Welcome to another episode of The Entrepreneurial Mindset Project, where I tease out the hidden logic that enables ordinary people to accomplish extraordinary things.
In this episode, I’m speaking with Rick MacLennan, who happens to be the Chancellor of the Ventura County Community College System. Why am I interviewing a community college chancellor you might ask?
As I have often said, an entrepreneurial mindset confers an enormous advantage to those who understand and embrace it, and Rick’s story provides a great example. Watching his parents transform a struggling service station into a thriving business left an indelible impression on Rick, one that would enable him to thrive within the community college system.
In our conversation, we covered a lot of ground, including the importance of focusing on improving the customer (student) experience, the role of a community college in supporting entrepreneurship within a given community, and the challenges of convincing leadership to adopt new approaches. We also discussed how he embraced an entrepreneurial mindset to transform a modest maker space into a thriving hub of entrepreneurial development that spread throughout the community.
So, without any further ado, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Rick MacLennan.
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Listen to the podcast here
The Power Of Possibilities With Rick MacLennan
Welcome to another episode of the show, where it is out the hidden logic that enables ordinary people to accomplish extraordinary things. In this episode, I’m speaking with Rick MacLennan who happens to be the Chancellor of the Ventura County Community College System. Now, why am I interviewing a community college Chancellor, you might ask?
As I’ve often said, an entrepreneurial mindset confers enormous advantage to anyone who understands and embraces it and Rick’s story provides a great example. Watching his parents transform a struggling service station into a thriving business left an indelible impression on Rick. One that would eventually enable him to thrive within the community college system.
In our conversation, we covered a lot of ground, including the importance of focusing on improving the customer or student experience, the role of a community college in supporting entrepreneurship within a giving community and the challenge is of convincing leaders to adopt new approaches. We also discussed how he embraced an entrepreneurial mindset to transform a modest makerspace into a thriving hub of entrepreneurial development that spread throughout the community. Without any further ado, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Rick MacLennan.
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Rick, thanks for joining me on my show.
Glad to be here.
How Entrepreneurial Thinking Entered Rick’s Life
We bumped into each other at the National Association of Community College Entrepreneurship Conference in Minneapolis, Saint Paul and you told me a story that stuck in my mind and I want to share that story. I also want to use this as a way for me to learn to crawl inside your head but that’s my whole thing. I think of myself as an entrepreneurial anthropologist. I’m trying to understand the underlying beliefs and assumptions that drive your behavior. Let me just start with this question, Rick. How did entrepreneurial thinking come into your life?
Honestly, I never thought of myself at all in those terms. A lot of times, you being, you live, and you do these things and all of a sudden, these labels that started getting attached and you learn a structure of how that might fit into how you are and what you’re doing or whatever. I never thought of it that way. In the last several years anyway as I’ve reflected upon my own life, it’s one of the things that started when I was very young.
My father was a LA police detective. He and my mother opened a shell service station. Not a gas station. I got in trouble if I called a gas station. His mind was to service our business and he took a broken down old decrypted site and turned it into one of the most very successful business. Anybody who needed work done on their car and that part of the community brought it to his station because of the work and the service and the focus on the customer experience.
I started working for him for $0.25 an hour when I was eleven years old. My job was to take those old wooden crates because I was too short to wash windows, but that was my job, to wash every window of every car that came into the station. Haul that box around and jump up on it and scrub the windows. I had a pretty early education, if you will, all the way from eleven on through high school of gradually working more into how this small business experience was going to played out.
I looked back to anything that I have been able to do in terms of how I approached my service orientation but also how we solve problems through those early lessons that I got in. You’ve got cleave and who owns the Ice House. I had two full-time mechanics, George and Bob who gave me life lessons from 11 years old, 12 years old, and 13 years old on about how to do this work. I was a typical young kid. I asked a lot of questions and I was shadowing those guys all the way through this. I think I traced it back to there that service orientation and bringing that into my higher education experience.
I landed in higher education at Portland State University at the very old age of 25 as a returning veteran. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I had this unique experience where as I was getting my veterans benefits certified, I had to go to the office of the Vice president of Student Affairs Office. On my way out, her executive assistant asked me if I wanted to work-study job. Before I even started taking classes, all of a sudden, I was working in the VP of Student Affairs office in an adult serving University in Portland, Oregon.
Here I was at the front end receiving all of these services of the returning adult student and I was working in the office that was trying to figure out how to meet those needs of the adult students coming in. I had this four-year laboratory of looking at it through my own lens about what I was experiencing and what this work was trying to do. It’s essentially identifying problems that students were having and working with this university staff. I became a full-time employee in the office of student affairs by the time I graduated from Portland State University.
