Brittany

By Becca Broaddus

Four Baylor Business faculty and staff members entrusted with preparing students for their job hunts share their tips for effective networking.

Ken Buckley

Assistant Dean of Career Management

1. Build the relationship first. One of the major fears of networking is asking someone for something when you have no connection or relationship with them. Build the relationship first.
2. Always be prepared to connect. Look for opportunities to meet others and take advantage of those opportunities. Introduce yourself, make great eye contact, and have a warm smile and a firm handshake.
3. Be informed and interesting. Be well read—know what is happening in the business world in the U.S. and internationally.

Hope Koch

Associate Professor of Information Systems

1. Complete your profile. Baylor has two career management systems: HireABear for all Baylor students, and the business school is piloting Handshake for business majors. Students and alumni seeking employment should complete their profiles.
2. Apply to the company’s website. Most companies use the career fair to get you interested in their company. Before they can hire you, they need your electronic résumé and application in their hiring system.
3. Show your interest. For students, if you are interested in a particular company, catch up with them while they are on campus. Many companies host information sessions, and meet and greets. They can get to know you at these events, and then they’ll recognize your name when they view the online applications.

Andrea Dixon

Executive Director of the Center for Professional Selling and the Keller Center

1. LinkedIn: The 21st Century Rolodex. LinkedIn requires active work to create a useful personal networking tool. Every event you attend, you will meet people face-to-face. Follow up and add them to your database. Share positive take-aways from the event and invite the other person to do the same. (Younger business professionals may want to check Google/Wikipedia for this Rolodex reference.)
2. Your online = your offline. What you put online is your face-to-face brand. You cannot engage with people and present yourself as a person of positivity while showing a sarcastic persona online.
3. Tell me about yourself. This is the “Golden Question.” It is the question that is most poorly handled in interviews and in casual conversation. Do not provide the chronological response. What is distinctive about you? What are concrete examples that demonstrate your distinctiveness? Start there.

Daniel Shallcross

Director of Accounting Internships & Career Development

1. Plan ahead and do research. Know how you want to introduce yourself and what you want to say. Once you know your conversation starters and what you want to say, practice in a mirror to yourself. Also, research the participants who may be in attendance at the networking event.
2. Be confident and assertive. Don’t be afraid to start a conversation with a stranger. Please note: being assertive is not the same thing as being aggressive. An assertive communication approach isn’t shy or passive, but maintains respect for others and encourages others around you to be assertive too.
3. Be an active listener. People love to talk about themselves and their passions. After learning something about the person you are networking with, ask open-ended follow-up questions to show you are interested.

Baylor Business Review, Spring 2016

By Becca Broaddus

Ty Findley, BSME ’09, MBA ’10
Senior Associate
GE Ventures
Chicago, Illinois

Ty Findley has always had a “natural curiosity” in business, even when he pursued an undergraduate degree in engineering. So after he graduated with an engineering degree from Baylor, he stepped into the Baylor MBA program.

“I was curious that I didn’t understand the bigger picture,” Findley said. “For me, getting the business side, spending that extra year, was not that big of an investment. It was a perfect complement to that engineering degree. There was a blended understanding with a technical foundation.”

Findley went to Baylor for two reasons: football and engineering. He was able to do both, walking on and playing linebacker while receiving his degree in mechanical engineering. But having seen his father start a successful company, he pursued a master’s in business, focused on entrepreneurship at Baylor.

After graduating from the one-year MBA program, Findley was selected for a job opportunity at Boeing doing a rotation program based in Seattle. The rotation moved him through six engineering environments across the company. Findley started working there with the intention of “pivoting back to the business side” if he didn’t love it.

Meanwhile, as Baylor Bears do, he missed being away from Baylor. Instead of lamenting his location, he decided to do something about it. Findley started the Seattle chapter of the Baylor Alumni Network (BAN).

