on online marketing and physical marketing and just getting out there is crucial for the growth and development of the business.”
White said that a few of the students in the program are currently in one of his classes, and that he has enjoyed watching them apply what they are learning.
“Another student that’s in the classroom is not in my triad, but I congratulated him and told him I was proud of him, because in the meeting he was actually echoing some of the points that we teach in the HR class about when there’s disciplinary action necessary, the four steps,” White said. “So I see the students, I learn it sticks, it works, they’re actually listening. They’re actually seeing potential in their vocation.”
