As published in the March 1, 2015 Toledo Business Journal
Kirk Kern
Dallas-Hamilton Center
Bowling Green State University
Monster.com founder to speak at Sebo Series
The Dallas-Hamilton Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership at Bowling Green State University (BGSU) strives to promote entrepreneurial thinking, according to the university. To help inspire and prepare future business leaders, the Dallas-Hamilton Center has launched several events and programs aimed at student entrepreneurs.
From April 6-12, the center will host E-week, which includes the Sebo Series in Entrepreneurship, as well as the Falcon Hatchery business incubator. Toledo Business Journal met with Kirk Kern, director of the Dallas-Hamilton Center, to learn more about these programs.
Toledo Business Journal: Can you discuss the background and history of the Dallas-Hamilton Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership?
Kirk D. Kern: The Dallas-Hamilton Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership was the brainchild of a guy named Bill Dallas, a BGSU alumni. He had a friend named Scott Hamilton, the figure skater. So the two of them got together as entrepreneurs to see if they could do something unique to assist not only students at Bowling Green State University, but the community in general, to bring some programming to the area, and that’s how it started.
The Dallas-Hamilton Center provides educational support and supplies entrepreneurial programming to external stakeholders, which is the community at large. Three years ago when I stepped into the role and Ray Braun became dean of the College of Business, he decided that entrepreneurial centers should help students start companies. For the last three years we have totally changed the culture of the Dallas-Hamilton Center and we’re focused on the student-run ventures or student startups.
TBJ: What is E-week, and when is this scheduled in 2015?
KDK: E-week starts on April 6, which is Monday morning, so it starts off with an entrepreneurial breakfast.
We have lunch and learn events every day that are open to our students and to the public. We offer free lunch and also the opportunity to hear different things that are occurring. The first lunch and learn is based on how you finance a business – “friends, families, and fools,” because that’s how entrepreneurs get started. You can’t go to a bank and say “Here’s my idea, why don’t you give me half a million dollars.” They are going to look at you and laugh. It’s how you bootstrap and how you ask folks for cash and what that looks like.
We also have an entrepreneur in residence, and this year our entrepreneur in residence is Bob Italia. Bob is an alumni who has been very successful, and his role as entrepreneur in residence is interacting with the students for the week.
On Tuesday, we’re planning on having a recap of our past Hatchlings, as we call it. We’ll have three or four Hatchlings come in and tell their stories, where they’re at and what’s going on, and its always interesting for other students to sit there and watch what’s happening because that gives them motivation to get into the program. In the evening we plan on having Bob Italia tell his story, and again the students love to hear those kind of interesting stories because they can relate to them.
Wednesday night is the Hatch, and then we have an event called the Dallas-Hamilton Center Hall of Fame, and we induct three to four entrepreneurs. Sebo will be happening on Friday, and that starts at nine o’clock in the morning.
TBJ: The Sebo Series is scheduled during this period. What is the background and history of this program and who is the keynote speaker?
KDK: This year’s keynote is Jeff Taylor. He was the founder of monster.com, which is a website based off of marrying job seekers with employers.
The whole Sebo Series is based on disruptive technologies. So as entrepreneurs we look at how we can disrupt the market in some way. Disruptive technology is something we found to be fascinating, so this year Jeff Taylor is speaking because he changed the way people find jobs.
We have three or four other folks that will be there. One is Matt Havin. Matt is an alumni who specializes in 3D printing.
Joe Maklese will be there, who is the president and CEO of Bendix, again an alumni, and they are doing amazing things with sensory technology on trucks and vehicles.
Then the last guy who will be here is Luke Terse, and Luke owns several companies, but the one we’re going to be talking about mainly is a drone company. He builds motors for drones.
BGSU Hatch entrepreneurs from 2014 (left to right): Caitlin Flack, Grant Kirkey, Robert Striblen,
Taylor Frazer, Morgan Smith, Nicole Braxton, Jerrod Witt, Loren Branch, Sara Scacchi,
Stefan Gridic, Angela Lucarelli, and Alan Eschweiler
TBJ: Can you discuss the Falcon Hatchery program that will take place during E-week?
KDK: The Falcon Hatchery program is unique, loosely based off of Shark Tank. We came up with a ten-week curriculum that is now in its third year. What it does is it offers opportunities to students throughout the whole university. Students bring their business ideas and we put them through an application process.
There are certain things we look at: commercial feasibility, we look at the marketability of an idea, we look at the investability of an idea, and a couple of other things like the cool factor – “is this thing cool and will the market accept it?” A team of expert business people, professors, entrepreneurs, and even some students select nine ideas to take to the Hatch.
So how does the Hatch work? Now that a student has this idea we put them through a 10-week program based off emerging entrepreneurship. We’re taking people who have not a clue about business and teaching them not only how to structure their product or service, but the idea is to teach them about how to build their company. The unique part of what we do is we take these students and put them with an alumni mentor.
Part of this program is we have designed workbooks for not only the mentor, but for the student to follow through. We have a complete 10-week curriculum, so each week there’s something that’s happening.
