Carolina Alumni Review - November/December 2008

blueprints

The First Years Out

‘They Are Acting on Their Convictions’

A great idea, a desire to serve and a lot of hard work help young entrepreneurs launch their organizations.

COURTESY SEKE BALLARD ’06

Seke Ballard ’06 didn’t set out to be an entrepreneur. He originally wanted to be a lawyer, and at one point he majored in philosophy, which he still loves. But halfway through college, he decided that business was a more practical major. While finishing his degree, he participated in the Carolina Challenge, which helps potential entrepreneurs hone a business plan and lets them compete against one another for seed money. His team’s idea — a business that would fix software

problems remotely — didn’t win. But the experience set him on a path he couldn’t have predicted.

After college, he
joined the Peace
Corps and went to the
Republic of Georgia
to work with a non-
profit involved in
community economic
development. Though
he wasn’t sure how the
concept would fly in
Georgia’s post-Soviet
economic climate, he suggested setting up a business-
plan competition modeled on the Carolina Challenge.

“The Georgians showed me to be a fool,” he says of his doubts. “They were very receptive to the idea.” The program worked so well in the resort town where he launched it that it was soon implemented nationally. The recent military conflict with Russia has put the project on hold, but he hopes it will resume.

Ballard, who is pursuing an MBA at Harvard, is just one of many young alumni whose trajectory has been profoundly affected by the emphasis UNC has placed on entrepreneurship in recent years. Spurred by a $3.5 million grant from the Kauffman Foundation and building on the existing strengths of the Kenan-Flagler Business School, the University created the Carolina Entrepreneurial Initiative in 2004. Initiative components include the Carolina Challenge, an undergraduate

Seke Ballard ’06 didn’t realize he was an entrepreneur until he entered the Carolina Challenge business plan competition. Now he’s pursuing his MBA at Harvard.

entrepreneurship minor and a graduate entrepreneurship certificate for students in the arts, the life sciences or public health. These and other campus activities, both in and outside of the business school, develop students’ entrepreneurial skills and prepare them for a range of business, scientific, social and artistic enterprises.

The effort has created a culture of venturing on campus, says Ted Zoller, executive director of Kenan-Flagler’s Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. “Students are really looking at entrepreneurship as a tool of change. It can be social change or change in private enterprise. They’re looking to develop new business models to attack problems. They could end up with a nonprofit with a social aim or a for-profit that improves the well-being of its users or consumers. What’s fascinating is that when students come in with an idea, they really want to come up with the next new thing. They are usually on the frontier.”

According to a survey conducted in fall 2006, 73 percent of Carolina seniors aspire to start their own business or nonprofit. With training from CEI behind them, some young alumni are doing just that. Some of them were always headed toward starting a business.

“I definitely had an entrepreneurial mindset from a really early age. I just didn’t know what to call it until I got into academia,” says Jessica Crowell ’07. “Carolina let me find all sorts of people who think that way.”

One of those was fellow business major Melissa Adelman ’07. Together they are starting a business called Size Me Up, which will sell software to online clothing retailers to help customers order the correct sizes ( www.sizemeuponline.com). Crowell calls it a currency converter for clothing. Their business idea won first place, $15,000, in the commercial track of the Carolina Challenge in 2007.

Crowell and Adelman are working day jobs in finance and spending their evenings and weekends developing and testing their product. The seed money they won is helping them get going, but their experience on campus had other effects as well. “We found at Carolina not just the competition, but a whole community that was very supportive of our idea and tried to make it happen,” Crowell says. Winning the competition also gave them momentum, media coverage and introductions to a broader business network.