“I consider myself the keeper of the golden goose,” says Rose, a third-generation owner of the company his grandfather, Roman, founded in 1929. “As long as the goose keeps laying golden eggs, our 150 employees still have jobs and can keep on raising their families. That’s an important task … and my MBA degree has proved invaluable. Without an MBA, I wouldn’t have the tools I need to do the job as effectively as it needs to be done.”

As an example, Rose points to how his MBA taught him the simple yet critically important concept of cash flow.

“You need to know the difference between cash flow and profit,” he notes. “I learned early on that a lot of companies can survive loss (unprofitable) years, but it’s cash flow that takes a company down more often than not.
   
“Good cash flow has helped us survive during this recession,” he adds. “You can be profitable and still have problems if you don’t look after your cash flow. Maybe you’re growing too fast or not collecting well enough. Poor cash flow can bring you to your knees … to take this company to the next level, I felt I really needed expertise in things like that.”

Rose had extra incentive to gain that knowledge. He had always planned to work in the family business after graduating from Marquette University with an electrical engineering degree, but was troubled by a stark fact related to family-owned businesses: the third generation of ownership fails an astonishing 97 percent of the time.

“I really wanted to beat those odds,” he says.

Pros and Cons
For Rose, getting an MBA was a no-brainer. In many fields and companies, it’s a mandatory requirement to achieve middle-management positions and above. But it’s not that clear-cut for everyone. There are many things to consider, both pro and con.

Some negatives are the high cost and debt incurred, potential lost earnings for those who leave employment to attend school full-time, and delayed “real-world” experience, which many pundits say is more valuable than classroom theory. And for a resounding exclamation point to that concept, consider guys like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates — guys who have done pretty well without MBAs.

But positives abound, too, including superior earning potential, enhanced credibility among peers and colleagues, and fruitful alumni networks for job hunting and solving thorny business problems.

Diane Kavalauskas, a senior career advisor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Sheldon B. Lubar School of Business, says people who are on the fence about whether or not to pursue an MBA should talk to a university advisor who can help them weigh the pros and cons.

“We always ask people about their background and their goals after they finish the program,” she says. “In general, if someone is established in their career, and they want to stay in their field but advance to the next level — become a middle manager — then an MBA is ideal for them.”

Kavalauskas adds that most MBA programs want students who have three to five years of work experience.
“It’s a big problem when you get an MBA with no experience in that field,” she points out. “You end up over-qualified for entry-level jobs and under-qualified for advanced jobs because you have no experience.”

Critical Criteria
Those who decide to pursue an MBA degree should consider several key things when selecting a business school. One of the first is location, because it makes sense for students to attend a school that’s near where they’d like to work, so they can develop local job contacts while they attend school, Kavalauskas says.

“Getting an MBA from a school in an area where you want to live can certainly be helpful,” she says. “Many students end up getting jobs through people they meet in courses.”

Rose chose a similar strategy, but in reverse. After reading that third-generation business owners succeed more often if they first work for another company, he focused on finding a job in cities with nearby top-10-ranked MBA programs. He ended up taking a job with an electrical contracting company in Detroit in 1986 and attended the University of Michigan’s business school, where he pursued an MBA with an emphasis on marketing. He attended night school part-time for about four years, and his employer paid most his tuition.

“Even though I left my job two or three years after I graduated from business school to come back to Milwaukee, my old employer received some benefits, too, because I brought a lot of what I learned and applied it directly to my job and the company while I was still in school,” he notes. “They still got a pretty good bang for their buck. I developed financial models for them and computer models for pricing, as well as statistical analysis that became a predictive model for the kinds of jobs they should look for — jobs that offered the highest financial return.”

Like many MBA students, Rose opted for a top-tier program because he wanted to learn from the best professors and benefit from a strong alumni-networking base. Some studies also suggest that graduates of top-tier programs earn more money than grads from lower-tier schools.

The prestige factor also figured into his school selection.

“Let’s put it this way: When people ask me what kind of degree I have, I always say a Michigan MBA, not just an MBA,” he says.

Other Considerations
Kavalauskas also suggests that prospective students look for programs accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB, at www.aacsb.net), which provides the educational equivalent of a Good Housekeeping Seal of approval.

“It may not make any difference to some employers, but it indicates a student came from an established, high-level, credentialed school,” she says.

Prospective students should also find out what employers recruit heavily at a particular school, as well as ask career offices for graduate surveys. Those will help students determine such things as what percentage of graduates obtained jobs, the kinds of jobs they got, where they got jobs, etc.

“They should also find out what kind of career services the university offers — things such as career fairs and advisors that can help polish resumes and interviewing skills and help students search for internship opportunities,” she advises. “You can find all that through a meeting with a career advisor.”

In addition, it behooves prospective students to do informational interviews with people outside the schools to get their impressions of various schools. For instance, people who are in accounting could talk to employees of large accounting firms and ask which schools they recruit from, what they look for in prospective employees and how valuable an MBA degree is in that field, she says.

The Online Option
Both Kavalauskas and Rose tout the value of classroom instruction as opposed to the trend toward online MBAs for time-pressed students. However, Kavalauskas notes that online programs aren’t always completely devoid of interaction with other students — it just isn’t face-to-face, for the most part. Moreover, online programs are more practical for some students who prefer an MBA program at a school that’s too far away to attend in person, perhaps due to job responsibilities.

“Just be sure it’s a program that includes real-time interaction with other students online, not just posting messages to each other,” she cautions. She also notes that her son took a University of Wisconsin-Madison online program because he worked in Boston but wanted to establish Wisconsin connections to get a job here.

“I wanted the experience of meeting other students,” Rose explains. “It’s an extremely collaborative process. You don’t go and plug yourself into a cubicle and type your way through the program. We had group projects in just about every class that required getting together with fellow professionals, and sometimes competing against each other to solve simulated business problems.

“I remember taking a finance class from someone who used to be the chief financial officer at Chrysler Corp. who told us stories about meetings between Lee Iacocca and bankers — things you normally wouldn’t hear about unless you read about it in a book,” he adds. “I heard things like that every day from professors.”
   
Top-Notch ROI
Rose says he always wanted to be the CEO of a major corporation, and he wanted Roman Electric to be that major corporation. That wouldn’t have happened without his MBA, which he says gave him the ability to speak fluently the language of business with lawyers, bankers and accountants, as well as confidently challenge their assumptions instead of taking them at face value.

The MBA also gave him an invaluable big-picture view of his business.

“The analogy I use is the size of window you’re looking through,” he says. We have people in the field whose window is doing the technical side of their job as efficiently as possible. Then there’s project managers, whose windows are a little bit bigger — keeping track of what their customers are doing, what opportunities they see in their niche.

“I oversee multiple project managers, so my window has to be even larger yet,” he continues. “I have to understand how the economy affects us, and how to talk to a banker … you need certain tools in your pocket. Without them, you’re going to get blindsided.”
   
And disrupt production of those valuable, employee-supporting golden eggs. 

Photos by Shanna Wolf

By Ken Wysocky

Ken Wysocky, owner of Write Words Communications, is a freelance writer based in Whitefish Bay.

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