I had a lot of opportunities to start new enterprises, new services, and new ways of communicating the students. Again, I do want to trace that back to that early experience in my life, but now that I have these labels to attach to it, I don’t think I’ve ever been anything but entrepreneurial when I come into this work. It’s just some unique experience that’s lined up that way. As I look back, I’m not surprised. I know some of the things we’re going to talk about is what’s happened since then but it’s not that surprising. What’s interesting to me, as well, is I don’t know why everybody doesn’t look at the world this way.
Rick, that’s the million-dollar question and I think that non entrepreneurial behavior has learned. We’re unwittingly telling you young people, “This is the way the world is. Abide that. Follow the rules. Do what you’re told and you’ll be okay.” What your father was teaching you is like, follow the rules but go a little above and beyond.
The thing you just said to me, we could talk about just that for the next hours but you just captured the essence of an entrepreneurial mindset. Number one, I’ve interviewed 700 entrepreneurs all over the world. Probably a third of them told me, “I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur.” Probably three quarters of them never invented anything new. They have that service mindset, Rick. That’s it.
I don’t know why and you can’t blame them. I’m in education for goodness’ sake. In terms of the framework, the language, and the way people might traditionally think of an entrepreneur going into education, you wouldn’t be thinking. Again, for all the reasons, we already know it’s got some pathways that are pretty stagnant and that’s thing. I don’t think most educators would ever do themselves as an entrepreneur. I certainly did. Until I start putting some stuff around, “I am doing some things that are a little bit differently than I see others do.”
Did other people like recognize that in you? Did they support it? I’m sure you had both where people were like, “Pay attention to the rules,” or other people recognize like, “Do more of that.”
Let’s go back to Portland State University. When I worked in that office, the VP had three assistant vice presidents in her office suite with her and I reported to two of them. They were two of the coolest dudes you can ever imagine being connected with. Think of it from their perspective, they could see all this need from an administrative perspective of things that they know they need to be doing. Here, you’ve got this relatively younger student employee who’s coming in.
I was like a dry sponge. I wanted to learn everything. I wanted to understand how they were fulfilling the mission of the work they were trying to do. If I pointed something out and I, “Here’s what I see.” I had the grace and they gave me the generosity of saying, “Go work on that. We want you to use your time to do that.” For example, Portland State University had never produced a student handbook. One of the years I was working there they, I said, “Why don’t we put all this stuff down so students can have a guide to help them navigate this place?” They said, “Go do that.”
I had a year-long project to produce the first ever student handbook for Portland State University. I took it from a problem-solving lens of what would a student want to know to solve problems and challenges and producing that work. It was the grace that they gave me and I didn’t have anybody saying, “We tried to student handbook years ago.” “We don’t need a student handbook.” “Students don’t read it anyway.” “It’s too expensive.” None of that came up. It was hard launch. “Go out there and research and produce. We’ll support.”
I can’t help thinking about the ways in which your childhood experience watching your parents take up flailing service station and make it into something that’s thriving and something that’s recognized in the community. There’s another important thing that you’re alluding to I don’t want to miss, which is this empathic perspective. It’s the entrepreneurs that think, “I want to make money.” They tend to fail at a higher rate than someone that’s looking externally, like what needs to be done? What does the student need? What does the customers need?
I don’t think I ever set out saying, “I had a success minded view of my future.” I wanted to get something moving in my life that would help me be successful and contributing and all those things. Beyond that, I go back to Portland State University. I was into it. I was committed to this idea that we were serving students and we could do a better job of serving students if we could figure out how to help them solve their challenges, their problems, and their bottlenecks. For me, the purpose of the problem I was trying to solve or help solve, drove all of the thinking about how to do that. It had nothing to do with some gain or financial or checking a credential box or anything like that.
Balancing Managerial And Entrepreneurial Mindsets
The way about this, Rick, is there’s a managerial mindset and an entrepreneurial mindset. We need them both but the managerial mindset operates more or less on assumptions that are rooted in the replication and delivery of known useful things. It’s an efficiency-based mindset and it assumes that we have the correct way. What happens cognitively is much more of a narrow focus. I have to do the thing that’s in front of me. If there’s not, we’re not questioning, is this the best way to do this?
Focus usually only gets narrower or it doesn’t get broader.
The entrepreneurial mindset at least leaves room for, is this the best way to be doing this? How could this be improved? I’m not advocating that we throw out the managerial and go all entrepreneurial, but we need both. That’s how I’m thinking about it. I love this idea that you don’t even think of yourself as an entrepreneur but you’ve witnessed. You were witnessed to your parents and I hear that so much, Rick. There was some childhood experience. I was close to it. I had a relative, a parent and Uncle Cleave and how that shapes our mindset in ways of which we are not aware of.
