While earning her business degree at Pepperdine University, Sara Dakarmen used her new know-how to persuade her husband, Todd, to turn his hobby selling salvaged Porsche parts into a full-time business.
Seven years later, Los Angeles Dismantler Inc. of Sun Valley employs 17 workers and generates annual sales of $5 million to $10 million. Dakarmen has always wanted to earn an MBA to better equip her to guide the tidy salvage yard and warehouse, which supplies customers around the world.
"I have so many ideas of which way to go, but targeting which direction to put your energy is hard," said the Encino resident, who earned her undergraduate degree in a part-time program at the Malibu school's Encino campus. "And if you don't manage it well, you'll shoot yourself in the foot."
She's the type of student Pepperdine is targeting with its revamped entrepreneurship program, which will roll out this fall.
The new lineup will teach students how to come up with bankable ideas before they are taught how to set up, finance and market new ventures. It won't be available at the Encino campus until next summer, but Dakarmen is already dusting off her GMAT study guide.
"Sign me up," she said.
The linchpin of the program will be a series of seminars that the students will take at least one of before they begin the program's six courses. The 90-minute seminars will explore cutting-edge fields, including clean technology, life sciences, entertainment and e-commerce.
Then the students will take the first course, which will teach them how to generate ideas that are personally compelling.
"We think there is a gap, particularly on the front-end process, the idea-generation phase" of entrepreneurship education, said Linda Livingstone, dean of the university's Graziadio School of Business and Management and a management professor. The first course will use the Simplex system, an applied creativity process designed by corporate consultant Min Basadur, who is also a management professor at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada.
The rest of the courses, ending with new-venture creation, are expected to be taken in sequence by second-year MBA students, attending full time or part time. The final class will include a formal business plan presentation to a group of venture capitalists and angel investors.
Previously Pepperdine's entrepreneurship concentration for its part-time MBA students was made up of two classes: entrepreneurship and business plans. Full-time students covered the same topics in four shorter classes.
