How Paul Quinn College Uses Entrepreneurship to Reduce Costs, Improve Workforce Readiness, and Graduate Students with Little to No Debt:

Changing Higher Ed podcast 296 with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Jeff Meade

Transcript: Changing Higher Ed podcast 296 – with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Jeff Meade

Introduction to Changing Higher Ed^®

Welcome to Changing Higher Ed^®, a podcast dedicated to helping higher education leaders improve their institutions. With your host, Dr. Drumm McNaughton, CEO of The Change Leader, a consultancy that helps higher ed leaders holistically transform their institutions. Learn more at changinghighered.com. And now, here’s your host, Drumm McNaughton.

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David. My guest today is Jeff Meade, founding Director of entrepreneurship at Paul Quinn College. Jeff is leading a bold initiative at Quinn. Every Quinnite is an entrepreneur. The program ensures that every student launches an entrepreneur venture before graduation, making entrepreneurship a core life skill rather than an extracurricular option.

With over 20 years of experience growing companies and advising businesses. Jeff has scaled marketing and advertising agencies to multimillion dollar revenues and built client side marketing programs that gained national recognition from places such as the Harvard Business Review Fast Company and Entrepreneur Magazine.

Jeff joins me today to talk about the program that they’ve established at Quinn, a program that partners with companies such as Southwest Airlines, and it reduces institutional expenses, but more importantly, builds a model that equips students with an entrepreneurial mindset, creativity, and real world experiences to thrive as founders, innovators, and entrepreneurs in any field. Jeff, welcome to the program.

Jeff Meade: Glad to be here. I’m really excited about this conversation.

Drumm McNaughton: I am as well. You have got an amazing background in multiple industries, et cetera. You’re in higher ed now bringing all that experience there. Give my listeners a little bit of background, of who Jeff Meade is, and what you’ve done over your lifetime.

Jeff Meade: Yes. Yes, so I, right now I am the director of the Every Quinn and Entrepreneur program at Paul Quinn College, and I’ve been here for about a year. And prior to that, the last two decades of my life, I’ve been in marketing and advertising. I’ve ran, I’ve started my own marketing agencies. I’ve scaled them.

I’ve had offers to buy my agencies. And, for the most part, I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life running marketing and advertising agencies and. Throughout that whole experience, what I really loved was just the joys of entrepreneurship, and I had this vision to create a program where I could see more students, specifically more minority students developing their own businesses.

It was a wild and crazy idea, and I started shopping it to a few folks, and Paul Quinn was one of the folks I shopped it to. And funny enough, I could still remember having a conversation with the president of a school. And I said, well, this is what I’m thinking. Not knowing at all what they were thinking.

And, funny enough, the president says, all right, well here’s what I’m thinking. And. After he said that, I thought he was being sarcastic because he pretty much said what I said. I was like, I look like this is going to work. So, that’s been my career in a nutshell. It’s been, marketing and advertising, and now I am running an entrepreneurship program at Paul Quinn College.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, knowing what I know about higher ed, higher ed can definitely use people who have more marketing experience and operations as well,

Jeff Meade: Right. Right. And I’ve seen that here too, right? Like, academia runs in a, let’s just say a different way than, than we ran our world and,

Drumm McNaughton: sorry. I have this sarcasm gene in me that I’m trying to, get rid of, but it just, it’s stubborn. It’s kinda like higher ed. It doesn’t want to change.

Jeff Meade: The funniest thing is I’ll be in staff meetings and people will be talking about these amazing things and I’m like, why aren’t we telling more people about this? Right? Like, it just, we do these amazing, things and we keep it to ourselves , and so I think that’s just my marketing advertising hat.

We should probably be telling people we’re doing this, not to show off, but just to let people know what’s going on at Paul Quinn. So definitely bringing that into the mix here at Paul Quinn.

Drumm McNaughton: Was talking with a colleague of mine who’s been former university president, et cetera, and he said something to me that just, it blew me away. It made me laugh. He says it’s easier to change the course of history than it is to change a history course in higher ed.

Jeff Meade: So true.

It’s so true.

Drumm McNaughton: So Paul Quinn, they’re known as one of the more entrepreneurial colleges.

