Entrepreneurs bring businesses beyond classroom

The Kelley School of Business Johnson Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation is consistently ranked among the country’s best business schools by BusinessWeek magazine, U.S. News & World Report and the Wall Street Journal, according to the school’s website.

However, young entrepreneurs in Indiana are also learning entrepreneurship tactics outside the classroom, running successful businesses and competing with well-established companies using a combination of social media, technology and street smarts.

Whittney Beechy, a 24-year-old interior and architectural designer, founded Mawr Design Inc. in September 2009.

Beechy is a third-generation entrepreneur who grew up learning entrepreneurial tactics.

“I think it’s a lot easier for people who have grown up around it as opposed to people who maybe come from families where everyone has always worked for a company or other people,” Beechy said. “You just don’t have the same support system.”

Family support is partly why Beechy opted out of entrepreneurship classes that were offered while she was in college.

“None of the professors were entrepreneurs,” Beechy said. “I didn’t want to pay to take classes from people who had never been through it.”

Visiting assistant professor of entrepreneurship Brian Anderson said entrepreneurial ventures, especially those competing against well-established competitors, are successful when they provide powerful innovation.

“It all comes down to the power of the idea,” Anderson said. “Has that entrepreneur figured out a better way to figure out an existing need? Did they figure out a need that didn’t quite exist before?”

Alex Mitchell, a 20-year-old IU-Purdue University Indianapolis student, and Jordan Abidor, a 19-year-old Arizona State University student from Indiana, said they recognized this would be a much greater challenge in their industry when they merged Mitchell’s now defunct clothing line “Of Rome” with Abidor’s “Arkaik” in 2007.  
 
“As much as I’d like to say ‘Do something new and fresh,’ that’s become almost impossible in our business,” Mitchell said. “The T-shirt and apparel industry is saturated with new companies starting up every week. Whatever you can imagine — it’s likely on a T-shirt.” 

So instead of doing something “new and fresh,” Mitchell said he and Abidor tried to “do it better” by taking Arkaik to the streets — or rather the concert venue  — selling their line at concert venues across the Southwest and at Warped Tour 2010.
 
“While on Warped Tour and selling at shows across the country, I learned a plethora of marketing tactics and strategies that I have implemented and improved to grow Arkaik on the social network pages,” Abidor said.

Beechy also talked about how essential social media has been to the development of her business.

“You have all the resources at your fingertips,” Beechy said. “At the click of a button, your business is exposed to people that you’ve never had an opportunity to meet.”

Anderson said that no one, not even professors, knows exactly how to measure the quality of social media influence, even though they recognize  that social media is a great tool.

However, Anderson agrees with Mitchell, Abidor and Beechy, who say entrepreneurship and social media are similar because in order to really understand them, you have to go out and do it.

“Do not expect four semesters of business classes to really prepare you for what goes into running a small business,” Mitchell said. “I was fortunate enough to start at 15, and I’ve had the time and mistakes to get where I am today.”