Child Abuse Survivor Wins Top MBA Service Award

That day came sooner that he expected. When he was 16 years old, a judge made him a ward of the state. The judge tried to get McLaughlin to live with his biological father, but the arrangement never worked. “He wasn’t a bad person—he just didn’t want anything to do with me,” McLaughlin said. “He had remarried, he had kids, he had a new wife and stuff—I was just kind of like this burden. The main thing he was interested in was getting the child support payments stopped.”

Ultimately, McLaughlin decided to live on his own. Unable to afford an apartment, he went from his car to a pup tent to a malfunctioning pop-up camper. When winter arrived, he bought a motor home.

“I passed this farm, and this guy had this nasty looking old motor home sticking out of his barn,” McLaughlin said. “It looked like it had been sitting in a barn for 25 years, and it probably had—but it had four walls and a roof instead of canvas, so it was a lot better for dealing with the elements and the cold.”

During that period, McLaughlin completed high school and began taking community college classes. “It was very difficult, because every hour I spent in class was an hour I could have spent working,” McLaughlin said. Eventually, though, he found his ticket out of the campground—a commission-based sales job. “With that, I made a good bit of money and was able to get out and decide, okay, now I’m going to take this money and I’m going to go to college,” he said. “And so I went.”

He followed his girlfriend (now his wife) to Illinois State University, finishing community college in the area and then transferring in. McLaughlin describes the next steps of his academic career with the nonchalance of a shopper describing his trip to the grocery store. “I went and got a master’s degree in accounting and got a CPA,” he said. “During that time, I started thinking I’d like to be a professor, so that’s when I applied to the PhD program at Washington University in St. Louis.”

He was working on his PhD at Olin when he received the 2010 Doctoral Fellowship in Accounting from the Deloitte Foundation. Suddenly, media outlets began covering his childhood.

McLaughlin’s willingness to open up about his past caught the attention of the Family Resource Center (FRC) in St. Louis, a nonprofit that works to reduce child abuse and neglect. The Chief Development Office contacted McLaughlin with the hope that he would share his story on the organization’s behalf.

“I started doing so much volunteer work for the FRC that it was really coming to kind of dominate my life and push out the accounting side,” McLaughlin said. “I felt compelled that the purpose of my life should be helping children who are in need, and I didn’t know how that would translate into a career. I had no idea of the specifics of how it would all play out.”

Discussions with Joe Fox, Olin’s associate dean for MBA Programs, convinced McLaughlin to go for a master’s instead.

Upon first meeting McLaughlin, Fox was intrigued. “He was a guy who was kind of miscast as a PhD student, but I wasn’t sure he fit into the MBA role either,” he said. “He had his own style.” Fox was more accustomed to students of the “do well to do well” variety, students who sought to make a difference in their communities by achieving personal success first. “Just in the last five years or so have students been coming through and espousing these causes as passionately as students these days do,” Fox said.

Spotting McLaughlin’s potential early on, Fox became one of his mentors. “When he started seeing the impact he could have, it started feeding his desire to make an impact in this area,” he said, noting McLaughlin’s habit of starting out with 60 ideas and narrowing them down to two. “I was the elder statesman in the respect of kind of reeling him in once in a while.”

An MBA program might seem like an unlikely place for a humanitarian type, but McLaughlin disagrees. “There are people who will make statements like, ‘You know, business school is just a bunch of greedy people, and they’re responsible for a lot of the world’s problems, for financial meltdowns,’” McLaughlin said. “If you go and look at just about any charity, and you go in and you look at their board of directors—there’s a bunch of business people that are on their board. Now, part of it is that those people have access to money to donate. But another part of it is that business people know how to get things done.”

At first, McLaughlin’s peers knew him as the guy who tutored other students—he was the former PhD candidate, after all. When they learned about his past, they encouraged him to use it in service of something big.

McLaughlin’s initial plan was to bike across the country, but that had been done before; his friends suggested that breaking a record would garner more attention. Someone finally suggested that he hike the Appalachian and Ozark trails consecutively. The then-inexperienced hiker’s response? “Yeah, I’ll do that.” Hike4Kids was born.

McLaughlin’s wife had quit the Appalachian Trail twice, and she did her best to prepare him for what lay ahead with a practice hike on the Ozark Trail.  “We go out, we hike maybe three or four miles, and I’m like, ‘That’s it. I’ve had enough. This is getting old,’” McLaughlin said, laughing.