Medaille College Plans For The Real World
“It was by total accident how this came about. One of the Medaille students was doing an MBA paper and wanted to write on the hypothetical opening of a restaurant downtown. I asked the student if it would be possible to write a market study for Get Dressed clothing… a business that had expressed an interest in opening another location. Get Dressed needed a market study to do its bank financing. A market study offers a comfort level for banks. The studies are difficult to do and can be expensive. That student wrote a plan for Get Dressed Downtown and helped to bring an established retailer to Main Street. Then I asked the students to draft a study for bringing a women's store to downtown. That store was The Jenny Shop now owned by Jen Hemmingway. The Buffalo Neighborhood Revitalization Corporation said that it was one of the better market studies that they had ever received. Normally an MBA thesis is written for a hypothetical businesses. This is different… these are actual market studies researched for downtown businesses (existing or start-ups)."
“Now I’m having the class conduct a market study for a downtown public market. I even help to arrange guest speakers. By doing this, I'm helping myself and the city at the same time. We need these studies to make downtown more successful. All banks need market studies… it's like an appraisal for them to justify loaning money for a business. Colleges in WNY already conduct these market studies for hypothetical purposes. The city has to tap into our student resources. We must encourage other colleges to follow suit with actual market studies. Most of the students already work here, so they are not planning on leaving when the course is over. Medaille has taken the time to cultivate this program and we have had great cooperation from both the school and interested entrepreneurs.”
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BackInBuffalo
great use of un-addled brains.
take this a step further and link up with a group willing to develop business plans for budding local entrepreneurs.
hypothetical exercises in an MBA program are as valuable and relevant as arguing with your snow-angel over the best Buffalo restaurant.
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sbrof
Sound like this is a win-win. Students get the experience of dealing with real clients and their needs and the smaller start up entrepreneur get a marketing plan that they might not be able to afford. Perhaps there should be a feed back into the program from (if any) long term successful businesses.
Plus it is much nicer to have on a resume that you worked on a real plan for a business that is utilizing that plan (ideally successfully) than a made up exercise about how a fictional business would or wouldn't work in Downtown.
It is funny that Medaille one of the smallest colleges around is doing this. Imagine the brain power that could be utilized if UB were to do something similar. But then I that might be asking too much UB is just slowly starting to think of itself as a part of the City again.
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Geomike
The college students would absolutely benefit from some real world analysis. Too much of my graduate experience was theoretical at best and never seated in solving actual current problems. Tapping into this resource benefits the students and college curriculum, and imagine if the students knew more about the issues in our community and were actually engaged in solving them.... free labor might start to address the issues our elected officials can not. If we get the students engaged (eg 25,000 at UB?) in our community, working to address some of the issues the area is facing, even on a small scale, and it's at virtually no cost to to the businesses / agencies they're supporting, how does anyone lose? My friend was actually involved in the Get Dressed study in his Medaille MBA program. It wasn't a hack job, it was true business case and market analysis, and just as Michael Atardo how he's fairing on Main St now (well once the snow melts).
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bison716
Very positive news!
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