Fast forward to my first college president at Garrett College in Maryland. We had a local guy. I can’t even remember the name of the company, but part of the story where I came in was a global mining equipment company. The founder/owner built that business out of the back of his truck. He had a portable welding equipment at the back of his truck and that’s how this whole company and just one thing led to another and we were having this conference. It was an ecosystem conference panel where we were talking about trying to tease out on entrepreneurial principals for our local community.
He made a comment. He said, “Now, you can’t teach on entrepreneurship. I was just born with it.” He told the same stories about his parents. Learning comes in a lot of different forms. It’s not just the formal pathway that you go, the more meaningful things. I learn more at that shell service station that I’ve learned anywhere else in my life but did I formally get trained to think the way I think? No, it was those life experiences.
Possibilities: People do have that locus of control. Life does not necessarily have to simply happen to them. They should take responsibility for identifying the challenge and figure out how to overcome it.
I do believe in the idea that teasing out the principles and trying to help others understand that they do have that locus of control that life doesn’t necessarily have to happen to them. They should take some responsibility for at least being able to identify the challenge or the problem and then exploring some alternative ways of figuring out how to get through that. It’s pretty teachable.
Don’t even get me started on that, but what this gentleman is referring to or what you’re referring to in the anecdote of this entrepreneur. In social psychology, they call that a fundamental attribution error, which is the tendency to look at a person and describe their behavior to who they are while simultaneously ignoring the constellation of cognitive motivation on situational factors that are invisible but acting upon that.
They may not even see them. They probably don’t share them.
That’s exactly what I’m saying. The more important thing here that you’re getting at is the level of engagement that comes when you are free to pursue your interests in ways that create value for people around you. You are much more likely to become intrinsically motivated and therefore, optimally engaged.
I know that’s exactly what happened for me because you think of like a flow experience. When you’re so into it, you’re not even thinking that it’s work or it’s whatever. I was thinking back to that time in my life, either at the service station or at Portland State University, when somebody’s all-in and you can’t convince them to be otherwise.
Importance Of Encouraging Entrepreneurial Development
Again, think about the broader importance of this, especially for you as an academic leader. If we’re collectively assuming that an entrepreneur comes rolling down the chute every once in a while, randomly with some scientifically and fathomable traits that we haven’t been able to pin down yet. That allows us to keep educating in a way that is stifling the development. I was in Riyadh at an entrepreneurship conference.
I was sitting in the session and this guy was bragging about the rigor of his entrepreneur curriculum. First, we teach this and then we teach that, then we teach this. I was thinking to myself, to the extent that you keep prescribing is the extent to which you are undermining the individual’s ability to develop. It’s more like that same thing. Don’t teach him how to build ships. Show him the vast beautiful ocean. I think that’s what your parents did for you, is instilled in you a sense of service orientation and agency.
I would say they don’t even know they did that. That’s interesting.
How did that benefit you in your career? How did that lead to the makerspace conversation we had?
When I first became a college president, like a lot of other people and who take on these stretch roles or whatever, anytime we move into something new. There’s always a little bit of that imposter, “Do I belong in this role?” I can remember sitting in the parking lot outside of Garrett College in Maryland thinking, Alright, here I go.” They’re going to probably figure out maybe two minutes that I don’t belong here. Who do I think I am?
There were certainly some challenges along the way that made me go, “I got a think about this.” It’s a wonderful beautiful college and a beautiful part of Maryland. At that time, in its history, they were having some pre-monumental struggles. They had Financial Department of Education financial aid program review that had fifteen findings that the liability amounted to about 10% of their overall budget of things. They were found to be not in compliance. They were on accreditation warning. They had just terminated a president for a whole lot of not good reasons and whatnot.
I was trying to think of how am I going to help this institution recover from a lot of these things. It wasn’t any one thing that I thought I could do in particular. About that time, this female came. Hit my desktop and it was from NACCE, the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship and said, “Sign the president’s pledge for entrepreneurship.” I open it up and looked at it. There were five components to that I had pledged. It was making a commitment towards the principles of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial thinking and convening a work group to help start thinking through those principles.
I said, “It didn’t cost me anything to sign the pledge.” I thought, let me do that and that got me connected into a network that started helping me bring my thinking of how a community college would take on entrepreneurial principles and apply it both within their walls as an organization and what would it mean in being in service to the community. It was the right message at the right time for the kinds of things that I was confronting that helped me develop a little bit of a framework to get my arms around that college and what they needed from the leadership perspective to help move it into the future.
That began a number of conversations. I collected a couple allies in the community external to the college and within the college itself that were like-minded about thinking him through some of these things. It became a problem focus orientation, a challenge focused orientation. For example, we ask the question. I was involved in some economic typical for my position and in some local and regional economic development activities.