They have a penchant for doing really progressive things. Hence, the president bringing you on to do this.

Jeff Meade: Right.

Drumm McNaughton: Higher ed’s got challenges right now, especially around preparing people for workforce readiness. Tell us about Paul Quinn. You guys are designated a federal work college, one of eight in the country.

What is that?

Jeff Meade: Yes, that’s, it’s actually really cool. And so it was really just this acknowledgement that students work when they’re in college, right? Like I think lots of times we like to say, oh, our students come to this institution and their days are filled with reading and learning and talking with their peers.

But two outta every three students. This country works while they’re at school. Like that’s a fact. And so we took that fact and said, well, how can we make this more valuable for our students? And so what happens, because we’re a federal work college is that means that all of the residents on our campus.

Must work. So for the first two years that they’re at Paul Quinn, they work on campus. And so that does a couple things. One that reduces our costs internally. So there are some staff that we wouldn’t bring on because we actually have students doing those jobs, which is really cool.

For instance, in my department here in entrepreneurship, I have a student that works with me on development. Usually you would bring in somebody from the outside, pay them a bunch of money, but this student is working on finding grants and writing grants, so a really, really good skill to have and it would be a lot easier if I just wrote up a job description and brought somebody in.

But the way we do it is. I’ve been having to teach her a lot. This is how you go out and find grants and so it’s, this is a skill that she’ll have for life and so we work with freshmen and sophomores doing that, and then their junior, senior year, they use these skills to get jobs with our partners out in the workplace. So, we have far ranging partners, Southwest Airlines, Goldman Sachs, and so they’ll go to work at those places their junior and senior year.

Drumm McNaughton: So this is going beyond your traditional internship or externship. This is actually going near having a job, working with your partners. Before we go to that part, I’m really interested in the first two years. You said you’ve got people working, all freshmen, sophomores are working on campus.

Jeff Meade: Right.

Drumm McNaughton: This is a radically different model for higher ed because if they work that, you go work at McDonald’s or you go work at, another place, you’re actually training them to be productive people at a university or elsewhere in their freshman and sophomore years.

Jeff Meade: Right, and it really ties them into the school more. And , that’s what we’re seeing. And just in terms of engagement and retention. What it allows us to do is set up so many more touch points. , Usually a student comes in and they would’ve talked to admissions. And then when they’re on campus, they’re talking to their RA or the faculty, but now they have a supervisor that they’re working with.

There’s so many different touch points that we have in the school to engage that student and make sure that we understand that they’re getting what they need. exciting to see. It’s exciting to see the skills that they’re learning as well. , Admittedly when you first start out.

There’s a part of you that’s like, “man, I really wish they knew how to do this.” There’s a lot of teaching that goes on, but you can see the light bulb going off, and just one semester, the student that I’m working with, I’m like, she actually knows how to go out there and search for grants.

That’s a life skill, right?

Drumm McNaughton: Oh, that’s huge. You’ve got these. People coming in freshman, sophomore year. How does this change your enrollment process

Jeff Meade: Well, what it really does is it’s allowed us to, and this flies in the face of what most colleges are doing, right? Most colleges are increasing the cost to go to school. What we did a few years ago is we actually reduced the cost and we just said, our students and 80% of our students are Pell Grant recipients.

They just flatly couldn’t afford what we were charging before. So we reduced it, but we reduced it and said, “well, how do we change the business model of the school?” And this was one way, right? We had to make them, the students essentially partners in building the school and running and managing the school , and that’s what that has become.

And so the experiences and the work, some of our students are doing. , It’s surprising, they work in enrollment management and so some students are on the road going to, college fairs and representing the school, right? It’s, really exciting. We, truly treat them as partners in this journey.

Drumm McNaughton: And so your recruiting process, do you take into account their current skills for recruiting and enrollment or they just apply whatever and then they’re given a choice of where they want to work? How does, that work?

Jeff Meade: Yes, no we don’t. when these kids are coming in, they’re 17 years old, right? For the most part, they have no job skills. What they have is a dream, , and a dream of what they want to do later on. And so we take that and we try to match it. I’ll just use, the young lady I work with, she wants to be an entrepreneur, all right?