“I knew absolutely nothing about how to do it when I started,” he said. “Dean Maness and Brenda Morris were very helpful to me. With their mentoring, we put together a steering committee of people who had been engaged with Baylor from Seattle and had interest in helping build a network chapter in the area. From the steering committee, it was just looking back to BAN’s structure and building that bridge between Seattle and Waco. Next thing you know, the team had worked with BAN to host sports watch parties, conduct a Stepping Out in Seattle, build out a Baylor Business Network entity and even host President Starr for a Baylor Parents Network send-off party.”

Although Findley had established the city’s alumni network chapter, he wasn’t at home with his job at Boeing.

“I worked for a product development team conducting new airplane studies at Boeing,” he said. “While I really enjoyed and learned a lot from my years at Boeing, I felt a big calling to pivot back to the business community. [Engineering] wasn’t my long-term mission.”

Findley and his wife moved to Chicago, so he could pursue a second MBA degree, this time focusing on finance and private equity with his acceptance into Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. While he was there, he took the Seattle template for how to create a network chapter and established the Chicago chapter of BAN.

“[BAN has] made such an impact on my family because we’re not in Texas,” Findley, who now serves as a BAN board member, said. “It’s great to see the momentum reach out much broader than just the booming Texas community. I helped create an alumni chapter in both cities I’ve lived in because I love knowing where I can make a direct, measurable impact on the Pro Futuris goal to advance a community of committed constituents. There are a lot of bears in the woods; you just have to get them out of the woods!”

Following his graduation from the program at Kellogg, he found an opportunity as an investor at GE Ventures, GE’s venture capital and growth equity group. He works as an advanced manufacturing investor, where he can use his skills learned in the manufacturing setting of Boeing as well as his business education. He started in August 2015.

As a venture capitalist and a co-founder of two Baylor Alumni Network chapters, networking has become a large part of Findley’s life. He attributes his knack for networking to three things: being prepared, being genuine and being giving.

Baylor Business Review, Spring 2016

By Thasunda Brown Duckett
Chief Executive Officer
Chase Auto Finance

Growing up in Texas, sports were a cornerstone of my childhood. I’ve always played team sports where the whole is greater than the sum of its individual parts. That mentality has stuck with me in life and in my career.

As a business leader, I think of myself as a coach. It’s my responsibility to build a strong team, design a winning strategy and execute the strategy with excellence to bring the team to victory.

One of the most important steps I took when becoming CEO of the auto finance business was to focus on the people and build a winning team. I quickly learned that many people in the auto industry “grew up,” so to speak, in the auto business and have deep subject matter expertise. That level of knowledge and historical perspective is critical—especially because Chase Auto Finance has been in business for over 60 years and the relationships our people have built and sustained are key to our ongoing success.

It was also important for me to balance out that subject matter expertise with people from outside the industry to bring a fresh perspective on issues and challenge the status quo. I always look for four key attributes in people when building a team: passion, good character, people who are intellectually curious and team players—those who know that winning is a team sport.

With this rich and diverse array of skills and knowledge, the business is constantly innovating and pushing the bar higher. At the end of the day, every team needs offense and defense—get the two of them in sync, and you’re in business.

In business we are! My team at Chase oversees a $60 billion portfolio of auto loans and leases for more than three million customers in the U.S. We manage relationships with 75 percent of all U.S. franchised auto dealers. That’s more than 14,000 dealerships across the country. And we have seen more than four years of consecutive loan and lease growth. Those highlights are a direct result of great teamwork.

My Road to the C-Suite

My road to becoming a CEO was unconventional at best. I come from very modest beginnings, but from the time I was very young, my parents encouraged me to think big, take risks and grab the opportunities that came my way. I guess you could say these life lessons have been relevant and prevalent in all that I do.

Rather than let my economic status define me, I worked hard in school, excelled in sports, went to college and got involved in career training and development programs. I was accepted into a corporate internship program called InRoads that taught me and my classmates the real value of building and sustaining a professional network.

And that’s exactly what I did. I met other people with similar backgrounds who were interested in financial services and shared a passion for succeeding in a corporate environment. Through those connections, I landed my first job at Fannie Mae, which led to a 15-year career in the housing industry and eventually to JPMorgan Chase where I now run a major business for one of the world’s leading financial institutions.