Entrepreneurship should be a major pillar of any region’s economic development strategy, especially a rural community. Share on XThe question that we begin asking at the college was, entrepreneurship is or should be a major pillar of any region’s economic development strategy, especially a rural community. What would the role of the local community college be in supporting that pillar? I would say that from 2010 at least until 2022, that question focused all of our thinking, strategy, and all of our activities around the whole conversation of innovation and entrepreneurship.
You and I had talked about a couple of those examples. I’m happy to go to a couple of those more here as well. At Garrett, at the very beginning, it was that question and we had no place to start. We did have one thing. We had a 20,000 square foot incubator. The focus is around technology in a rural area because at that point, there wasn’t a lot of bandwidth that would go out into homes.
We had this hub that people who wanted to start a business related to technology would have these resources but it was empty. We had this resource that was not being used fully. We started thinking, this could be our place where we focus on bringing entrepreneurial thinking and entrepreneurial mindset to this community. We send some folks to some training. They came back. We hung up our entrepreneurial shingle.
What training did you send him to?
We sent him to the Kaufman. They had a entrepreneurial faculty training on-site thing and we sent a couple of people to out and developed some basic terminology and skills around that and put our information out to the community that we have these entrepreneurial courses and program that we’re moving them the support. Many people showed up and we started thinking about it. The language we’re using, we’re not being seen in this space but we know that this community is hurting from an economic development perspective.
Giving people some autonomy and locus of control around how they can solve their economic challenges is a valuable decision. Share on XWe do believe that giving individual some autonomy and locus of control around how they can solve their economic challenges is a value. How do we translate that to this community? There’s only three of us in the meeting and somebody in this meeting said, “We somehow need to help people understand about that there’s the power of possibility.” The idea of thinking that something’s possible is going to help you start to get into the framework of saying, “If it’s possible, that means there’s something I can do about it. I can have some control over this. I can look at this in a different way.”
That led to a whole different way of thinking about engaging our community. We convened our first ecosystem. We did a whole ecosystem mapping and looked at the finance at the government and at the educational regional stakeholders. I did a road show personally inviting them to come and be a part of this conversation. We got NACCE involved in that as well. Once we convened all of what we considered, we added over time other players in this ecosystem world. Once we got this regional conversation going about answering the question, if you believe entrepreneurship should be a major strategy, how do we support it?
The collaboration began and the whole regional approach to this began. That led to a whole series of workshops, conferences, and panels all under the brand of the power of possibilities and it became a thing. We started hosting maker fairs and other activities that built on it. That’s my first real example of how. Again, I don’t think it was too much of what I did other than the convening and then finding at least 1 or 2 champions who thought, “This is something that we can put some structure around and build up from there.”
Connecting Everyday Entrepreneurship With Economic Development
What’s so exciting about that among other things is you’re pioneering a important idea which is the connection between entrepreneurship like every day on entrepreneurship. Not the high growth uber tech entrepreneurs but an economic development. I don’t know if you remember or familiar with a guy named Tom doing this in North Carolina. People are still trying to do smoke stack chasing. Here it is 2024, and Kaufman’s done all kinds of research on that.
It winds up spending for $500,000 for every job. You convinced to bring across the border. You’re giving away half a million dollars in taxpayer money and that connects with my findings and my research, Rick. There’s an extraordinary reservoir of untapped entrepreneurial potential that is dormant in everyday people.
Starting with the power possibilities in Maryland, we ended up getting some local interests and starting an angel fund and that got off the ground. We supported that. I can tell you story a after story whether it’s for financial gain or for social entrepreneurship, community good or whatever. One person, one idea, one problem to solve and maybe a little way. Maybe they were going to make a goal of it as an enterprise and as a sustaining thing or not. We’ve seen person after person come in, take an idea and take it to the next step.
What I’m trying to say is, in my mind, we’ve taken our mission of open acts open affordable access to what we have to offer, whether it’s transferring education, technical or entrepreneurship and said, “Down to the individual level, how do we bring this to everybody irrespective of where they are and help them take whatever baby steps or big steps they need to take to get it to the next phase?” We have looked at entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial education and everything around through that lens.
I’ll go to North Idaho College now. In North Idaho College, we had a whole curriculum around entrepreneurship. It was a pretty good way to funnel some students into a program to start getting them to think about those things. It was impactful but I wouldn’t say it was the most impactful thing that we did. The most impactful thing that we did was open up other doorways into the institution that didn’t look like a credit course or curriculum that students had to register for and paid tuition for and do all those formal high or higher education thing.
