David Williams talks to MBA alums who graduated in the last big MBA recession (2001-2002) and gets their advice on how they turned the downturn into an upswing. How did they get through it, and what advice can they give to for MBAs graduating today?
The Corporate Star
Name: Ginger Taggart
Place of birth: USA
MBA: University of Bath School of Management 2002
Position: Director of international markets, Disneyland Paris
I was due to fly out to England to start my MBA on September 12th 2001. I was putting the last things into my suitcase when the attack on the World Trade Centre began, and I knew immediately it was going to be a very tough time. Things had already been looking bleak for the economy for several months and now they were only going to get worse.
I had worked for ten years in the States in a variety of travel and tourism companies, starting in advertising agencies and then moving into in-house marketing, ending up working for Disney in Orlando. My goal had always been to live and work abroad and to move into international marketing, so doing an MBA in the UK made a lot of sense. The economy was looking so bad however that colleagues did ask me whether I should be giving up a good job at such a time.
For me, the key piece of advice I could give is to look for a job before you need one. It is easy to think that an MBA is a year or two out of work which allows you to focus on your studies, but it is absolutely critical during that process to plan your strategy for re-entry. Make sure your biggest assignment is to look for a job after the MBA.
To this end, I networked aggressively with as many people as possible. I knew Disneyland Paris were opening a second gate (park) so I reached out to various executives and contacts I knew to ask if they had any special-project needs. It turned out they had a short-term project available so I took a week and a half off the MBA and worked on the project in Paris. It wasn’t my plan necessarily to come back to Disney, but it kept up the network and increased my international experience.
After the short-term project in Paris, I spent a lot of time that spring really looking for a strong three-month summer project. I reached out and networked with everyone I knew from my old company. I had them reach out to friends of theirs. I went out to my contacts in the media and to Bath’s alumnae. This was what finally worked for me, and it was through an alumnus that I got a summer internship with Coca Cola in Greece.
I was extremely fortunate that I had two job offers coming out of the MBA, one from Coca Cola and one from Disney. They came through networking and doing solid projects while I was studying. Had I waited and not done either of those I would not have had the offers for sure. Essentially I was using the MBA as a platform to contact new companies.
The Entrepreneur
Name: Nirmal Chhabria
Place of birth: India
MBA: Cardiff Business School 2003
Position: Owner, Niva International
The first job I got after completing my MBA was as a sales associate for Phones4U, selling mobile phones. It was a tough job market. Perhaps if I had graduated a couple of years before or a couple of years afterwards, things might have been different, but I needed money and I wanted to stay in Cardiff after my MBA. I could see this was a city with lots of potential for growth and I wanted to be part of it. My plan was to work for two years and then set up on my own. So I stayed and I looked for an opportunity.
While I was looking, I did a wide variety of jobs. I sold life insurance. I sold loans. I did private tuition for business-studies students at £5 an hour, including some from the MBA program I had just left. I worked as a driver for a Chinese takeaway. And it was while I was working for the credit insurer Atradius that the break came.
Atradius was my day-job, but in the evening I was also working as a research analyst, writing industry reports on a freelance basis. One of the reports I wrote was on the scrap-metal industry and I began to realise that this was a huge export opportunity.
UK scrap metal attracts a premium price. It is top quality, well cut and sheered, and properly segregated. But at the time scrap was being moved around the world as a break-bulk cargo, so that if you wanted to buy it, you had to buy a whole shipload, which might cost $5-6 million. Only the very large steel manufactures could do this. My idea was to sell UK scrap in shipping containers so allowing me to sell direct to the small and medium-sized steel manufactures in much more affordable amounts. These smaller manufactures make up eighty percent of the market. I left Atradius after two and a half months and set up Niva International in 2005.
It has been tough to build the company. I presented to 167 venture capitalists and they all turned me down. No one would lend to me. I had to borrow from friends. I was working out of my kitchen so had to borrow offices when people wanted to see me. UK scrap merchants weren’t used to dealing with shipping containers. But we persevered, and by moving into specialised commodities such as tyres and brass we were able to succeed. From having lost $8000 on my first transaction we are now tracking for a turnover of £11 million next year.
If you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to make full use of all the resources that are in front of you. An MBA is not just a piece of paper: it is an opportunity to make the most of an amazing set of resources: from the books to the contacts. Most people are in a cocoon or a shell; they are just doing a degree. They don’t try hard enough.
Read the full article: Get up on the downstroke