And she has these ideas for starting businesses. The best thing I thought was, Hey, just work side by side with me. Let me show you what this process looks like. and that doesn’t happen for everybody, right? Like some people get the jobs that are highly coveted. Some people get to work with sports, , they’re working with the athletic director.

And so some of those jobs are cove coveted, but then there are jobs that students are doing that they’re not so excited about. , Students may say. I have no desire or interest to work with the registrar. And now that’s just one example. So it’s not like it’s a perfect matching system.

What we try to tell them is, Hey, , what we’re trying to do is improve your skills, your job skills, and all this. And, that’s what they have to remember because the goal isn’t to work at Paul Quinn. The goal is to make sure that they have job readiness skills so that we could send them out to work with the corporations in Dallas, and then.

When it’s time for them to graduate, the hope is, hey, you have a leg up on everybody. You’ve been working with this company the past two years, right? So it’s on you to get that job when you go to apply, you can say, Hey, we’ve worked together for the past two years, me. And so they’re not seeing corporations for the first time when they graduate.

They would’ve had this true work experience the entire time.

Drumm McNaughton: That’s, huge. That is, that’s huge. When you say that you reduced tuition, was it a tuition rollback and you don’t do as much discounting as you did or something different?

Jeff Meade: , no, not even. We lowered the sticker price. so by lowering the

Drumm McNaughton: did the discounting rates stay the same?

Jeff Meade: The discounting rate. I would have to look at that to be honest. But essentially what happened was we brought it down a couple thousand dollars, and the whole point was. If our students can’t afford that price, then we’re going to have them pay this price that they can’t afford.

But still knowing that they couldn’t afford that price, and we brought in partners to help subsidize that. And so that’s a part of the corporate work program that I missed in that when they get to their junior and senior year and even when they’re working with us on campus, right? One way to look at it is, like I said before, the example is I could have brought in somebody to help with grants and development and paid them.

Call it 70,000 – 80,000. Right? But I’m not doing that. I have a student working there, and that student actually gets a stipend. And so part of their work here actually goes to cover some of their tuition. Right.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes, and that’s where the, the difference comes. You could lower the tuition because you’re not paying out as much in staffing costs

Jeff Meade: You got it.

Drumm McNaughton: that. So it all works very well, and the student is getting some pocket money

Jeff Meade: You got it.

Drumm McNaughton: And this helps them to be able to keep them doing whatever they need to do to purchase the, the overpriced books.

No, I’m sorry, I didn’t say that. So, those are the first two years you talked about partners. Let’s talk a little bit about developing the partners that you have, what they do, and how that works with your juniors and seniors.

Jeff Meade: Yes, so we have a lot of partners that have bought into the vision, right? Like we have like a Southwest Airlines and Southwest Airlines has been great. They recently sponsored a pitch competition that we had on campus, and so we had students participate and a business pitch competition. They had these ideas that they wanted to get off the ground.

Drumm McNaughton: not baseball pitching it, it’s

Jeff Meade: Right.

Drumm McNaughton: pitch. Okay. Got it. Thank you.

Jeff Meade: And,

Drumm McNaughton: I told you about that sense of humor.

Jeff Meade: Right. You did. You did. You warned me. , I thought it was great. I thought it was really exciting to see students get up, pitch their business, and us being able to give them cash prizes, , to actually go out and support. So in that way, Southwest has been great, but they’re also an employer.

And so what that means is they will bring on our students who have work experience at the college to come and take positions at their company. And luckily for us, Southwest is headquartered here in Dallas. And so they’ll take positions there. Now the, the really fun thing on the back end, is that.

Southwest will pay them a stipend and usually students will get paid about like $20,000, say a year,

Drumm McNaughton: Oh, nice.

Jeff Meade: with Southwest. And so some of that goes to their ledger and then some of it goes to their pockets. And you can imagine on the backend for a company like Southwest or any of our partners, when you make a donation to the school.

Is tax deductible, right? It’s a lot different than hiring that student, as a worker. So it’s like a win-win for everybody,

Drumm McNaughton: That is really neat. So freshman, sophomore, they’re learning job skills, not necessarily, , one-to-one transfer, but they’re learning. Critical thinking. They’re learning, working in teams, all of those things. The A, a c and u talk about that. Business owners say that they want to see in graduates the junior and senior year, they’re working with your partners and doing a, real world job, not make up.