It was a 10,000 square foot makerspace that would accommodate interest from the very youngest learner because somebody who are at the other end of the building, who had an idea that needed high-end prototyping equipment, that needed engineers on staff to help them mentor that idea and have lawyers that were helping with intellectual property and patent work as well and everything in between. The makerspace that we had developed up there are just a couple of things. We had robotics, virtual reality, machining, woodworking, welding, fabrication, textile, printing, and rapid prototyping. Anything that you could think of that you would do in a makerspace with the exception of food and food preparation but a lot on the arc side, we have there.
It was mentored and staffed. It was a doorway that was open to our community at no cost. We brought so many people into our college community that way. Those are folks who never would have come in and we launched a lot of stuff out of that as well but that’s the whole palette of activities around, whether it’s a credit side or it’s the makerspace side or the small business development. All of those things. We had women in entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship competition. All of those things are one more doorway in to help people start thinking about innovation and about their own role and their own control over their economic journey if that’s the way they want to pursue it.
That’s it, but I love the fact that you made that an outward facing initiative. Without the red tape, you don’t have to become a student and you don’t have to go through the application process. You can walk in off the street and start to get your hands dirty. That’s also very interesting, but the thing that’s so exciting about that to me, Rick, is I’ve been saying this for years. Every community college should be what you just talked about.
I’m in a bigger area now. I’m in Ventura County in California. We have three community colleges in our service district and a pretty big population. I would say there’s no difference in the need for where I am now and the work that we’re talking about than anywhere else but particularly in rural areas or less populated areas. Our colleges are called anchor institutions for a reason. They’re like the train station of the Westward migration. If you had a train station, you were going to survive. Your town was going to make it if you had a train stop in your town.
I think community colleges are the modern version of that. If you’re fortunate to have a community college in your region and your service area leveraging it to do this work around economic and all the other things we do, our comprehensive mission. It’s vitally important. Never argue against that. There’s this whole other view of the world. I like to put things in the negative. If the local community college isn’t going to be engaged in asking that question, how do we support entrepreneurship? Where’s it going to come from?
This is what we found out. When we started doing this ecosystem mapping, we found a lot of competition of effort. I don’t mean competition in a, “We’re going to get it. You’re not going to get it.” People doing the same thing and crossing into other a little simple conversation and coordination would have greatly improve and build the amount of services, programs, and access to the community. That ecosystem mapping and asking that question, if you did nothing else, was a huge service. If the community college is going to do it, low likelihood that somebody else or some other entity is going to be able to do that.
That’s it. I forgot that the Hebrew scholars like, “If not me, then who?” If not now, when?
Possibilities: Get one or two people who think the same as you do, start a conversation, and see where that goes.
We’re so well positioned. The other thing I would encourage anybody who would be thinking, “How can I do this or what would I do in this space?” I would just say, get 1 or 2 people who think the way you’re thinking, start a conversation and see where that goes. What I experienced was with the organizations and the interested parties outside of our walls, again in my experience. When they’ve seen us going down this road, they not only have encouraged. They have enthusiastic partners and supporters to the tune, both at Garrett College in Maryland and at North Idaho College in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
We received the largest personal gifts in both of those colleges history because of the work we were doing in entrepreneurship. In North Idaho College, that was more than one. It was two and more than six figure gifts that we’re given to the to the college strictly for the work that we were doing around innovation and entrepreneurship.
That starts to build on itself when you start to get that external support, whether through grant writing or private gifts. Our communities who value us as community colleges, when they see us doing that direct community impact work, it’s highly valued. That certainly was the case, both in Garrett College and North Idaho College.
That’s the formula. Rick, we’ve got to figure out how to clone you.
It’s not me.
Power Of Imagination In Entrepreneurial Thinking
I appreciate that, but that thinking. I want to go back to the phrase you use like the power of possibilities and I want to tie that to the entrepreneurial mindset. Hang with me for a second. This is a little bit geeky but I found a considerable body of research that shows the use of imagination that distinguishes the entrepreneur from the non-entrepreneurs. That the mindset is such that it creates a very powerful incentive to draw from the past to navigate the future.
We just tend to go, “This is a way we’ve always done it. That’s where we’ll continue to do.” It works in some situations. What’s so astonishing, Rick, this is research coming out of University of Pennsylvania, called Prospection Theory. When you use your imagination and you’re reaching for something compelling in the future, that enables us to access problem-solving abilities that are not otherwise available to us. It’s astonishing. That’s what happens to the typical entrepreneur like you that don’t even know it. Somewhere, in your mind, it’s lurking something different and better than what is currently there.