We take this idea at the beginning of the first 10 weeks, and then at the end of 10 weeks we mold this into a presentation. The presentation is the huge event we call the Hatch, a live event that is done similar to Shark Tank. We bring in five alumni who want to invest into these companies and what these students do. The students know their product inside and out and their mentors are with them on stage, and we do a live event. We stream it live, last year we had watch parties in four different countries and we had 65-66 alumni watch parties in the States.
Not everyone gets funded. That’s part of the real world, so what we try to do is make certain that the students have every opportunity to have a great presentation, and to have unique ideas that investors will like.
TBJ: What were some of the businesses funded through this program in the last couple of years?
KDK: The first year we had nine students in the program. We had two food trucks. We had a rap record label from a young man who was a performer and wanted to start his own record label. We had an app to pair musicians and individuals who needed musicians, so if it was a wedding or whatever ceremony, or if you’re looking to hire someone for an orchestra. And we had one company called Cribs on Campus, which was a company that sold microwaves, refrigerators, and futons and they would be delivered and installed into the dorm room for a package price. Out of all the different ideas that year, three that were funded were Cribs on Campus; a children’s write-a-book, which was an app-based program that the young lady was going to custom write books and custom illustrate them; and one of the food trucks was funded.
This last year we had 12 businesses funded. They’re in different stages of incubation. We have three students that are really working hard on getting their businesses up and running; one of them is a young lady who has an app called Umat. Her Umat app is based off of her inability to find an open washer or dryer in her dorm so she wanted to solve her problem, as most entrepreneurs do. There is an app that shoots her a push notification that says in your dorm Washer 4 or Dryer 1 is open, so she’d go downstairs, throw her load in, and the app will time it out and send her back notification when the wash is done.
Another young man has an idea called Audible Eye. His idea is intriguing because he was standing in the student union and he looks up above, and there’s a range hood with a brail sign on it, and he’s thinking to himself, ‘I’m sighted, I can see the thing, but if you’re blind how the heck would you know that’s up there?”. That got his gears turning about how do visually impaired people navigate. There should be an app that tells them what’s happening, so he developed an app called Audible Eye. It’s based off of beacons and it sends an audible message to your telephone, so you can have an earpiece in when you walk into different buildings. What will happen is that if you walk in, whether you’re sighted or visually impaired, it will tell you things like where the elevator is, hazards, staircases, and men’s and lady’s rooms. At some point in time it will tell you every classroom door. Every school system should have something like this, every government building should have something like this, because people are moving around and they don’t know where things are.
The last one is a young man starting a clothing company based off of being a Detroit native. His company is called Revitalize the D. Its a social-based enterprise, he has unique designs and artwork that replicates in some way Detroit art, Detroit landmarks, and for each garment that is sold there’s a percentage that will go back into reinvesting into a fund for students who want to start companies in Detroit.
TBJ: Can you share any information about the performance of a past Hatchery business?
KDK: Christian Jabonowsky started her company, Cribs on Campus. You buy this whole package when you’re coming into campus for housing and admissions, and they get it shipped right to you. She’s doing extremely well. This is her third year in business and she’s now expanding into different universities. Last year she doubled her business; she had over 250 customers last year and the profit margins on her business are incredible. You’re doing business for a certain amount of time – it’s about four to five months out of the year. She’s expanding into different markets right now: she’s expanding into the University of Toledo, she’s expanding into the University of Cincinnati, and she’s got some feelers out in Kent State. She’s an enterprising young lady.
Our goal is to get these students to a point that they understand business, and to figure out if they want to continue to move forward. They already have investors; the investors want a return on their investment and to get out as the company grows. Christian has already cashed out her investors.
TBJ: How many people attended The Hatch event last year?
KDK: Last year we used the ballroom and we had 1,200 packed in the room and we had an additional theater room where people could watch. We had 500 students who came in the minute the event was supposed to start and they were not happy they could not be in the ballroom. They did not want to go over and watch it in the theater so they left, so we had 500 turn away. So we had over 1,800 at the event at some point in time.
This year we’re taking it to the Stroh Center. We have seats for 3,200 and we are cautiously optimistic that we will have 3,200 folks in that arena. We do have standing room only space, and we’re excited about the prospects of inviting high school students from throughout the region. As a matter of fact, we have high schools coming from as far as Canton sending buses of juniors and seniors.
TBJ: Are there any other issues that you would like to address?
KDK: We are now in the licensing process. We have licensed all our Hatch products and many colleges and universities want to use the program. I think our licensing piece is something that’s really paramount to our success. We are entrepreneurial in our thinking and doing, and as funding from the State dried up we needed to become entrepreneurial.
There’s value in our curriculum. We’re really pleased with our educational piece and the rigor of our program. We’re not actually sharing them with others – again we’ve done all the heavy lifting to be able to license something or franchise it – but we’ll be there to assist and help. What we’re trying to do is create some different revenue streams so we can fund our programs and fund our College of Business. Our goal is to have Hatch events throughout the world, and that would be a tremendous boost for the university.