| Collegian Archives
Entrepreneurs should establish principles that guide their small businesses, said Patrick Whalen at a talk on Friday, hosted by the Kehoe Family Initiative for Entrepreneurial Excellence.
Whalen, assistant to the president, is a former Marine Corps officer who opened both a boys’ highschool called St. Martin’s Academy in southern Kansas and a coffee roastery in Hillsdale named Ad Astra Roasters.
“You should have principles that will dictate what you will be,” Whalen said.
He said the principles create the structure rather than the size of the business. Because the business stems from the principles, an entrepreneur has the freedom to keep his or her business at a lower scale. He said keeping a business small can be a choice rather than a default.
“Small is OK if it accomplishes your goals,” he said. “Do one thing and do it well.”
Developed by Career Services, the Kehoe Family Initiative seeks to give students who are interested in becoming entrepreneurs a chance to develop and launch their own business idea. Whalen addressed the stereotypes of starting a new business that “if you can’t be the best, then you have no reason being an entrepreneur.”
He said a business does not necessarily need to dominate the world, produce millions of dollars or monopolize the market to be successful.
“Use your God-given gifts, think it through, come up with your plan, follow it, and then be true to it,” he said.
Whalen said your business should meet a need within either the immediate or outside community. Ad Astra Roasters is the only roastery in Hillsdale and St. Martin’s Academy is one of the few schools in the country that offers an alternative high school education.
In the course of his talk, Whalen discussed the business structure for both Ad Astra Roasters and St. Martin’s Academy to help students envision the idea of a small business as a practical reality.
For the school, the business model is to help educate young high school men.
“I want to unlock the God-given potential in these souls,” Whalen said. “You can’t force them to grow, but you can set the conditions.”
Whalen’s business idea for the academy contrasted with the contemporary view of education where students sit in classrooms all day, and hear people talk to them, in hope of learning something valuable. He said his school offers something fresh and revolutionary.
The academy is a 200-acre sustainable farm located in southern Kansas dedicated to forming young minds through teaching animal husbandry, farming, cooking, butchery, and other skills that instill responsibility and resilience.
Whalen said he wanted to build an environment that would allow young high school students to thrive. He capped the enrollment at 60 students in order to maintain the integrity of the environment.
“You’re not supposed to do schools of 60 kids,” Whalen said. “It’s not effective. It’s not economically efficient. People say this is a dumb idea because it’s not efficient.”
Whalen encouraged students not to be afraid to remain steadfast to the principles upon which their business is founded.
“What are you trying to do?” Whalen said. “I would encourage you to ask yourself: what’s at the root, what’s driving this? Find it and do that.”
In starting his school, Whalen knew wealth would not be a guarantee, and yet, it didn’t matter to him because of his principles.
“If that means “inefficiency” then so be it for the sake of keeping to my principles and mission,” he said. “I could scale the company at a much higher rate, but that means liability, debt, and more risk.”
For Ad Astra Roasters, keeping to principles meant functioning with zero funding. His family could expand the Ad Astra Roasters, but he is more interested in maintaining a slow on-ramp approach to remain true to his original principles that family is priority number one.
Whalen said he is willing to sacrifice a much higher growth rate for the sake of maintaining a strong family life.
We’ve chosen this place intentionally and scaled the business to fit this place,” Whalen said.
Whalen said to accept more funding would mean higher risk, calls during dinnertime, and more unexpected trips since the stakes would be so high. This, in turn, would eat into his family life.
“Entrepreneurs tend to be folks for whom the system or the structure doesn’t make a whole lot of sense or who have some insight or imaginative impulse,” Whalen said. “You bring that slightly different perspective to everything.”
Whalen advised students to enroll in an accounting or finance course as a practical step toward better understanding the numbers involved in business that will make it run and be successful.
“Have your ducks in a row because whether it’s your buddy or the local bank, you still need to have the dollars and the cents for the business to line up and make sense,” Whalen said. “It will help to have a relationship, but that’s not everything.”
Whalen encouraged students to get started, no matter how small their business starts.
“As an entrepreneur, you’re blessed with the kind of intellect and imagination to see asymmetrical solutions to contemporary problems,” Whalen said. “With every blessing comes an obligation. I encourage you to exercise that imagination and that intellectual ability in accordance with your principles, and then pursue it.”
Freshman Katrin Surkan said she was inspired by Whalen’s talk.
“It struck me that he started both a coffee shop and a school which seem to be different and disconnected: one is personal and one is impersonal,” Surkan said. “For both of them, however, he had similar principles which was interesting. The message that really shone through his entire talk is that you have to have a principle to found any kind of business or else it’s not going to be of much use.”
Sophomore Kevin Rybka said he appreciated Whalen’s approach to incorporating ideas into realities.
“He’s all about practical structures,” Rybka said. “I think principles are important in building a family, culture, or anything. Everyone lives by certain principles, but the question becomes how do you actually put those principles into something that is concrete and not just talk about them in abstract ways?”