And that gives them additional skills that they can leverage when they graduate to either work with that company or another company. Do I have that right?

Jeff Meade: You got it. You nailed it. Yes.

Drumm McNaughton: It’s beautiful. So the other neat thing that’s great is they graduate with zero student debt.

Jeff Meade: That is the goal. Our goal is for them to graduate with less than $10,000 in student debt. Many students graduate with zero debt. You can imagine everything is set up to make sure that our students leave here and they’re not buried in debt. That the whole school is designed to make sure that.

, when they start working their biggest bill isn’t paying back to school.

Drumm McNaughton: That is fabulous. , so many students right now, there’s 1.7 trillion out there in student debt, or maybe it’s 1.6 now, but , it’s still a huge ticket. Item and it’s the students going out who have this and they’re not able to get on with their life. Like many other folks, , I was fortunate.

I went to the Naval Academy and they actually paid us to go there. We got paid half of an cent salary while we were there, but we also had to buy our uniforms. We had to buy our books, all of those things. But when we graduated, we had a little beginning of a nice nest egg. To be able to take care of us when we get to our first duty station.

That was so important. I just cannot imagine what it would be like graduating with 20, 30, $40,000 in debt. And trying to find a job at the same time.

Jeff Meade: Oh my God. Yes. , I have, I have twin boys who are juniors in high school now, so I’m looking at what that might be in a little over a year, so it’s scary.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, Paul Quinn discounted tuition. because you’re a faculty member. I,

Jeff Meade: Right.

Drumm McNaughton: good sense to me.

Jeff Meade: Makes perfect sense to me. But , both of my boys don’t want to go to school with dad.

Drumm McNaughton: Well just tell ’em that , you’re going go into the education department instead of the business department.

Jeff Meade: Right, right.

Drumm McNaughton: I promise I won’t teach any of your classes.

Jeff Meade: Yes. I need you to convince them.

Drumm McNaughton: Hey, no problem. I, , so one thing we haven’t talked about. Well we’re, we’ve got a few more things that really want to touch on. , how do you build a program like this? because this is what you were brought in to do. the one thing we haven’t talked about is we’ve talked about the benefits to the students, which are huge, but let’s talk about.

Benefits to faculty. One of the big challenges that I see in higher ed is we do not have good leadership training programs. In fact, I don’t know of a single college who formally trains people to step into a position like yours. Whereas out in the corporate world, they do have leadership training.

When you’re having to, mentor and supervise a freshman or a sophomore student, you’ve got to learn leadership skills. Let’s talk a little bit about the benefits for faculty.

Jeff Meade: Yes, no, that’s a good one. And we actually, as a faculty, we actually went through a training program, and it was really important because as you can imagine for faculty and staff, lots of times you haven’t had any experience managing people.

Right. And, and so if you haven’t managed adults. And then you’re put in a position where you’re managing young people.

Drumm McNaughton: Oh, that’s huge.

Jeff Meade: Yes. You could be setting both parties up for disaster. , so, so, so we did, we have gone through training programs for it and yeah, , and I think in many ways both parties are learning. , you have students who’ve never worked before. , in many ways you’re just teaching them about life skills, lots of times, , just being punctual, if you’re not going to be able to make it saying that.

, not sending a text message like five minutes after you were supposed to be somewhere. So a lot of this stuff is really just about life skills at first, and then we can start to get into the, , alright, this is how you excel in this position. but I, I think, I think what I took for granted is sometimes just some of the life skills, , and, and just the.

This could be this generation, but just some of the things they are so comfortable sharing. Right. I have students who will come in for nine o’clock and they’ll say, why do we have to be here so early? And I’m like, nine o’clock, nine o’clock’s not early. I’m like, “I just went to sleep.”

So, sometimes I’m like, “well, it is fine that you told that to me. Don’t ever say that again.” Right. Like, don’t ever say that when you go work somewhere.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes, exactly. And , a friend of mine said, , don’t share every detail of your, your life. , you’re going to find unscrupulous people who will poke fun at you or ridicule you for those sort of things. It’s part of growing up and learning boundaries.

