Planned Business Incubator To Aid Student Entrepreneurs

NEWS EDITOR

 

One of the most important things Nevin Kulungara, GSB ’15, would like to accomplish at Fordham is to help students bring their business ideas to fruition.

For example, his friend, Ross Garlick, GSB ’15, runs a successful rental company, FURI, on campus where students can rent air mattresses that they normally wouldn not be able to fit in their dorm rooms.

But, Kulungara knows not all students have the skills and finances to get their ideas off the ground.

That is why he and a few other students have created Fordham Student Holdings (FSH).

“The goal is to create a platform for student-run businesses on campus,” Kulungara said. “Right now, if a student wants to manage a business, he or she doesn’t really have an option.”

Adding on to Kulungara’s view, according to the organization’s proposal, the main purpose of FSH is to establish a “structured process for creating and maintaining student-run businesses on campus.”

“We have all these great ideas for businesses on campus,” Kulungara said. “You know Gabelli students in their first year have to create business ideas and Professor [Mitchell] Fillet was telling me every year he gets great business ideas that would bring in profits, but there’s nothing they can do about [the ideas].”

Currently, the plan is to run FSH through the Entrepreneurship Department in GSB. Kulungara cited Dr. Christine Janssen, head of the Entrepreneurship Program and Mitchell Fillet, professor in GSB, as instrumental in FSH’s development.

He has also been working closely with Garlick, Muhammad Sarwar, GSB ’14, Steve Frost, GSB ’15, Jackson Lindour, GSB ’15, Charlie Summers, GSB ’16, Caroline Reichart, GSB ’15, Caroline Schneider, GSB ’15, John Tressler, GSB ’14, and a few members of the GSB Dean’s Council.

Kulungara says that the ultimate goal is to run FSH similarly to the Ram Van office in terms of its structure, but he hopes to have more students involved in upper management levels.

Ram Van is currently run by a board of staff members, but they hire students to handle day-to-day operations, such as deploying and driving the vans.

The proposed structure for FSH includes an overseeing board of directors comprised of faculty and administrators.

The FSH proposal states that the board’s objectives would include advising the businesses within FSH, making sure that the FSH businesses’ activities are in line with Fordham’s policies and providing longevity to the structure.

Right now, the proposed plan states that the board will include the director of the Entrepreneurship Program, a GSB dean, a FCRH dean, one representative from both Student Affairs and Residential Life and two faculty members, one nominated by the GSB dean and one nominated by the FCRH dean.

The Board of Directors would meet once a semester to review the FSH’s progress and performance as well as to approve new businesses.

FSH will also include an investment arm that will be on the same level as the Board of Directors, but with a different purpose.

According to the FSH proposal, “the investment arm will behave as if they are investors with equity in FSH.” Its main goal is to maximize the profits of the FSH businesses.

“The investment arm is particularly for students interested in venture capital who are really going to be hard-nosed about profitability,” Kulungara said. “They’re doing the financial models. They’re making sure the managers are meeting the earnings goal. That’s what their job pretty much is.”

The investment arm will include five members of the junior or senior class selected by the board after an application process. There will also be an advisor from the GSB finance department.

Underneath the board of directors, there will be a CEO, preferably a student appointed by the board to take a more hands-on approach with the student managers.

The CEO’s main responsibilities would include helping students with their business proposals, composing reports on the business, marketing the variety of businesses and making sure each business has the proper resources to function smoothly.

The CEO would also oversee all the managers of the student-run businesses, the managers being the students who proposed the business idea.

“The way we envision it right now is that a student would come to Student Holdings and say ‘this is something I want to do,’” Kulungara said. “Obviously there needs to be some sort of approval process that is in compliance with the university policies and we need to make sure this [idea] is something that can generate revenue, because this is a business.”

The managers would run all operations of the business, including, according to the proposal, “hiring employees, ordering/managing inventory, setting prices (with the guidance of the investment arm) and reporting financial information to the CEO.”

The managers would be able to hire student-employees for their business if needed. According to the proposal, these students would be paid hourly wages. The plan is similar to the one that is currently in use for Ram Van drivers.

As for the profits that the company would bring in, the proposal states that “after paying wages and other operating costs, profits from the businesses would be split between management, the holding company and the university.”

The breakdown would be worked out in the initial contract when signing the business.

A few long-term ideas for the profits include scholarships and charitable donations.

Currently, however, nothing is set in stone, as the organization is still working out the details, but Kulungara hopes to get this off the ground very soon.

“We would like to get administration on board by winter break so that we can spend spring semester really planning out the businesses,” Kulungara said. “I think a lot of the red tape is kind of tedious and we want to get through it as quickly as possible, so we can get to the meat of it which is putting the board together, putting the students together, doing profitability stuff, thinking of business ideas and how we can fund them.”

Having a student-holdings company would help Fordham in comparison to peer and aspirant schools, as shown through Kulungara’s research. Some of Fordham’s peer and aspirant universities, like Boston College, Notre Dame, NYU, Villanova and Syracuse, have no program similar to this.

According to the research Kulungara and his group provided, mainly Ivy League schools, Georgetown and Northwestern are the only schools that have holding companies like this proposal.

Kulungara believes that this would fit in perfectly with Fordham’s Entrepreneurship department and the Fordham Foundry that began last fall.

“We want the [small businesses] to be part of the entrepreneurship ecosystem here at Fordham,” Kulungara said. “[Janssen and Fillet] said that this would be a natural fit for the Entrepreneurship program. We think that students who want to have something on-campus, something they can try out for four years here would be for the Student Holdings. If, however, a student is developing an app or something beyond the gaze of this university then they would probably be better off in Foundry.”

Kulungara believes that FSH will give its students a leg up in the ever-increasingly competitive business field.

“There’s only so much you can learn from a textbook or from case-studies, so I think, as valuable as classes are, managing a business on a day-to-day basis is just invaluable,” Kulungara said.