Networking and building lasting friendships has given me the support and confidence to take on bigger job responsibilities and a strong sense of community. I have truly benefited from my mentors, friends and colleagues who represent very diverse backgrounds.

The Importance of Paying It Forward

I am so thankful for the opportunities I’ve experienced in my career and believe that it’s my purpose in life to help and inspire others. The best gift I can give to pay it forward is to continue sharing the helpful advice I’ve received along the way. Here are some tips:

• Don’t be afraid to take risks. There will always be highs and lows in a career, but as long as you’re able to learn from every experience, and you have confidence in your ability, you will be successful.
• My father would often tell us kids growing up to, “Reach for the moon, because even if you miss, you’ll be among the stars.” I think that’s true not only in business, but in life.
• As a leader, don’t be afraid to empower your team and give them the tools to succeed. But no matter what, always listen, be humble and understand the needs of individual team members.

Everyone’s journey is different. To paraphrase Sheryl Sandberg, “Careers are a jungle gym…if I had mapped out my career when I was sitting where you are, I would have missed it.” You’ll have to make tough choices along the way—but the journey and the experience is what makes you who you are. Embrace it and find passion in all that you do.

Real success does involve some sacrifice along the way, but always be mindful of the things you should never sacrifice—your integrity, your health, your family and how you treat others. That is what will bring you to the very top.

Baylor Business Review, Spring 2016

By Becca Broaddus

Clint Harp, BBA ’00
Kelly Harp, BS ‘01
Owners
Harp Design Co.
Waco, Texas

It was the hottest summer on record, and the heat was oppressive. Houston was suffocating in the humid, 100-degree days of 2011. Across the state, from car to house to workplace, people clung to their air-conditioned respites. Clint Harp was working in his garage—sweating, hoping the heat would restore him and flush his stress out. Recently, he’d quit his six-figure sales job to pursue his dream of building furniture.

“I had this stupid thought,” he said. “I’m just going to go into the garage. I was going to go in, bang on a pallet of wood, and just sweat for four or five hours.”

And he did. He and his wife, Kelly, had found themselves at odds lately. Clint was sugar-coating their situation, and Kelly knew it.

“After we put the kids down that night, I said, ‘Kelly, I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m totally scared, and I feel like an idiot because I don’t know how this is going to work.’ She looked at me, and all she said was, ‘All right. I can work with this.’ At that moment, it was like, ‘OK. We got this.’ We’d still have these stressful times, but we could always go back to that moment where we knew that we were together in this.”

So the Harp family moved forward—accepting the possibility of bankruptcy, foreclosure, car repossession, bad credit and debt—to follow their dreams.

Kelly wanted to pursue a master’s degree, so when she got a full-ride to Baylor, the family moved to Waco. Kelly started classes, and Clint started volunteering at Habitat for Humanity. A few months in, they ran out of money.

“I had parked my car somewhere, and I was just crying because I’m an idiot,” Clint said. “I’m thinking, ‘I’ve brought my family out here. We have no money. I have no job. I have nowhere to even build furniture, what was I thinking?’”

That day, Kelly suggested they take the kids to the park, and destiny intervened. They stopped to get gas on the way home, and Chip Gaines pulled up on the other side of the gas pump in a Magnolia truck. A few weeks later, Clint was building furniture for a home show Joanna Gaines was hosting.

Clint and Joanna decided to work together before he even had a place to build furniture.

Clint reached out to his friends at Habitat for Humanity to ask if they had suggestions for finding a shop. As it happened, Habitat for Humanity’s original cabinet shop was being phased out, so they offered to rent it to Clint for about $25 a month. He moved his tools out of storage and got to work.

Six months later, they filmed the pilot episode.

“What’s funny is, we’re filming a pilot for HGTV, but we’re as poor as church mice,” he said. “We’re living off Kelly’s stipend from school. I remember the whole time I’m thinking, ‘I don’t know how to tell these people that I’m literally applying for jobs right now. I have no money.’”

