At 27 Calvin Hunt finally stumbled across his first great opportunity. The Atlanta native had graduated from Florida State in 2008 directly into the teeth of the Great Recession. A shot at a dream job in the corporate headquarters of Hatteras Yachts in North Carolina vaporised as the tanking economy swiftly decimated the luxury-boat business. Instead, for nearly four years Hunt toiled at a Hatteras dealer in Orange Beach, Alabama servicing old boats, struggling to sell new ones. By the summer of 2012, his interest in the marine business effectively scuttled, Hunt had relocated to Austin, Texas, to attend an unusual one-year MBA programme focussed on entrepreneurship at the Acton School of Business. “The goal was not to earn an MBA,” he recalls. “It was to learn to start and run a business.”
That’s when his big break appeared. A month before beginning business school Hunt ran into a friend interested in hydraulic fracking. The technique can require transporting massive amounts of water across miles of open desert, and Hunt and his new partner soon discovered that long, flexible hoses would be superior to the industry-standard 40-foot-long sections of stiff aluminum piping. The problem? Almost no one made hoses with large enough diameters to be useful for the frackers.
Sensing an opening, Hunt swung into action, first locating a manufacturer of fire hoses in Erie, Pennsylvania and then busting his tail to line up enough pre-sales to convince the manufacturer it was worthwhile to retool its factory to produce bigger hoses. By November he had secured an exclusive North American distribution deal, and by April, when the first hoses shipped, his Austin-based Frontline Fluid Solutions had four employees, was profitable and was on track to reach an estimated $4 million in sales its first year.
What he hadn’t done in those crammed and chaotic nine months: Drop out of business school. Incredibly, Hunt had chosen to give cheap equity to his business partner so he could devote himself full-time to finishing his MBA at the tiny 24-student, ten-year-old Acton School. The education, he says, was worth the dilution. “I felt like I needed to finish the programme to run the business effectively,” he says.
Acton inspires this sort of loyalty because of its relentless focus on a single goal: Educating aspiring entrepreneurs. The curriculum discards the traditional MBA silos of finance, accounting and marketing to revolve around the entrepreneurial cycle of creating, growing and selling a business. Courses actually sport names like ‘Opportunity’, ‘Raising Money’, ‘Customers’ and ‘Harvest’, and they are taught exclusively by highly successful entrepreneurs rather than by traditional academics.
These volunteers—none takes a meaningful salary—are entirely devoted to teaching. The current roster of ten professors boasts an alphabet soup of advanced degrees from elite institutions, but they publish no research, and Acton grants no tenure. Instead, the lowest-rated teacher (as judged by student evaluations) is asked not to return the following year. (About 8 percent of the students also fail to complete their degree, a much higher percentage than most top MBA programmes).
“I have found that teachers who have either ongoing business experience or prior business experience—and who focus on teaching, not research—are intensely more valuable to students. Research is valuable to institutions and to society, but teaching is teaching,” says Jeff Serra, a longtime Acton professor and serial entrepreneur. After serving as CEO of oil refiner Philbro Energy prior to its 1997 sale to Valero, Serra founded a renewable energy company that he sold for $125 million, an Austin-based technology investment fund and most recently—and most creepily—Vida Capital, which is in the business of buying life insurance policies from the elderly for their value after those people die.
Inside the classroom Acton adopts the same case-study technique used by many of the best business schools, particularly Harvard Business School, where much of the material was developed. Where Acton differs dramatically from Harvard is in the amount of time its students spend inside that classroom—five months compared with 18—and its cost, $49,500 compared with $127,000.
That’s because Acton students spend their first four months studying online. During this prematriculation period the budding entrepreneurs are familiarised with the case method and learn basic financial skills like reading a balance sheet and discounting cash flows. The time commitment during “pre-Mat” is only 20 to 25 hours a week, allowing many students to keep full-time jobs—and further reducing the opportunity cost of the degree.
It seems to be working. Two months after graduation 25 percent of Acton’s class of 2013 were either running their own businesses or in the process of starting one. Over a longer time horizon the numbers are even more impressive: A full 50 percent of all Acton alumni describe themselves as entrepreneurs and another 23 percent say they will be running their own company “someday soon”.
it was very delightful to hear such a wonderful news about the B-School and i as an aspirant of entrepreneurship congratulate the initiators!!i wouldn\'t be more happy to pursue my course at Acton because i believe it will more than sufficiently cater to my ambitious needs. my query is will the B-school provide for scholarships to Indian students?
on Nov 5, 2013