That interesting because when we look at the structure behind us, I do that every day. I’ve got to do something in my work and I go, “Has anybody done this before or are there any good examples of that in California or I’m going to write something. Is there another piece of writing I’ve done that can help me?” I’m always looking at maximizing my resources that have gotten us here. I like to the idea to turn prospection theory.
Strategic thinking is unencumbered by the past. It could be informed by the past, but it is not anchored by the past. Share on XTo me, it’s a version of strategic thinking and strategic thinking is unencumbered by the past or it could be informed by the past but it’s not anchored by the past. The past should only serve, in my mind, as a springboard and these uncharted territories were these other ideas that might prove to be more fruitful but I think you’re onto something there.
It’s like this paper by Seligman. If you’re interested, it’s called Navigating Into the Future or Driven by The Past. This is Martin Seligman who’s the Godfather of Positive Psychology at University of Pennsylvania. They put a rat in a teammate and the rat learns that it goes right and that’s where the reward is. They somehow ablate the left hemisphere of the rats brain like electronically or chemically or something. I’ve forgotten, so that it can’t turn. They put the rat in the maze and the rat figures out to turn 270 degrees to the left.
That has no president for that. It never saw another rat do it. There’s no like rat handbook but what Seligman and others are saying, Rick, is that when there’s this some sort of compelling or the power of possibility, as you put it. Our default brains are constantly working at solving the problem. When you think you’re at rest or your brain is not engaged. It’s engaged. As you said, I like thinking in negatives. This begs the question to me like, what happens to a human being in the absence of the compelling goal?
I don’t think you have to look too far to see a lot of examples with people in your own hemisphere. I just wonder, why do we feel so limited? Why do you think happened to us instead of us causing things to happen? I keep going back to that. The whole power of possibilities thing was rooted in locus of control. Do I want to have some responsibility and enjoy the outcome and the benefits from taking control or do I want something else? We’re in a massive planning activity. If I go in front of a group of people, I say, “I got some good news and some bad news,” and it’s the same thing. The future is coming.
The question is, do we want to plant some flags in the future and take some control over in our own thinking about the future or do we want to go along on the right and see what happens? It’s sad in a way and big way. Too many I believe are encumbered by not being able to think outside of whatever they are that controls around them that they do have the control. When we were sitting around the table talking about, how do we get on entrepreneurship to be a thing here. What we need to do is help people understand the power of possibility. We just focused on that and it sounds trite in a way but it was a powerful concept for us anyway to start to get this regional thinking off the ground.
Rick, if you were to interview entrepreneurs, almost every one of them will very early in the conversation start to devolve what they often call a vision. They might not always use that word but they will start to articulate. There’s something that’s resonant. For some, Rick, it’s like, “I need to escape poverty.” “I need to escape some negative situation.” For others, this could be better. This is a problem that I can solve. One of the entrepreneurs that I interviewed way back in the day, in 2010 for the Ice House Program. It was the guy that started 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, Brian Scudamore.
He started that with $1,000 and an eighteen-year-old kid. With $700, he used to buy used pickup trucks and $300 for flyers and gas knocking on doors. He said eight years in he was getting nowhere. He went out and sat on the edge of a pond with a legal pad. He said it to me just like this, Rick. He’s like, “I’m stuck. I don’t know if I’m like smart enough to do this. I don’t know if I love it enough to do it. I don’t know if I’m smart enough to lead bigger teams.”
How Military Experience Shaped Rick’s Entrepreneurial Thinking
He said, “Wait a minute.” He’s started to think about what could this be and he said, “We’re going to become the FedEx of junk removal.” He said it started to flow out of the pen. He took that back to his office in it up and said, “It wasn’t the Blue Print because it didn’t say how.” He showed it to his team and by God, he became the FedEx of junk removal. He’s now on a Shark Tank thing in Canada. The Dragonstone, I think they call it but it is about the power of possibilities. One question I want to come back to. You’re a young kid and you witness firsthand your parents turning nothing into something, let’s say. You also mentioned you were in the military. How did that help you or how did that shape your thinking if at all?
When you’re eighteen, there’s a lot going on in your head and I needed the military at that point. I did okay in school and I was doing fine. The military is a big organization. Very structured and very hierarchical and all that, but what’s neat about it that maybe isn’t talked about a lot is it all boils down to the squad. Maybe six people, who your whole experience is going to be tied to those people and by definition, it’s a small group. That small group is tasked with achieving a mission. Whatever that mission looks like. It’s solving this problem and solving that problem.
For me, probably the biggest benefit that came out was, I lead teams now and I try to work with building trust at the executive level. That’s squad experience that I had for the time that I was in the army probably informed my might thinking around that. Not from a military objective perspective but from you’ve got 5 or 6 other human beings that you’re depending on to achieve whatever the objective is. These are people who were from different parts of the country. They’re from different ethnic backgrounds, our military and different gender. Alk of that.