Jeff Meade: It’s so true. It’s so true. And, , one thing I have to understand, I think we as an institution, faculty and staff is just, these students have grown up so differently, right? And in that respect, they have been so used to sharing, what we might call oversharing. but they, they’re so used to sharing that.

Sometimes you just have to say, Hmm, probably not that, probably don’t share that, you

Drumm McNaughton: for sharing. Don’t do that

Jeff Meade: Yes.

Drumm McNaughton: Again. So,

Jeff Meade: Right.

Drumm McNaughton: it’s training faculty and other folks in leadership. And you’re in a unique position because you’ve been there just a short period of time. , have you seen a difference in how people have led. , are leading there at Paul Quinn versus other places , , you’re essentially throwing these people into the deep end of the pool and saying, Hey, we know how to swim.

You just have to practice it a little more.

Jeff Meade: Right, right. Well, I think it, it is very different just because I came from marketing advertising, so I think the biggest shift or biggest difference I see is just that, we do things and we don’t share it. Like I mentioned earlier, I’ll be in so many conversations where I’ll hear about these amazing things happening, and people don’t share it. And the other thing I see too is also, and this is true of academia, but true of a lot of other industries, we just work in silos and really just trying to break those silos up. know, people are like, oh, we’re doing this, and, I’m so into networking and just trying to figure out ways we can work together.

I’m like, oh, that sounds cool. How can we partner? And I don’t think people are opposed to it. I just don’t think it’s a muscle. They have used a lot in the past. Right.

Drumm McNaughton: Exactly

When we do strategic planning with organizations, colleges, universities, we make sure that the strategies are cross-functional. IE, they go across all departments and each department has their own part to play in particular strategies. This forces people to work together and start sharing, especially when it comes to developing and attaining metrics.

, the key success factors that that. Strategic plan has.

Jeff Meade: Right, right.

Drumm McNaughton: so you were brought in to build this program, how do you build a curriculum? How do you build a program that focuses on these kind of things? Because this is, to me, when I look at what you’re doing unless you have this pension for entrepreneurship and there’s a few colleges around the country, Quinn being one of ’em, Babson being another, Stanford, another, all in different ways.

How do you build a program like this? Tell me about it.

Jeff Meade: Yes. And, I appreciate the shout out to Babson because that’s my alma mater.

Drumm McNaughton: school.

Jeff Meade: Yes, and I went there first. That was one of my first stops in fact. When I was workshopping this idea, I was up at Babson talking through how I might develop something like this. And it was Babson who had told me that was a president from a small school in Texas that was walking around, kicking the tires, trying to understand their secret sauce and that was how the connection was made.

 funny enough. Yes. It has been, , really interesting, to see it.

Drumm McNaughton: So what are the key things that go into building a program like this? Because you touch on pretty much every aspect of the university with this.

Jeff Meade: Yes, I do. And , it feels like I’m in every meeting as a result. And I often joke with people, like, I’m not sure what I did right or what I’m doing wrong, but I seem to be in every single meeting that’s being held at the school. But the first thing was really just that.

One thing I learned from Babson was really that it has to be universal. Like if this is going to be part of the DNA of the school, let’s just make sure that it’s not a siloed program and figure out a way to, to incorporate it across the entire institution. And so that’s was one thing I said we have to do.

We have to make it a core class. And so what we’re doing now is when every freshman comes in, they’re required to take this entrepreneurship class and so it starts actually as a summer bridge class. The freshmen come in a couple weeks early and they’re just getting acclimated to college.

And one of the first people they see is me and they take a principles of entrepreneurship class. And the whole point of that class is to come up with ideas, to solve problems that they’ve seen in their community in the world. And then we’re, we’re building ideas to solve those. And at the end of that class, they have to pitch a business idea.

Everyone has to do it. And then right now

We are piloting. A program where, a good percentage of the freshmen actually go through a year long course. And we just went through the fall session, so this is the first one. And so this year long course is built around building a business. So all those ideas that they were pressure testing in that first six weeks during Summer Bridge, now they’re actually joining in groups and combining ideas and saying, is this real?

