The Art of Putting Out a Shingle
It was a late November morning in Jonesboro, and Dave Stickler, CEO at steelmaking company Hybar, was just wrapping up his comments. The room at the Embassy Suites Red Wolf Convention Center was packed, a mishmosh of civic leaders and businesspeople plus administrators, professors and students from Arkansas State University.
Dave Stickler
Stickler had spent the better part of an hour trading comments with the three fellow entrepreneurs joining him on stage plus Jim Washam, dean of ASU’s Neil Griffin College of Business, but now it was time to wrap up the panel discussion, and Stickler took a moment to consider his comments.
“Anyone who wants to be an entrepreneur has to understand what drives bottom-line results,” Stickler told the crowd. “You could be passionate, you can have a love for this or that, but unless you put money to the bottom line every day, every week, every month and every year, you’re not going to be successful, and you won’t be able to grow.”
Make no mistake, entrepreneurship is the most variable of crafts. It ideally begins with the most kidlike of emotions — enthusiasm — before facing the very grownup concept of how to turn that enthusiasm into something both meaningful and profitable.
There is no shortage of advice about how to make that happen. Entire shelves in bookstores are dedicated to ideas about how to start and run a business, and the number of online personalities hawking their own paths to success borders on almost uncountable.
All of the resources and ideas prove, ironically, that there is no straight-line, prescribed path to success. There are, however, nonnegotiable tools required to make the attempt, and it is in that intersection between ideas and mandatory skills that Arkansas State plans to unleash an entrepreneurship program that challenges the conventions of just how students in traditional college settings are prepared for the business world.
“Sometimes we’ll see entrepreneurship programs, and they’ll focus solely on entrepreneurship,” Washam said months after the November symposium, “but all of our students get at least a couple of semesters of accounting, finance, management — a whole business background. Along with that, there’s a social entrepreneurship and an impact-management class, and there’s leadership to go with that.”
Offering a bachelor’s degree in entrepreneurial management and strategic leadership, Arkansas State aims to equip students in the program with more than textbook knowledge. Real-world internships are part of the program, but so is instruction in the foundations of communication and networking.
Heather Nelson, for one, thinks it could not come soon enough. A lifelong entrepreneur, Nelson began working with Arkansas State Chancellor Todd Shields in 2024 to create a lecture series that would bring C-Suite executives to Arkansas State to share knowledge, create ideas and foster connections. Nelson went on to serve as the university’s “executive in residence” and presently works as the university’s vice chancellor for external affairs and strategic initiatives.
Heather Nelson
Nelson said during the early days, the program was grounded in material from The Start-up J Curve by Howard Love, which remains a key pillar of Arkansas State’s overall platform in business instruction. However, the highlight now is the executives themselves, some of whom work outside northeast Arkansas who have traveled to Jonesboro just for the opportunity to speak to and work with Arkansas State students.
“They’re coming from all corners, and they’re coming to share with the students,”
Nelson said. “They share their story and their journey, and then they have connection time.”
Nelson is the face of the program because, well, she is the sort of person one would want as the face of the program. Equal parts enthusiastic, bubbly and knowledgeable, Nelson speaks with passion about the long-term good the entrepreneurial management experience is doing both for students and businesses in the market for college graduates.
That market, simply put, has never been harder to crack, a point driven home when Nelson first began working with Arkansas State students.
“What students tell us is, ‘I love what I’m studying; I’m terrified for what happens after graduation because I don’t know how they marry,’ so what we’re trying to do with this course is we’re trying to marry those things for them,” she said.
Along with the foreboding numbers facing college grads, fresh questions have emerged about the role of a traditional university education in an accelerated world. Colleges, long considered mandatory destinations, are now finding themselves having to answer for the extent to which they prepare students with real-world, actionable knowledge.
“We’re teaching skills here where people can go out and they can start a business,” Washam said. “We’re also teaching skills that they can use with another company.”
That includes skills that are not found in textbooks. A headful of knowledge means nothing without the ability to connect to others, and as such, going through the entrepreneurial management and strategic leadership program also includes the fine art of introductions, handshakes, eye contact and networking.
As for those who cluck their tongues at a perceived lack of social ability in the younger generation, Nelson will not hear of it.
“The students that are in college right now were in middle school through COVID[-19],” Nelson said. “What was middle school for you? Guess what? For all of us, it was the hyper-awkward years where you learn how to talk to the opposite sex. Your whole body is changing. You’re learning social skills and all of that, so the students that are in college today were sitting in front of screens during their middle school years, and if we don’t recognize that it’s made an impact, we’re doing them a disservice.”
None of this is happening in a vacuum. Arkansas State’s goal, from Shields on down, is to produce graduates who can reach out and confidently connect with anyone in any sort of professional situation. Knowledge without the ability to express and apply it is simply baggage.
“I think part of our mission is to provide these graduates and these students with the skills they need to go out in their communities and contribute to economic development,” Washam said.
Jim Washam
Washam also noted that traditional stereotypes of students studying business skills do not apply at Arkansas State. Sure, there will always be students looking to master the nuances of finance en route to successful white-collar careers, but there are also students grounded in blue-collar skills who may not at first consider themselves entrepreneurs.
By example, a student looking to inherit the family plumbing business may be inclined to bone up on plumbing, but if their knowledge does not also consist of communication, marketing and promotion, all the plumbing knowledge in the world will not make up the gap.
Those skills could not possibly be more important, especially when considering not just Arkansas State but the region that it serves. Just outside of Jonesboro, cities such as Osceola are benefitting from the presence of companies such as Hybar and U.S. Steel, some of which offer six-figure salaries to trained workers.
With the entrepreneurial management program, Arkansas State offers students not just a foot in the door but an entire pathway into an emerging local economy and rapidly moving worldwide business landscape.
“What they’re learning is there’s not one way,” Nelson said. “It’s about taking in as much information as you can, of being curious and realizing things are changing all the time — because there’s not just one pathway.”
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