The current crop of student entrepreneurs are determined not to let school get in the way of their education.
In the past four years, 22-year-old Jimmy Enriquez has founded two thriving companies, launched a campus organization for student businesspeople like himself, and squeezed in enough study time to earn an accounting degree from the University of Texas at Austin. But he still can't drive and talk at the same time, at least not when the topic of conversation is his favorite -- student entrepreneurship. As the car whizzes past his intended left turn for the second time in nearly as few minutes, Enriquez pounds the steering wheel, but it is less a gesture of frustration than an attempt to emphasize his point -- which is that college is the ideal time and place to launch a business.
"If you wait until you're out of school and working for somebody else," he explains, "you're going to get used to that fancy salary and that big car -- and you're not going to want to gamble with that stuff. It's better to start a company when you're a student, while you're still used to driving a junker and living like a dog." In other words, while you are still too poor to know the meaning of downside risk.
It was that sort of predicament that caused Enriquez to take his first entrepreneunal plunge. He had finished his first year of college, and had returned home to Corpus Christi, Tex., in the hope of finding a job that would earn him another year's tuition. But when he got there, he found that his family's financial needs were at least as dire as his own. "Everybody was unemployed, broke." He rolled up his sleeves and started a construction-site cleaning business that netted his family some $30,000 in three months. A sister still runs the operation, called Nelda's Construction Services. It has 15 employees, grosses $3,00 to $5,000 a week, and has expanded into Dallas and Houston.
Jimmy and his younger brother, Rocky, then used $2,000 of the net profits to seed Enriquez Bros. Vending Co., a "foosball" game leasing partnership the pair had dreamed of starting since high school. The plan was that Jimmy would keep the com pany books while continuing to crack the textbooks in Austin. Rocky would take charge of buying, installing, and maintaining the mechanical games out of Houston.
Doubters told them they were fools that the table-soccer craze of the late 1970s was dead. The very thought still sends Jimmy Enriquez into fits of chortles. "Ooo! That was the best thing about it," he drawls. "They were right -- it was deader'n a doornail!" But, both being foosball champs, the brothers were convinced that their expertise could be combined with some promotional savvy to "build a whole new generation of players." They started foosball leagues -- complete with newsletters and tournaments. They even held clinics that, in an ingenious scheme to increase the number of plays per machine, allow kids to play for free until they have learned to get through a game as quickly as possible.
The company is a three-city (Victoria, Corpus Christi, and Houston, Tex.), 68-machine operation, with revenues of more than $60,000. Jimmy took $16,000 out of the business -- enough to pay his tuition through his graduation day last December and on into the courses that prepared him for his certified public accountant exam this past spring. Rocky used some of his money to buy a car, but, according to Jimmy, they are both still "living like dogs," and expect to be doing so for at least another three years. It will take them that long to ensure the health of this company and build both the credibility and the capital to start others. Staying in business for themselves is the all-important goal, Jimmy says. "Having your own company means having your independence. It's a way of making your own mark."
Enriquez is but one example of thousands of young people who are making their mark while still in college. Individually, these students are starting companies of all sizes and descriptions. Collectively, they are forming entrepreneurship clubs that are quickly becoming among the most popular of campus organizations. More than 100 such groups now exist, and most of them have sprung up in the past year or so.
Student-run businesses have been around, of course, almost as long as there have been college students. But the current crop of student entrepreneurs seems somehow different. For the student business operators of the past, getting a college degree was the primary goal, and any money-making scheme on the side was just that -- a sideline. Today's student entrepreneurs don't see their endeavors as merely ways to fatten their wallets and occupy their time while they are waiting to get out into the real world. For most, college is the real world -- a place with markets to be tapped, risks to be taken. They expect to be seeking out such opportunities for the rest of their lives, they reason, so why wait for a diploma? Why not start here and now?
These student entrepreneurs find themselves confronting many of the problems that all entrepreneurs face. There is the need for capital. The employees aren't productive enough. And, there is the question of succession: Is there anybody sharp enough to take over the operation, if need be, after the founder graduates?
The biggest conundrums arise in the area of time management, however. "We've got problems that other students don't have," explains Jeff Mulligan, a graduate student at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., who juggles his studies with the day-to-day operation of two entertainment companies -- one a mobile disco, the other a mobile sound-and-video service. "You know -- do you write up your income statement or your term paper? Do you make the sale or make it to class?"
Talk like that brings a delighted chuckle from Wichita State University professor Iran Jabara, founder and director of the school's Center for Entrepreneurship. As a 35-year veteran of the business faculty -- 7 of which he was the dean of the school -- Jabara has studied entrepreneurs on and off campus for years. But the popularity of entrepreneurship he sees on college campuses today is far more than he could have hoped for, much less predicted. All of a sudden, he says, "we're seeing more and more students who simply aren't interested in going to work in the corporate world. Maybe it's because they saw their dads working only for Fridays, vacations, and retirement -- and not being very happy as a result. These people are looking for better opportunities. They want to pursue their own dream."
