But it is the time and effort required to lead a dual life that is the major source of stress for most entrepreneur-teachers. While some say they devote as little as 5% of their time to teaching, many others say the effort doesn't pay off with less than a 30% commitment -- which is a staggering amount for someone still intimately involved in running a company.
Caroline Brainard, an assistant professor at Simmons College Graduate School of Management, says her four-employee, $4-million fresh-fish company, Blue Crown Seafood & Provision Co., of Boston, has occasionally suffered for the full-time classload she carries for two semesters a year. "When a restaurant owner calls to complain that he's gotten cusk instead of hake, he doesn't like hearing that I'm in class and can't be reached for an hour or so. And it's very hard to do things like negotiate a line of credit in phone calls between classes."
Employees don't always take kindly to the boss's absence, either. Dr. Arthur Karuna-Karan, who taught two classes at Seattle's University of Washington while launching a biotechnical firm called Cyanotech Corp., says his employees considered his decision to teach ill-timed. "There was skepticism when I started teaching, and relief when I gave it up," he admits. "The company was new, there was some uncertainty about it, and I was supposed to be out raising funds. There was a felling -- a demand, actually -- that I spend all of my time with the company."
Ask other entrepreneurs why they undergo the sacrifices required of them to teach, and they'll list a variety of personal and professional gains: Harvard's Van Slyke says it's made him "a better listener and a more interesting person." Jack Friedman, a New York City real estate entrepreneur, says that the various business-strategy courses he teaches give him "a structure outside of work." Dick Whitley, chief operating officer of Boston's Forum Corp., a management- and sales-training firm, adds, "Just preparing for class has helped me become more systematic about evaluating business problems."
Some of the benefits of teaching accrue more directly to business. More than a few entrepreneurs recruit job candidates from among their students, and some admit they find business opportunities in class. Burt Alimansky, a New York City investment banker, reveals that his teaching builds his client roster. "Because many of my students are accountants and attorneys, the fact that I teach gives them confidence in recommending our firm to their clients," he explains. "Others, who may be evaluating our services on their own, also get a measure of comfort knowing that NYU or the American Management Association has enough confidence in me to let me teach."
But what gets and keeps entrepreneurs excited about teaching is the opportunity to use the classroom to try to offer something of value to the business curriculum, some practical or philosophical issue that they perceive to be missing. "I'm in this out of rebellion," says Atlanta entrepreneur Glenn R. Sirkis, a co-founder of Hayes Microcomputer Products Inc. who plans to begin teaching this spring at his alma mater, Georgia Institute of Technology. "When I look back on my days in the business school, the only classes and professors I remember are the ones that taught me tools. I want to give the practical advice I never got very much of." Others seek to add a more realistic, or humanistic, perspective to business curricula that they see as dominated by quantitative analysis.
Dick Handal is CEO of Textiles Nacionales S.A., a textile manufacturer that has been active in a number of economic-development projects in its native Ecuador. This past winter, as executive-in-residence at Georgia Tech's College of Management, he wanted to show his students that there were businesspeople who wear white hats. "A lot of students see business as a zero-sum game, one in which somebody always loses. I wanted to be an example to them of something different."
Similarly, Charles Leighton's message is, "No matter what the textbooks say, street smarts beats analytic smarts every time; 'we' is better than 'I'; and it's people that count." The co-founder of CML Corp., a retail fashion company in Acton, Mass., Leighton has lectured at Harvard for more than a decade. Recently, he has become concerned about the number of students who are "interested only in deal-making."
Leighton, having grown a $200-million company from the acquisition of 10 companies, seems to be an odd one to be denigrating the value of deals -- a point his students make often. But, what he's trying to get across is that deal-making is fine, so long as internal growth and quality production aren't ignored after the papers are signed. "Growing one company from $2 million to $44 million, as I did, and another from $3 million to $42 million -- that's not just doing a deal and letting it die."
Whether or not the message gets across, Leighton enjoys trying to deliver it. "Bring up a subject like that in class, and it's 'Why, why, why?" he says with a chuckle. "It's fun to get out of my own sphere and get pushed around, intellectually speaking."
Enamored of the intellectual stimulation of school, and unwilling to divert any of their attention from it, an increasing number of entrepreneurs are turning teaching into a second career. Daryl Erdman, who holds the chair in small business and entrepreneurship at College of St. Thomas, in St. Paul, Minn., severed ties with several retail companies -- including the bulk of a supermarket chain that had been in his family for 60 years -- to join academe. "It was traumatic, but for years I'd been saying that teaching was something I was going to do. Apparently, nobody believed me. Why is that? Why is it that an employee gets everybody's best wishes when he or she leaves to do something else, but when the boss does, nobody understands it?"
It may be that people like Erdman are just ahead of their time. Timmons, for one, sees teaching as the answer to an ever more frequent dilemma: "You're in your thirties, you've worked seven or eight years, you've got $10 million or $15 million in your jeans -- so you sell out. For awhile, there's a sense of relief. But three or six months later, you're antsy, cranky, and the spouse wants you out of the house. What do you do? You either start the whole thing over again, or you look for something different." Teaching may be that something different.