Is this an idea or is it. Opportunity, right? And so it’s starting to see those ideas come to fruition. And so after this fall semester, as we move into the spring, we’ll start to pick which ideas we’re actually going to invest in. So that’s exciting. And so to your, to your question earlier. One thing I think we had to do was we had to have funds available.

And so when I first got here, I kind of hit the streets and said, I’m just, I got to do a lot of fundraising. And so went out and built an investment fund, a seed fund so we can invest in our own students’ ideas.

Drumm McNaughton: What I’m hearing is, especially with this bridge course that you have it, it’s a brilliant idea. I’ve only heard of a few colleges who do a bridge class and usually it’s focused at, , lower SES folks who are first generation college, never been to college, their parents, et cetera. , what you’re doing though, I think, and you tell me if I’m wrong.

You are changing people’s mentality. I wouldn’t say from a, , victim perspective, but you’re changing it to a perspective as whether it’s in business or whatever. I’m going to go out and make things happen versus I’m going to wait for them to come to me.

Jeff Meade: You nailed it. Yes. And we, we are teaching them to become entrepreneurs of their own lives, right?

Drumm McNaughton: That’s it right there. Entrepreneurs of their own lives.

Jeff Meade: you got it. That’s, that’s the message that we want students to embody and embrace.

Drumm McNaughton: So you had corporation invest in the program. That is very different. Some institutions do that. I frequently use Cal State San Marcos. They have what they call the senior experience, and it’s a mandatory three credit hour class, and they’re forced to work in teams and people in the community have projects that they bring that they want, , develop a new marketing plan, develop new marketing materials, et cetera. , that type of thing. What you’re doing is different. What you’re doing is different from that. In having partners, you’re essentially finding jobs, you’re finding investment into your program, and for them, they’re finding.

Better trained workforce going.

Jeff Meade: Absolutely. Absolutely. the, , the entrepreneurship program, the reason our president actually started going down this road of looking at entrepreneurship was he heard from corporations that they were looking for workers, employees who thought more entrepreneurially, right? They wanted people who could be creative, who could think on their feet, who could make decisions without being told.

And so that was the impetus for him to say. We’ve got to figure out how to develop these students. And then he went on a road show to a couple schools and Babson being one of them, just to figure out how schools are

Drumm McNaughton: well, it sounds like you’re very fortunate to have the president that you do. I want to swap horses just a little bit. Faculty governance, shared governance can be an issue. Referring back to my quote earlier, it’s easy to change the course of history than a history course in some cases. How do you get faculty buy-in for a program?

Was that an issue?

Jeff Meade: It wasn’t a big issue. And it’s because we’re so entrepreneurial. , and probably the best thing that happened to me, quite honestly, is sooner after I came in, we hired a new chief academic officer. And so, , he, he was trying to make a name for himself and I saw an opportunity and so I was in his office every week.

Tell, tell him about the program. And I would put him on conference calls with the folks at Babson about how they launched the program. And so I think in many ways he saw this as part of his brand and he knew he was coming into an entrepreneurial school. right. And so I just started quick saying that this has to be part of the ethos of who we are.

So thankfully, I think because of that and because we’re small, it hasn’t been much of an issue. The real challenge now is just trying to weave it into the different classrooms. And so, , I find myself having lots of meetings with different faculty members because I actually want to weave the ideas Our students are building into different classes, and so there’s not really a blueprint for that.

I got to figure out how to scale this, but for now, it’s just one-on-one conversations saying, these are the ideas we’re looking to fund in the spring. How might we integrate this into your class? And some classes it’s easy, like marketing, it’s, it’s really easy. finance, again, accounting, they’re looking at p and l statements and all that for the businesses, so that stuff is kind of easy.

But, , some of our liberal arts classes, we got to get a little bit more creative. So, I can’t wait to have a blueprint, but right now it’s a lot of one-on-one conversations to weave it into the curriculum.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, you started this, what, this year? Was it last year?

Jeff Meade: I’ve been at Paul Quin a year now, last November.

Drumm McNaughton: Okay, so let’s get back together again in another six months for an update. How’s that sound?

Jeff Meade: I like it. Sounds good.