But then, things began to change. Fixer Upper gained popularity. Clint hired help. The business blossomed. Kelly left the master’s program to help with the company.

“These little dreams started to come true,” he said. “We built the pole barn. We closed in the front of the shop. We’ve got the paint shed over here. Then, our house got chosen for Fixer Upper. It was crazy.

“I had all these different visions of what this going to be, but ultimately, I wanted to work with my hands, build furniture and build a company where other people would want to work. We wanted to include other craftsmen and craftswomen who do their own thing. We had this vision of a store filled with not only goods that we make, but also goods that other people make, and information about those people. We’re getting to do that now.”

What began as a garage-based stress outlet from his sales job has become a thriving business with 12 to 14 employees, and two DIY Network backyard design specials airing this spring.

“It’s kind of hard for me to remember even who that guy was, because that guy in that garage in Houston had no idea about anything,” Clint said. “He thought he was going to be making tables out of pallets forever. That guy thought he was going to be in a garage by himself for who knows how long. I never had any plans of this.”

Baylor Business Review, Spring 2016

New Approaches to Keeping in Touch

By Eric Krell

How resilient are our most important networks?

The question is yielding unexpected insights and raising new concerns about how we manage our increasingly valuable networks. Consider the Internet, whose durability hinges on our collective ability to detect and repel malicious viruses. At least, we thought it did. It turns out that the Internet, an increasingly critical enabler of our nation’s infrastructure, is also surprisingly vulnerable to good, old-fashioned physical breakdowns. Decrepit thermostats, outdated cooling systems and derelict generators as well as the intentional severing of surprisingly unprotected fiber optic cables pose growing risks to Internet connectivity.

When we shift the focus to our own professional networks, unexpected insights and crucial questions also arise.

The viability of our professional networks now depends more heavily on Internet, email and social media technology. In 2014, the virtual professional networking platform LinkedIn embarked on a project to use its technology to track the employment activity of more than 3 billion global workers. Writing in The New Yorker last year, Nicholas Lehmann characterized LinkedIn’s massive business opportunity this way, “The keeper of your career will be not your employer but your personal network—so you’d better put a lot of effort into making it as extensive and as vital as possible.” Declining single-company careers, growing entrepreneurialism and the rise of the gig economy suggest that this notion is on the mark.

LinkedIn and other powerful technology tools have made it staggeringly easy to extend our professional networks. Happily, a few well-timed and thoughtful email sentences can connect a business school undergraduate in Waco to a chief executive officer in Silicon Valley. Less happily, scope alone does not determine viability. The health of our personal and professional networks depend on more qualitative factors, strategic thinking and hands-on care.

Six Degrees Starts the Connections Craze

A pivotal development in modern networking took place in an Albright College dorm during a 1994 blizzard. Three students watching movies began pondering how many flicks the actor Kevin Bacon had appeared in—and how many other performers he had worked with. The trio conjured a parlor game in which participants throw out an actor’s name and then connect that actor to Kevin Bacon via other actors who have appeared in the same movies. And so, “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” was born, opening our eyes to Kevin Bacon’s extremely busy career and the power of mutual connections and networks.

Nearly two decades later, former PayPal-er Reid Hoffman demonstrated the business value of mutual connections and networks by creating LinkedIn with several partners. The site launched in May 2003, and within a month, had attracted 4,500 members. Today, LinkedIn boasts more than 400 million members in more than 200 countries and territories. Two new members join the network each second.

Three Ways to Rethink Networking

That metric demonstrates the astonishing speed with which professional connections can be made online, but it also hints at some downsides of online networking’s extreme ease and reach.

Have you ever felt a mix of guilt and creepiness when an unsolicited join-my-network email languishes, unopened, in your inbox? Have you labored over whether or not to ask a more experienced person in your field to connect? Ever kept someone in your online network who you’d rather boot because you’re partly concerned about hurt feelings? Have you received unsolicited and not terribly credible endorsements from contacts?

