Could ‘Growth’ Become A New Business School Discipline?

Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management

‘KEY TO MY EDUCATION’

Another Kellogg MBA student, Bob Winder, enrolled in Human Capital and Enterprise Scaling, and immediately came away with ideas to put into place at work. His business is a group of five dental practices in Dallas and Houston called Logan Dental Partners. He learned about the dental roll-up model during his days in private equity and decided that he wanted to build one himself.

“My background is PE and recently I did an acquisition of a dental support organization,” he says. “This class has been key to my education. In order to scale in the service business, it’s all about the people. In PE, I looked at market demand and external drivers without fully appreciating the internal perspective on how to grow a business. The course helped me learn how to grow and scale a business from a talent perspective.”

‘AN EYE OPENER FOR MBAS TO SACRIFICE EARNINGS IN THE EARLY YEARS FOR MORE DECISION MAKING AUTHORITY’

His biggest takeaways from the courses: “Coming from private equity, you see how to scale a business from more of an operations and market-demand side. This class really helped me identify how to scale it from a people perspective. You just don’t fully grasp all the difficulty and pain a company has to go through to make those changes.”

Meantime, Ochagavia is using what he learned in class to his family business in Chile, Exportadora San Gregorio SA, which employs 150 full-time and Up to 1,000 during the harvest season. “Before,” he says, “we were never thinking about where we wanted to be five or ten years from now. This class made me understand that it is really important for us to have those goals and to understand what we need to do to get there.”

He believes that Kellogg’s growth and scaling initiative may also impact student attitudes about their careers. “Most of my classmates were looking for different jobs,” he says. “Most of them want to work for big corporations. They don’t think about mid-sized companies. This is kind of an eye opener to sacrifice some earnings in the early years in exchange for a company with faster growth and where your decisions would have a lot of weight instead of being one person on a huge team in a Fortune 500 company.”

DON’T MISS: KELLOGG’S NEW GROWTH MANTRA