[00:32:13] Three Takeaways for College Presidents and Boards

Drumm McNaughton: Well, this has been, you’ve got me excited again about what’s going on in colleges and I really appreciate that. As we wrap up as we always do, three takeaways, for college presidents and boards.

What do you need to do to better prepare your students for a life as an entrepreneur and to inculcate that culture into your own institution.

Jeff Meade: I’d say the first one is, , and we were just talking about it. We partner, we partner with a lot of folks. So, so partner, don’t compete, right? Like  I’ve come into this position and I’ve said, I just want to be a part of this entrepreneurship ecosystem that is happening in Dallas. How do we play a part?

And so for me it’s. I rely on Babson College. The corporate partners like Southwest Airlines, WeBank, , which is the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council. They help put together our pitch competition. I bring local entrepreneurs into the classroom, right? So I partner with a lot of folks to make this happen.

 , this isn’t a, I don’t need all the light on Jeff. We have a goal, we have a vision, and I’m bringing in people who see the world the same way and want to play a part in making this vision come to life. So that’s one.

The other thing I do that I think a lot of presidents of schools would appreciate is I want this model to be self-sustaining.

So, for me, I want us to generate revenue. I don’t want it to be a cost drag on the school. And, and I think that’s a different way to think about these departments. And so for presidents or for boards, I think that’s really exciting. Even for my corporate partners w ho have invested in my seed fund. When they invested, I told them, I’m not coming back to you for any money. This fund is going to be recyclable. Because I believe that when we invest in these students, that they will actually build businesses that generate revenue and then that revenue will be pumped back into the fund. And so for some of my partners, they’re like, “this is amazing because this one time investment will live on in perpetuity.”

Drumm McNaughton: An endowed.

Jeff Meade: Exactly. Exactly. And I think the last one is, and we’ve, we touched on this a bunch in the conversation, just make it universal, not optional, right? Don’t treat entrepreneurship as an elective. That’s just for the business majors. , one thing we’re doing is the program is called Every Quinnite is an entrepreneur.

So every student, regardless of discipline, has to launch and operate a venture. That’s just what you do when you come to Paul Quinn. And if you don’t want to do that, Paul Quinn is not for you. . And so it is, it is a part of our DNA and I think that’s, , the easiest part is people will see students creating businesses.

But like I said, the whole point is we want to make students, entrepreneurs of their own lives. And we do that through launching and starting ventures.

So those would be my three takeaways.

[00:35:18] Dr. McNaughton’s Bonus Takeaway

Drumm McNaughton: Those are great takeaways. And I would also expand on that partnership a little bit because not only do you have external partners, you have internal partners as well, and that is critical so that you don’t have the silos.

Jeff Meade: Yes, absolutely. Good point. Yes.

Drumm McNaughton: Next for you? What’s next for, Paul Quinn?

Jeff Meade: Yes, it’s exciting. We’ve been moving a mile of minutes. , I think the next thing is really just to scale this out, right? Like I had all the freshmen come in for the bridge program, take the principles of entrepreneurship we didn’t bring all the students into this, seminar class, which is a year long, right?

Because we just wanted to get some things right. And as much as I wanted to do that, , is actually some good conversations with my folks at Babson. They said, Nope, the first year, do not bring everybody in almost ab test it, right? So

that’s what we’re doing. I would say probably by year three, I’m hoping that we have a hundred percent of the students.

So every single student. Is taking this year long class. Right. And I, I think that’s a big deal to say that every freshman spends a year in a class where they are building a business that we expect to see earned revenue.

Drumm McNaughton: That’s fabulous. That is fabulous. Well, Jeff, thank you so much for being on the program. I have thoroughly enjoyed our conversation and like. I said, let’s do this again, six to nine months. I want to hear more about what’s going on at Quinn.

Jeff Meade: I love it. Would love to provide an update and thanks for having me on the show.

Drumm McNaughton: My pleasure, sir.

Thanks for listening today and a special thank you to my guest, Jeff Meade. Jeff, thank you for a wonderful conversation. This was great. I learned so much about what Quinn is doing and what you’re doing there, and I really appreciate all that you’re doing. I look forward to having you back in a few months, talk about the program and where it’s evolved.

For my listeners, thanks again for tuning in. See you next week.