How do you overcome or appreciate the differences in the people that you’re working with to still maximize whatever your objective is and achieve that? From an interpersonal communication, conflict management perspective, and certainly from a cultural competency perspective. They don’t even have those terms when I was doing that work in the army. To come to this point in my life and reflecting back on it, those are some pretty invaluable lessons in terms of how to not leverage people to help you do the work that you need to do but to consider the people that are doing the work with you as partners in the process and authentic contributors to the process so that you can fulfill your mission.
In the role that I’m in now, at this level as a Chancellor of a multicolored community college district, the influence I have is at a very high level. Hopefully, people throughout the organization start to see that’s a leadership perspective and a leadership style that might be a value in other places and organization as well. It’s a long answer to your question.
That’s good, Rick. In my new book, The Entrepreneurial Mindset Advantage, I talk about entrepreneurial leadership and recognizing that we have to create space for people to be innovative and entrepreneurial to try things. One of the things that I’ve observed is going back to the beginning of the conversation but I feel like entrepreneurial attitudes and skills are the skills the world now demands. I don’t care what you’re doing. I don’t care whether you’re going to work in an organization, in the government or a startup or big company. You need entrepreneurial attitudes and skills.
You’re right. With these challenges, we’re going to struggle without that orientation.
That’s what I’m saying. We look at student engagement like the dad is clear. Two thirds of kids come out of high school. They’re not engaged in learning and we’re blaming the parents, cell phones and culture. All these other things. Those might be factors. I’m not saying they’re not but I think we have to recognize the ways in which students become alienated from learning because of the ways in which is presented to them.
Any student of any age, if you present an opportunity for them to be engaged on their terms with the subject matter, especially with experiential learning things. Certainly, in our makerspace. We build it for the doorways into the community to invite people onto our campus and these kinds of experiences. We also were focused on our faculty in the institution.
We wanted to have doorways into these spaces there as well. When our engineering faculty and other faculty started bringing their classes in for project-based learning into this vast makerspace, you could just walk through and watch a class take a small group on a problem and look at the engagement from every single person in that small group looking at trying to problem solve their way through that. It’s our structure and our system and a lot of good features in our education system.
We’re just now starting to make some more meaningful movement towards these, what you want to call it hands-on learning or project-based learning or engagement learning or whatever it is. I don’t think we can do that enough because again, I get to meet a student who doesn’t get excited about learning when it’s framed that way for them.
That’s what I was alluding to early when I was talking about that. Rick, if I could say this, having studied every day entrepreneurs for three decades and interviewing hundreds of entrepreneurs. I have this sense of urgency in my heart that I have seen the extraordinary ability of ordinary people. There’s this reservoir of untapped entrepreneurial potential that we can’t get to with our current way of teaching and learning. We can’t get to it with top-down managerial thinking. We can’t measure it with academic achievement scores or IQ tests. That’s the essence of my work is. It’s like helping the world understand, if you do what you always did, you’re going to get what you always got.
Overcoming Challenges in Higher Education and Entrepreneurship
I’ve been on this journey now for a while and wherever I’ve been, I call college presidents. I try to help them understand the value of an organization like NACCE and things like that. What I find is that, there’s so many competing things that to get somebody to focus on this idea of the value. Again, I asked that question, if you believe this was something of value, what’s our role in helping? There’s not a lot of room for people to make space for that thought, “I’m going to focus all my energy on this because their tables are already set. They’ve already got their issues and initiatives. Whatever.”
What you’re doing and what you’re trying to do is important work. My question to you is, how are you seeing movement? Are you seeing it shifting in the direction that you are passionate about and think we got to be going? Are you still seeing these monumental roadblocks and calcified systems and structures that are making an impossible to get there?
I hope to use this show to accelerate this. This particular episode because I’m not seeing it fast enough. I see a lot of community colleges. There’s one in my backyard. It’ll remain nameless but it’s like, entrepreneurship is a box to check. It’s like, we offer small business courses over there. By the way, small business and entrepreneurship aren’t the same thing, newsflash. It’s not happening fast enough.
Weeks ago, I was in Yaoundé in Cameroon, speaking at a government conference. Where the government of Cameroon is recognized, we need to put on entrepreneurship in the schools. What I’m seeing writ large, both domestically and abroad is people are waking up to what you’ve already understood for some time. The world is beginning to wake up to it but we still don’t understand entrepreneurship.
People keep talking about it as a business discipline. To your opening comments, if we frame entrepreneurship in this little box called startup or business, we are never ever going to appeal to anything more than a small percentage of our population. When we reframe the conversation about opportunity, what does the future hold? What is the power of possibilities to different conversation?
