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May/June 2005

MBA Consultants analyze firms and add value

By 2013, the three prospering counties in the Highland Lakes area in Texas’ Hill Country will need to supply 21,454 vacancies to meet the demand for workforce housing.

That’s a number Jayne Mortensen, executive director of the Building Industry Association of the Highland Lakes, needed to guide plans for future sustainable growth in what is fast becoming an affluent resort and retirement destination north of Austin. And she got it — along with armloads of related information on housing and rental needs — by turning to a group of Mays Business School MBA consultants.

Compared to the dollar signs of hiring an economic consultant or the staff to put the project together, groups and companies using Mays students come out on top: The MBA students work on organization-defined projects as a required part of their degree. But leaders also come away with something they haven’t always gotten from hired guns — personal attention and constant updates from a team of hardworking professional students putting their business skills into practice.

A team of MBA consultants meets with officials from the Highland Lakes Building Industry Association in Marble Falls, Texas in September 2004.

The resulting MBA-prepared model for the Highland Lakes, which includes Blanco, Burnet and Llano counties, gives leaders the numbers they need to define the area’s housing problem and a tool that will help guide growth and development for years to come.

“This will help us preserve the quaintness and all the pristine vistas that define our community,” said Mortensen, who took her MBA consulting team on a three-hour driving tour of scenic lakes and stone-bedecked homes to show them what was most important to the area’s inhabitants — a planned, custom-home environment, rather than conventional tract-homes that accompany fast-growth markets. “What do we want our community to look like as it grows? We get to decide and plan for it.”

In the mutually-beneficial Mays consulting projects, organization and firm leaders get a tool or a service that expands their abilities, and MBAs get a crash course in adding value to a client’s products and processes.

In a consulting project last summer — the first of its kind involving dual doctorate of veterinary medicine (DVM) and MBA students — a team of three students undertook a study of the economic impact of veterinarians for the Texas Veterinary Medical Association. The DVM/MBA students found that the state’s 4,507 veterinarians contribute $1.72 billion to the economy of the state each year and give nearly $32 million back through taxes.

The unprecedented 60-page report is now on the desk of each state lawmaker. It documents, for the first time, the true impact of the state’s animal health services industry on the lives and livelihoods of fellow Texans, said Texas A&M’s E. Dean Gage, director of the Center for Executive Leadership in Veterinary Medical Education.

“It raises the level of understanding for the contributions of veterinary medicine to the health and well-being of our animals and the safety of our food supply,” said Gage, who advised the DVM/MBA team responsible for the far-reaching economic study. “It shows us something we never had nailed down before — we needed to have these numbers.”

The creation of value in a firm or organization is the biggest lesson MBA students take away from the mandatory, six-hour consulting course taken during their final semester at Mays. The course is the feather in the cap of the newly-minted MBA candidate who graduates having already put his or her business education into play in a functional enhancement project for a Mays client.

MBA clinical associate professor Dennis Smart oversaw the transition from a textbook case-studies class two years ago to a semester-long consulting project that today connects students to a supportive web of faculty mentors and industry experts. He describes the process — which enables students to further develop teamwork, communication and problem-solving skills — as teaching students to think beyond a specific task and consider how a solution might add value to the organization.

Students put the skills and knowledge acquired through the MBA course work into practice in the development of value-adding solutions to real business issues, Smart says.

Most projects aren’t like the Highland Lakes or the Veterinary Association — instead, they’re proprietary viability studies or market analysis projects prepared for such companies as HP, Boeing and Aspen Technology.

But pick any consulting project and it’s apparent what MBA students contribute, and what they take away from a rich relationship with a client.

Jayne Mortensen and other leaders in the Highland Lakes will turn to a second team of MBAs this fall for an interactive blueprint and map for workforce housing, building on work accomplished last fall. “This is truly just the beginning of a huge snowball in our world,” Mortensen said. “This lives beyond the team; its value stays here for us.”

MBA candidate David Riddle, who worked with Mortensen’s Building Industry Association, said he was reminded that the biggest job of a consultant is engaging the client to be sure the project is satisfactory. The MBAs focused on their strengths as a team to overcome problems and sift through reams of available data in innumerable combinations to arrive at the best predictive model for the Highland Lakes.

“I can’t imagine ever being bored while solving a problem,” Riddle said. “That’s the fun part of being an MBA student; they really expect you to approach challenges that way.” @