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Tradesmen tap into free MBA expertise: INTERNSHIPS:An innovative consultancy scheme is providing valuable lessons for students from New York's Stern school
By SARAH MURRAY
January 19, 2004
Financial Times

When, in the space of a year, the revenue growth of Ken Taylor Plumbing, a 40-year-old, one-man plumbing service in Harlem, New York, increased from 6.3 per cent in 2000/2001 to 28 per cent - and rose to 38 per cent the following year - it was not because of a dramatic surge in demand for plumbing services.

It was because of the application of some fundamental business principles - the sort of principles you learn while following an MBA programme.

Helping to propel Ken Taylor's business forward was a group of students from New York University's Stern School of Business who formed part of the school's Stern Consulting Corps, a consulting internship programme.

Using what they were learning in the classroom, the students helped Mr Taylor to acquire computer skills and to develop a database of his customers that allowed him to target his marketing effort more carefully. They also helped to train the professional office manager Mr Taylor hired to help run the business while he was out repairing his clients' boilers, washing machines and sprinklers.

Mr Taylor, who is now considering acquiring a second van and hiring extra staff, readily acknowledges how much the students' work has helped him.

"Before, I had no computer, no office manager. I was running the business like I did in 1964 when I started it," he says. "But now I've learnt so much I can even pass it on to some of my friends. It was fun and a great big learning experience - like having a personal trainer."

Tosin Oyefesobi, a second-year Stern MBA student who worked with several small businesses in Harlem, found she was encountering problems that did not necessarily come up in the case studies presented in the classroom.

"Mr Taylor was running the business by himself so when a call came in he couldn't always pick up the phone," she says. "When you come to business school, you understand the business concepts. When you run a business it's easy to get involved with the operations - but you still have to keep an eye out on the bigger picture."

The Stern Consulting Corps aims to give the students exactly this kind of insight. The idea grew from an organisation called Stern Rebuilds, through which

Stern students helped small businesses in Chinatown and Lower Manhattan get back on their feet after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001.

Seeing the potential, the school developed the concept into what is now an extensive internship programme that gives MBA students the opportunity to work with non-profit organisations round the city.

"These programmes are ways of both giving something back to the city but also providing good learning experience for our students," says Thomas Cooley, Stern's dean.

"The advantage is that it gives students an opportunity to see part of the business world that has business issues and problems that they don't encounter in the classroom."

But in Harlem the Stern students were not working alone. They were participating in the Harlem Small Business Initiative (HSBI), a programme begun in 2002 and led by members of the National Black MBA Association and Booz Allen consultants. The HSBI helps equip Harlem-based individual and family-owned businesses with the financial know-how and business tools to make them more competitive and successful.

The Stern students are given training and a mentor while they work on a consulting engagement for 10 weeks with the organisations.

"The students are mostly mentored by consultants like Booz Allen and AT Kearney," says Prof Cooley. "One of the important things is that they should be mentored with people with substantial real-world consulting experience."

The HSBI is just one of a number of organisations in which the students take up internships. The SCC works with New York-based non-profit groups that include Coin (Consulting Opportunities in Non-profits), the Robin Hood Foundation, which funds and supports local poverty-fighting organisations, and Seedco, which provides financial and technical assistance for non-profit organisations and small businesses in dis-advantaged communities throughout the US.

Leigh Graham, senior programme associate at Seedco - and a Stern alumnus - has been impressed. "Not only do the MBAs bring a new perspective in but they also bring in very specific skill sets - marketing, finance or experience from a previous consulting background," she says.

But while the Stern students clearly help the organisations they work with, they are also learning valuable skills of use to themselves by encountering real business problems. In the HSBI initiative, for example, the students helped the 10 small businesses in the pilot with business functions such as staff recruitment and hiring, marketing plans and website development, lease negotiations, computer training, funding applications and creating operating manuals.

An important part of the programme is what the students learn about the process of consulting.

"That was a key part of getting this done - having real-life consultants to show you how to break into the client side and build trust with the clients," says Ms Oyefesobi.

"It helps to learn the skills that you have to have as a consultant - listening and getting people to trust you. And understanding the business from their point of view, but also having an outside point of view."

For Prof Cooley, the SCC plays to what he believes is one of the school's strengths - its ability to capitalise on its location. "It's the idea of New York as a classroom and a laboratory - and the question is, how do you give that substance?"

He also believes the SCC has a role to play in what he sees as the changing nature of business education.

"It's an important part of my vision of what we should be doing to revitalise MBA education to give students a broader view of the world, a broader set of tools and exposure to different ways of thinking," he says, "and also to help develop a sense of social responsibility by demonstrating a commitment to the community."