This is my own experience. The challenge with other people in leadership roles is, it’s hard to shake somebody off of their foundation. If this is the way they see the world or, however, they see the world. To have them see the world differently is a pretty big investment in a relationship and having that interest be received. There’s change management, the whole idea of that but then you see these examples around the country where there’s some innovative work doing.
A lot of people point out that and they go, “Why aren’t we doing that? Why can’t we do that?” Maybe there’s an inroad there when people start to ask those questions. I haven’t given up on this at all, by any stretch. I do think that when I’m in a room full of college presidents, for example, community college presidents. If I were given the floor for five minutes to talk about NACCE and entrepreneurship. I would get a little response there.
In fact, I’ve had people say, “Yes, we already do that. We have an entrepreneurship course in our college, or we have we have 2D/3D printers in this thing over here. We have a makerspace.” We’re just going to keep trying to push the ball uphill. I think the show that you’re doing, hopefully, get some folks that are going to see this and maybe ask some questions. I’m certainly open to helping anybody who’d want to get started on the journey but it’s almost got to be intrinsic.
I’ll just say this, in an organization like ours that’s talked to countless staff and faculty at the country. I served on an AC board for about a decade and had the opportunities. All this professional is saying, “How can I get my president to see the world the way you do or to support the kinds of things that you’re doing at my institution?” The answer is, if the president or the leadership of the institution can’t see that pathway. It’s probably almost impossible to get on the road.
You’re going to do these one-offs and these pretty cool things that some level in the organization. You’ll get a lot of buzz around those things. Without the executive leadership, it’s not going to take off. My role with NACCE over the years, my interest was trying to be focused on how do we help presidents of these community colleges understand their anchor status in these communities and asking the question about, what should we be doing to support not just economic development but specifically on entrepreneurship? We just need to keep beating that drum and trying to help expand the resources for presidents. When they do look over and say, “Maybe there’s something there,” that we have the support in place to help them do the work that they want to do.
That’s in alignment with this. That’s what I was trying to do in this book, Rick. The Ice House is an exciting book. It’s like an adjunct. People get it. The basics are there. The bones of it are there. This is more of a leadership book. To your point, I’m not trying to convert like a Muslim into a Jew. I’m looking for those early adopters to try to help them and work with them and point them to you as an exemplar.
Everett Rogers wrote about this. I’m the innovator and you’re the early adopter. I can work with you and your success will convince your more reluctant peers to buy in. That’s how change happens. That’s how any entrepreneurial endeavor happens. You don’t have an idea and walk out the door and everybody starts buying your stuff. You’re pushing a big boulder up a hill for a while.
We hung out our shingle at Garrett College and nobody came. We had just spent, I think $80,000 getting this thing built up, getting people trained and developing all this stuff that was going to be a part of it. It was a very visible failure in a small institution where we were putting resources that could have been used somewhere else. It’s clearly a failure but what was cool is that the people who were involved in this said, “What are we going to learn from this? How are we going to take the next?” We have those conversations. Keep up the good work. I’m glad to have this conversation with you.
I am too, Rick. I’m grateful to spend the time with you. As an aside, the nameless community college in my backyard spent millions building a makerspace. They brought in IDO for consulting. It’s big and fancy and they just shut it down. It’s shuddered.
We spent resources. We had a building that we needed to repurpose. We had community partners that wanted to work with us. We had programs that were already existing and we just wanted to create a hub. Basically, we wanted to create a community of a variety of experiences around innovation and entrepreneurship. To that extent, we spent nothing. This was a community that wanted to come together and be a part of this work.
Not only did you spend very little. You generated revenue. It just flipped the whole script. Rick, I’m going to send you a copy of my book. I want to say thanks for taking the time out to do this. I can’t wait to share this episode with the world. This is exactly what I’ve been thinking about for a decade and thank you for what you’re doing.
Gary, I appreciate that. Thank you again. I just want to reiterate that’s there have been a whole lot of people who’ve been a part of this and I’ve learned a lot. Not just from my experience with NACCE but certainly, the very first book I read. It was the Ice House book. It had anything to do with entrepreneurship and that got me started giving me some of the vocabulary and the thinking that’s got me through this whole journey after this point. I’m looking forward to reading your new book. I probably should have read it before this book episode.
You’re off the hook because it’s not available till December 3rd. I have a couple dozen copies the publisher sent me and one of which is I’ll send in the mail to you straight away.
I look forward to that. Thank you for the work that you’re doing. I’ve been following you over the years and watching how the Ice House was developed and certainly, I’ve talked a lot of people about your work. It’s meaningful. Keep it up.
Thank you. Thanks, Rick.