TEACHING & LEARNING
Custom Builder Has
Designs on Future
Powers of Concentration: Wharton's Undergraduate Entrepreneurs
OUTREACH
Between
a Rocket and a Hard Place
Faces of Wharton Entrepreneurship
RESEARCH
The Vanishing $7 Billion:
An Options Approach to Corporate R&D
2002 Philadelphia 100 Find High Growth in Downturn
Teaching
Custom Builder Has Designs on Future
This
is the first of two stories on the winners of this year's Price Institute
for Entrepreneurial Studies Fellowship Award, presented annually by Wharton
Entrepreneurial Programs to Wharton MBA students who demonstrate their
intentions and capability to pursue an entrepreneurial career. The $10,000
award was established by the Price Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies,
founded by Harold Price, who graduated from the Wharton School in 1928.
For Bill Marsh, getting a multi-million dollar business started was relatively easy compared to keeping it going. Marsh, a second-year Wharton MBA student and recipient of this year's Price Institute Fellowship Award, had founded a home-building company in the Atlanta area with a friend after graduating from Georgia Tech in 1993. "We felt that we could win because we would bring a new twist to this old industry," he said. They created a design-build service using a sophisticated system to create customized homes that they could show to clients through a 3-D computerized rendering.
The technology set them apart from their competitors and sales were more than doubling each year. Soon, Marsh was sitting on top of a multi-million dollar company. But while he was very skilled in developing the business, marketing, raising capital and deal making, he found his Achilles' heel was keeping this large company operating. He wasn't able to create a strong organization or controls and the company ran into a financial crisis that killed it in 1998. As personal guarantor, Marsh found himself in Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
Working with a former client, he briefly built a new company from the ashes, but he increasingly realized he needed to sharpen his entrepreneurial and business skills. So he came to the Wharton School. "I felt like I needed to go back and add some discipline and strategic skills to what I have already," he said. "I obviously didn't have a complete set of what I needed. My undergraduate business education gave me the mechanics, but Wharton has given me a better strategic sense of business."
Hard Lessons
He's had plenty of opportunities to think through his past experiences and develop new capabilities for the future. He invited his fellow students in a Wharton class, "Leadership and Teamwork" to critique his leadership in a paper titled "Deconstructing Marsh Construction." "You get an honest appraisal, but you also get encouragement," Marsh said. "There is a lot to be learned from failure. People in the Wharton culture understand that more than others do."
As a result, he's learned to shore up his weaknesses. "As a general rule, people tend to focus on the things they love to do in a business and it is very easy to neglect the things you don't enjoy as much," he said. "You need to implement a system of checks and balances to make sure all parts of the business are taken care of. That might mean partnering with someone who has complementary talents or outsourcing certain functions of the business."
In retrospect, he also appreciates how important it is to know when to cut bait. "I don't regret that I started the businesses, but one regret is that I held on so long," he said. "I didn't recognize when it would be an appropriate time to end the business so it made the ending more difficult than it needed to be."
Next Steps
At the same time that he was looking back at his past, Marsh was also preparing for the future. With classmates in his Entrepreneurship and Venture Initiation course (MGMT 801), he created a business plan for a company called PayNet, which they entered in the Wharton Business Plan Competition. But after carefully analyzing the concept, they realized the field was very crowded and they decided to walk away from the idea. "It takes maturity to realize that you are barking up the wrong tree," he said. "It is easy to race toward the creation of a business about which you feel passionately, but when your time, talent and treasure are on the line, you need more than just this good feeling. You also need rationality and a clear vision of how you can win."
So far, none of the businesses he's explored has gelled to the point where he wants to make the leap. As Marsh heads toward graduation, he expects that his next job will not be self-created. But he sees this as a continuation of his education. "I'd like to have the experience of working within someone else's organization, to see how they run it," he said. "I've never really done that."
In the long run, Marsh
does plan to get back in the saddle and start a new company. "Like
many entrepreneurs, I have failed but I have dusted myself off to fight
again," he wrote in his application for the fellowship. "Each
day, I am wiser and more capable than the day before. I will build a great
company. Then, another. This is what I have dedicated my entire professional
life to, and this is how I plan to spend my career."
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