Belmont Entrepreneurial Showcase: February 2006 Archives

We offer our students the opportunity to learn through experience in two ways. For those who have their own business, we offer student business hatcheries and incubator programs. For the rest we have formed a series of campus based businesses. Our first three were retail stores: a record store with our music business program, a retail art gallery with our art department, and a clothing store set up as a private business by one of our majors. This year we launched two new campus-based businesses: a public relations firm and a graphic design firm. Both are in cooperation with those academic departments. The Nashville Business Journal ran a story on these two new businesses this week.

We are experiencing a new challenge for the campus-based businesses we run here on the Belmont campus. Our students run a record store, a clothing store, an art gallery, a graphic design firm, and a PR firm. All five of these businesses are faced with succession issues this year.

One of our local papers ran a story on this today:

Looking at the profit and loss sheet, [Boulevard Design] likely would not have survived its short two years in the graphic design industry.

[Laura] Duditch [student manager] wants that to change, but she will not be around to see it. She graduates in May and has planned an adventure in Taiwan with her future husband. One of her student interns will take the helm after graduation.

Bryan Vaughan has a similar quandary. The junior music business major spent nearly the last two years managing a record store called Reverb Media, a few spaces down from Boulevard Design Studio. Vaughan leaves this summer to study abroad, then to manage his start-up publishing company called Paper Garden Records.

"It's hard to put in everything when you know you're going to give it up," he said.

The students experience the same kind of succession issues that any small business faces. The only difference is that instead of taking decades, succession for them is accelerated down to a few short semesters.