Kelley On Campus: A Nerve-Racking Litmus Test For Online MBAs

‘A TRIAL BY FIRE TO BUILD BONDS AMONG THE STUDENTS’

“It’s trial by fire to build bonds among the students,” adds Sarah Wanger, executive director of Kelley Direct. “The goal is to make sure the online experience is as good as it can be.” On the Sunday night before the Monday presentations, some teams are up preparing and rehearsing their pitches until 3 and 4 a.m.

“It’s pretty intense,” agrees Venkat Kasis, a 39-year-old scientist who is also finishing up a Ph.D degree. “It’s a lot to digest in a short period of time but I’m getting a lot of tools for my toolkit from the experience.”

So while the stress over the presentation is palpable, so is the joy of meeting classmates and faculty in person after only seeing each other on a tiny computer screen. “I love this and wish there was more of it,” says Sergio Urquiza, a 49-year-old MBA student who works for Fusion Orthopedics as the Midwest regional director of education. “Being able to meet and network with people is important and you can miss these opportunities if you were only online.”

He concedes the frustration students are feeling as they work their way through the challenging exercise is real. “We weren’t given everything at once and everyone is just so used to having all the data and getting to a solution,” explains Urquiza. “The professors tell us to follow the process and trust it. It’s not meant to stress you out. But people who are here who want to win are now pivoting to let’s get it done. It’s good stress and frustration.”

TEAM 20: COOL, CALM AND COLLECTED WITH A BOLD SOLUTION

And the level of stress and frustration varies from team to team. While Team 17 is still figuring out what it will do, in another classroom Team 20 is already convinced it has the answer to the council’s challenge. The students decided that the council should eliminate the small fees it charges to certify suppliers for corporations and essentially become a purchasing organization that would act as a procurement vendor to corporations that want to do business with URM suppliers. It would then take a cut of the revenue from both companies on every transaction.

Getting details of the case in dribs and drabs didn’t seem to bother Team 20 at all. “We were limited in terms of the information at first and that was done intentionally to force us to follow the process,” says Amanda Heismann Gray, a senior real estate manager for AW Property Co. in Georgia. “There is still ambiguity but it’s a real-world situation because you never have all the information. There is a lot of low-hanging fruit but we are setting this up for what they could do for the next 10 to 15 years.”

“I want to pitch the most valuable idea to them,” insists Colin Glick, another Team 20 member, who is a regional manager for continuous improvement for Grainger. “If we win that would be cool but our goal is to help them.”

MENTALLY STUCK? USE CHATGPT TO HELP YOU SAY IT BETTER

During their prep session, Brittany Lambert, an assistant professor of organizational behavior, is in the room briefly as a coach as team members walk her through the storyboard of their pitch. It’s so well organized and thoughtful that Lambert has little coaching to do. “If you are mentally stuck on any point,” advises Lambert, “go to ChatGPT and ask it how can I say this better.”

It was advice the team didn’t actually need. Each team member played a key contributing role. As Glick saw it,  Isaac Reeves, who works at McMaster-Carr, was “The Storyteller,” Allison Adler Videtti, vice president of marketing for the Great Lakes Credit Union, was the “Marketing Sensei,” Gray served as “The GPO Guru,” Keith Silvio, who works in finance, was “The Financial Estimate Machine, while Glick self-identified as “The Executioner of action plans.”

The team concluded that the council should propose a 5% markup on the buyer’s side and a 2.5% fee on supplier revenues in exchange for free certification, coaching, and mentorship. By thoroughly vetting each supplier for a corporation, the council would help corporate buyers meet their diversity spending goals. The team’s rate-of-return calculations on their big idea showed that in year one it would be negative due to the hiring of a six-figure procurement executive but that it would quickly rise to a 29% rate of return and insure the non-profit the financial support it needed to achieve stability and grow.

