|
|
 UNDERGRADSMain Page2007 RankingsAdmissions Q&AsCareer Q&AsUndergrad ForumReading ListRecruiter Q&AsSchool Report CardsSchool ToursUndergrad 24-7Undergrad VideosNews HeadlinesPREMIUM CONTENT
| |
SEPTEMBER 2002 MBA JOURNAL: INTRODUCTION Mike Grossman: Who I Am, and Why B-School Is for Me "My career experience fostered in me a fascination with the behavior and buying patterns of retail consumers. It's where human nature meets the economy. And it was becoming clear that the traditional marketing tools were becoming obsolete." It didn't take long for me to realize that the long-term time commitment and sacrificed income necessary was far beyond what I was willing to give. Plus, at the time I couldn't copy-edit to save my life, and that's what most entry-level opportunities required, at least to some degree. So I turned to Wall Street, hoping to find religion. I took a job as an equity broker at a small investment bank which provided me and my colleagues with a great deal of freedom in terms of developing our own business plans. And boy did we. After four months of trial and error, I realized that while American investors were being bombarded with investment proposals, overseas prospects were under-penetrated. So we developed and supervised a small but very capable sales team which sought retail and small corporate investors all over the world, via telemarketing and direct mail campaigns. In a business where two or three new accounts a week is considered very good, we often opened that in a day. We benefited greatly from the fact that the language of the international business community is English, since the only other language that I can speak is Latin. And a word or two of another language here or there was often enough to help break the ice. Our customers were usually owners or CFOs of small to medium-sized private businesses in Europe, looking to invest their spare capital in the American markets. We ran a swing shift to keep the office running almost 24 hours a day. Europe and Asia are in different time zones, so I had to live on their schedules. This meant I had to reset my biological clock so that I would go to bed around 6 p.m., and get up at 1:00 in the morning. I took the subway to work in the middle of the night for years (and I never had a problem, I might add). People my age would be getting home from the bars, and I would be going to work. And I had to keep the schedule on the weekends. Otherwise my sleeping patterns would get thrown off. My social life was non-existent, but the sense of mission I felt at work filled the void. After three years, I moved on to a much larger, older New York Stock Exchange member firm. My trailing 12 months of commission production at this point was approximately $320,000. I continued to do the same sort of overseas business, but I could see trouble on the horizon. Increased competition from other brokerages and investment banks and a new set of rules and regulations, along with increased enforcement of old ones, resulted in a prohibition on my activities. Foreign regulators wished to prevent the penetration of their markets by non-domestic brokerages, and with the help of American regulators, they did so. A lot of what we were doing was technically not legal, but up until this point, it was the equivalent of jay-walking. Now the laws carried real teeth, and they were being enforced. I had to cease my activities at the direct request of both domestic and foreign regulatory agencies, which meant an end to my time in the brokerage business. I came away feeling that Wall Street was about pagan money-worship. Maybe so pagan it would embarrass Ayn Rand. I'm not so proud of how we performed for our customers, so I can't really decide if that's a good thing or not. I sought to reinvent myself, and in September of 2000, I took a position with Cendant Corporation developing and planning direct marketing campaigns, with a focus on telemarketing and direct response mail. While it didn't have the excitement of Wall Street, it did provide me with my first exposure to true large-scale direct marketing. A typical marketing campaign could involve several hundred thousand pieces of mail, or an attempt to contact over a hundred thousand customers in telemarketing efforts with partner clients such as Capital One, America Online, and Chase Bank. I began to understand how much I did not know. My career experience fostered in me a fascination with the behavior and buying patterns of retail consumers. It's where human nature meets the economy. And it was becoming clear that the traditional marketing tools were becoming obsolete. Postage rates have risen, and this, combined with the lower response rates due to the sheer volume of junk mail, makes direct mail a dinosaur. And the overpopulation and regulation of outbound telemarketing rules it out as being cost-efficient. Both brokerages and direct marketing companies will have to find another medium to use. A new paradigm. Everyone on Wall Street is wondering how retail brokerage can save itself. I think the answer is in CD-ROM, but that's another story. And it's a question that I really can't answer without certain quantitative skills, such as accounting and statistics. You know, the sort of things you learn in, say, business school. And of course, the question that everyone is asking me, why am I choosing to leave New York City for the University of Iowa? Helpful hint for the application process: visit the schools you're applying to if you can. Even if you think you know what it's going to be like, visit anyway. You want to be braced for where you're going to be living for the next two years. I had actually first been to Iowa in 1996, during the Iowa Republican Primary. I was doing some volunteer work at the New York office for Senator Bob Dole while he was running against Pat Buchanan. They needed help in Iowa, and so I spent six weeks in there during the primary. Even though it was freezing, I got to see a lot of the state, and I liked it. The people struck me as some of the most sincere and, much to my surprise, cosmopolitan people that I had ever met. When I went back to visit again for three days after I was admitted to the Tippie School of Management in mid-April, I was reminded of why I had such a favorable impression. I liked the students and the administration, and Iowa City is a great little town. Everything's within walking distance, which is good news since I hate to drive and don't have a car. I was admitted to MBA programs in the New York City area, but Iowa felt more 'right' than did any of my more geographically convenient local choices. And I was very impressed with the strength of the marketing, finance, and accounting programs. It's been said that Iowa doesn't attract many recruiters from the coasts, but I'm not worried about that, even though I think I'd like to return to New York after graduation. I've always been one to make my own breaks, and I can do it better than any 'network' can. Approaching others with ideas and concepts is what I do best, and one of my principal strengths is selling myself. I've only been turned down for one job for which I've interviewed. I was offered a graduate assistantship, which made me eligible for residential tuition. This, in addition to a partial scholarship, made it a very cost-attractive option. Iowa's program is unique in that it features about only 75 students per class, and a team-oriented approach that makes it the polar opposite of The University of Chicago. Having come from lassie-faire Johns Hopkins and not having been overly successful there, at least from an academic standpoint, I thought it might be best to try something a little different. Being stronger in the verbal than the quantitative fields, I think that this former political science major will need all the help he can get in places like statistics and calculus. Even among business schools, Iowa is known for having a quantitative bent, so I plan to do a lot of studying before classes even begin. To paraphrase a cliché, I still love New York City, but I don't think that I'm 'in love' with New York City anymore. It wasn't September 11. I saw those buildings burn from my apartment, but I came to grips with that. It was just more a need for changing the scenery. Seven-and-a-half years is a long time to be anywhere, and it feels even longer if there's nothing keeping you there. There's an element of adrenal exhaustion. And what about when I'm done? I hope that my concentration in marketing will help me develop the new generation of tools that will help breathe life back into retail brokerage. I'd love to devise sales strategy in the bowls of a wire house, which is what they call the big, old Wall Street brokerage firms. I'd like to be able to conceive and dictate marketing offensives, rather than just implement them. Or maybe I'll find a technology I really believe in, and start my own software company. So me and my three guinea pigs (Wayne, Parker, and Todd - also known as 'the boys'), are headed out to Iowa City. IMPACT (Involvement, Motivation, Professionalism, Achievement, Challenge, and Teamwork) is Iowa's pre-MBA prep program, and it begins on August 16. Attendance is mandatory, so I need to find a place before August 1. Iowa, ready or not, here I come. Stay tuned. If you have any questions concerning the Tippie MBA program here at Iowa, feel free to drop me a line at michael-grossman@uiowa.edu.  Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed. Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here. Learn more, go to the BusinessWeekOnline home page  | | SEPTEMBER Learn about your online education options |
 Copyright 2002, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.Terms of Use | Privacy Policy |
MBA Insider
Printer-Friendly Version