I’ll hazard a guess you answered “yes” to at least two of these questions if you’re a business professional or a business student with an Internet connection. This is not to single out LinkedIn. Powerful tools with incredibly valuable upside should be carefully used and maintained to lower the chances of misfiring.

Robert Ingram, the director of the Baylor Business Network, understands this. He is straightforward in defining his group’s mission—serving as the liaison between Baylor Business alumni and Baylor University—and intentional in how he uses virtual networking technology. He uses LinkedIn to help drive attendance at in-person networking engagements. “My network is based on eye-to-eye contact and handshakes,” Ingram says. “When you add networking technology to one-to-one interaction, you can get the best of both worlds.”

Not all networking needs to be in-person, but all networking should be intentional and in the service of a clearly stated mission, regardless of what tools are used to execute the mission. Rethinking the following approaches can help on this count:

When to build your network: Many mid-career professionals know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of “Lost my job/looking for a new one!” email blasts from suddenly active network contacts. Once the job-loss empathy subsides, a less kindly skepticism sets in: Why do I only hear from him when he needs something? The most effective forms of networking are continuous, rather than event-driven. The best time to cultivate new network contacts is when you least need them. Consider devoting an hour or two to review your network at least once or twice a year, much as mid-career professional should review her retirement portfolio.

How to build your network: The best forms of networking don’t feel like networking at all. Whenever Hoffman sits down with one of his connections, he reportedly asks them how he might help them. It’s a basic and surprisingly effective approach; try it in your next networking encounter. (I have—and found that it A) equipped me with a friendly, focused way to open the discussion; and B) freed me from the sometimes awkward maneuver of asking for help because the other party has always repeated the same question later in our conversation.)

How to manage your network: Who do you accept to your network and why? What types of folks do you seek to add to your network, and how often are you doing so? Addressing these questions—even in a relatively rudimentary manner, can strengthen your network and save time. Turning down LinkedIn connection proposals from anyone you have not yet met (virtually or in-person) can prevent virtual networks from becoming too unwieldy for some. Identifying the types of individuals we seek to add to our networks (e.g., other professionals in my industry, function or geography; more experienced, successful people in my field; or chief human resources officers) can bring more form and intentionality to our networks than most automated tools or functionality allow.

Measuring the quality of our increasingly personal professional networks is difficult at best, but focusing on quality can help us manage our networks, so we operate a bit more like a business version of Kevin Bacon.

Or not. It turns out that Kevin Bacon’s dominant ubiquity also needs rethinking. A study by University of Pennsylvania Institute for Biomedical Informatics researcher Randall S. Olson shows that the actor Eric Roberts is by far the most linkable actor; he is within two degrees of separation of one in four of the nearly 2 million actors listed in IMDb’s massive movie database. Bacon doesn’t even crack Olson’s list of the top 100 most linkable actors.

Baylor Business Review, Spring 2016

Alumni, students, faculty, staff, parents, recruiters, donors and friends of the Hankamer School of Business are inextricably linked. The interconnectedness and shared experience of being a member of the Hankamer family is a unique bond that brings us together.

Our faith-based heritage and commitment to integrity provides the foundation for collaborative and mutually beneficial relationships. From student-to-student, student-to-faculty, student-to-recruiter, student-to-alumni, and alumni-to-alumni relationships (among other relationships), Baylor Business fosters and supports engagement on several levels. This complex network, set within a global perspective, allows us to stay connected to our students long after they graduate.

This issue of the Baylor Business Review explores the art of networking and building relationships among Baylor alumni and external groups. From traditional face-to-face meetings to the utilization of social media platforms, building and maintaining professional and personal relationships can be critical for the modern businessperson.

In an effort to produce the best business school magazine for our readers, we will be distributing our annual readership survey in the coming weeks. Please watch your email inbox for a readership survey from Baylor Business. If you’d like to be added to our email list, please visit baylor.edu/business/email.

Baylor Business Review, Spring 2016