DARK SUITS AND WHITE SHIRTS ON PITCH DAY

A day later, the school is teeming with students in dark suits and skirts, white shirts,  and ties, readying for their presentations. Many walk into a breakfast room looking harried from working into the wee hours of the morning. Starting at 10:45 a.m., each group will enter a tiered classroom, judged by two faculty members while a Kelley staffer keeps watch on the clock to cut everyone off at the ten-minute mark and then open the presentation up for a brief presentation. If a team makes it to the finals in Hodge Hall auditorium, the group will do the pitch again before another set of judges in the afternoon that includes two executives from the non-profit.

Team 17 walks in confidently and delivers a surprisingly strong presentation, proposing that the council validate suppliers for corporations and give the minority suppliers badges to show they passed muster. Companies would then pay the council a $5,000-a-year fee for the verification service. It’s a highly competent pitch, even though it fails to resonate with the pair of faculty judges in the room.

Team 20, on the other hand, makes it to the finals, but ultimately loses to Team 27 which proposes a hybrid business model for Mid-States. Under the rubric, “Profit For Purpose,” the winning team kicked off its pitch with a strong start from Meredith Tierney-Beed, a reputation marketing manager at Johns Hopkins University.

‘YOU ARE ALWAYS WORRIED ABOUT WHERE THE NEXT DOLLAR IS COMING FROM’

“We heard time and time again that the inconsistent revenue stream and the unpredictability of the revenue was a major issue in scaling Mid-States,” she states. “We entered into this project thinking we could commercialize a portion of your services to sustain your mission long-term. All of it is grounded in your ultimate mission and goal which is to promote and cultivate minority businesses in your region.

She pulls up a chart on the screen behind her to show Mid-State’s year-over-year swings in revenue and expenses over a ten-year period and then introduces two actual stakeholders at Mid-States, an existing buyer and an existing supplier, to bring their idea to life.

Another team member, Miguel Morales, who works for a small private equity oil company, then steps in to pitch the key idea. “Non-profits are always worried about money,” he says. “Money is the chief focus of the non-profit. You are always worried about where the next dollar is going to come from next, whether it be grants, sponsorships, or donors. But you can have Mid-States wholly own a for-profit arm that will commercialize your services and offer flexibility in how it generates revenue.

THE WINNERS? MORE THAN A SINGLE TEAM

“We are thinking of an Alibaba-like portal where we maximize the monetization of the matchmaker system and leverage the fees and commissions to grow profits. Then, Mid-States controls those profits to further the goals of the nonprofit which is access to capital, access to business knowledge and (the ability) to grow the network with the banks so you are not as dependent on fundraising, for example. It is a model that creates social and economic value.  This is a scalable model. It’s simple and it creates value for minority-owned businesses.”

The rest of Team 27 members flesh out the ideas, citing other non-profits with similar models, including the Girl Scouts of America, along with the actual returns from the model and the detail on how it will work. Tierney-Beed closes the pitch. “We are challenging the idea that social value and economic value are mutually exclusive, especially in an environment where people are increasingly aligned with environmental, social and governance goals of corporations,” she says. “They want to invest their money in this. I think Mid-States is especially well positioned to take advantage of this new and innovative model and ultimately grow and scale minority-owned businesses.”

The judges are clearly impressed. After a few questions, fielded exceptionally well by the team, they convene and announce Team 27 the winner. But it’s clear that more than five students on a single team won by the experience on campus. “The vast, vast majority of them will bring this up as being transformative, eye-opening, and connected,” says Fisher. “They describe it with such fun and vigor. And the further they get from it, the better it becomes in their minds.”

True enough, though Team 17 failed to make it to the finals, there are no regrets. “You come into it thinking you deserve to be here and the program pushes you and makes you question your ability,” believes Guthridge. “It’s such an impressive cohort. You have to learn how to prioritize. We are all high achievers and you have to partially lose somewhere.”

Back in Philadelphia for her Boeing job, Guthridge immediately goes onto her LinkedIn account to share her experience. “So grateful to be able to share my experience in Bloomington this past week!,” she wrote. “It was so inspiring meeting some of the most motivated, hard-working, and innovative thinkers all doing amazing things that comprise my MBA cohort at IU.”

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