DNEP featured on WJR 760 AM Radio
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DNEP Managing Director Christie Baer was featured on WJR 760 AM Radio where she shared about DNEP and how we create value for both Detroit business owners and University of Michigan Students. This was part of WJR’s “College Tour” series where they highlight different higher education institutions, such as the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. Listen to the interview here.
See below for an interview transcript.
INTERVIEWER: “Once again we’re delighted to be here at the Ross School of Business where all week long we’ve been learning a lot of really inspiring and interesting things about the institutions of higher learning in our state. Here at Ross, one of the things we found most encouraging was the community involved! We’re seeing that at large here as we welcome in the managing director for the Detroit Neighborhood Entrepreneurs Project, Christie Baer. This brings the business talents of your students to bear in the city of Detroit. That’s the definition of win-win, isn’t it?”
CHRISTIE: “It really is.”
INTERVIEW: “For DNEP, define how you work in the community with these entrepreneurs.”
CHRISTIE: “It’s a 7 year program. What we do is we recruit businesses from Detroit, mostly minority owned businesses, and we match them with teams of students from different University of Michigan schools, more than half of those are of the Ross School of Business.
We try to sequence things so business owners get the help they need for Detroit neighborhoods. For the students, these are life changing consulting experiences where they are able to be change makers in Detroit right now. Not after graduation, right now. They’re making a difference as a professional in training who gets the chance to form a relationship with a business owner.”
INTERVIEWER: “There was progress launched recently for the U-M Center of Innovation in Detroit. How does that affect and impact DNEP?”
CHRISTIE: “We’re really excited about the new building. The DNEP program manager is always based at the U-M Detroit center. Having this consolidated space, we’re slated to have some physical space there and we’re looking forward to an increased presence. We use the Impact Studio at the Ross School of Business now as a way to bring together teams of students and I think the new space will be great for that as well.”
INTERVIEWER: “[The businesses you work with], are these new businesses in Detroit just starting out or have they been around for a while? Do you have a success story?”
CHRISTIE: “Most of the businesses we work with are not startups. We tend to work with second stage businesses where the owner is full time in the business and they have data of some kind.
What all the projects have in common, no matter what discipline it is, is that the students are doing research: they’re analyzing data, making recommendations, and in some cases, they’re implementing it for them [the businesses].
It’s really hard when you’re a business owner and have to do all the things and make a bunch of decisions on things you don’t know about. It doesn’t matter how smart you are or how hardworking you are, you still have to eat and grocery shop and sleep sometimes. So getting a basketball team of students to take on some of these research projects for you is phenomenal.
The students are overseen by Michigan’s award winning faculty so you know that nobody is breaking any one’s livelihood. The students form these close relationships with the owners where they are learning how to build trust. Part of it is the faculty are teaching them technical skills in their classes, and the students are held accountable in that their GPA is hit if they don’t do a good job, and the Michigan student does care about their GPA quite a bit. On top of it, they’re learning some of what would be considered soft skills. For example: if you’re 20, how do you build rapport and trust with someone who’s twice your age and who’s had a really different lived experience than you have?
So many of the students tell us that after they work with DNEP, they walk out from here and pick up consulting jobs from McKinsey or Accenture or some of the big consulting firms.
We hire students to be accounting consultants to do 1:1 teaching and financial coaching. We had a MBA student who went on to Hello Fresh and Taco Bell and said, “Oddly, part of my new job is to teach new managers about the financial parts of this job. Because I was an accounting consultant and explained financial statements to business owners, I was able to pick it up and got promoted really rapidly.”
We measure success from the business owner perspective but we also look from the student perspective. From the business owner perspective, we have seen businesses use slide decks that Ross students prepared to win pitch competitions. We’ve seen businesses open second locations. The students do really complex stuff in thirteen or fourteen weeks that would cost businesses tens of thousands of dollars [if they outsourced the consulting].
[For the work the students do], it’s not going to sit on a shelf or a binder. Nobody’s going to clap for them or pat them on the back and tell them they did a good job, the stuff that they did will be used immediately. Practical application.”
INTERVIEWER: “What I love about this is it’s two way learning, isn’t it? Not only do your students bring in a certain amount of sweat equity and intensive experience and some high level stuff, but you have seasoned business veterans who have street smarts that they can impart from real world experience on those students as well. “
CHRISTIE: “Yea, you know that’s right. One of the things that sometimes digital natives like our students think is that everything there is to know in the world exists on the Internet. So it’s a good learning lesson for them that the business owner is on their own hero’s journey and they have tried all kinds of things or pursued multiple paths that don’t appear anywhere on the Internet. Again, that kind of learning how to build trust and how to be able to solicit information that leads to better recommendations and even more learning.”
INTERVIEWER: “These DNEP students, they develop these relationships with the small business owners and founders. A lot of them are minority owned that they deal with as well. Talk about that.”
CHRISTIE: “More than 90% of the businesses we work with are minority owned because ultimately DNEP is a race wealth gap intervention. So what we’re looking at is which kinds of businesses have employees and what kind of businesses are undercapitalized for all kinds of systemic racism reasons (like African Americans being excluded from higher-ed up until not that long ago and redlining preventing African Americans from having homes that build in wealth that you can then tap for a business). There are all kinds of systemic racism reasons that result in black entrepreneurs in particular not having some of the social networks, social capital, and some of the financial capital that white business owners are more likely to have.
So we focus our recruiting on Detroit business owners who are from the neighborhoods and who live in the neighborhoods. We try to have the students support the business owner’s visions for their neighborhoods. While we are lovely and well-meaning, it is not our place to develop what the Detroit neighborhoods need. It’s only our place to be allies and supporters and do our part.”
INTERVIEWER: “There’s value in also leaving the halls of academia to see what’s happening at the grassroots because just as everything’s not on the Internet, not everything is in the classroom.”
CHRISTIE: “Oh absolutely. I think of the Community Tech Workers, the students we hire to do 1:1 technology training, the accounting consultants, the interns, and how we pay for mileage reimbursements for students in the classes to be able to do site visits. There’s nothing like seeing the business in context for them. Sometimes you see what you think the business says on their website and you go in-person and you see “oh there’s a branding mismatch here!” Seeing the context for the business helps you understand better the business owner’s decisions and how they think about where they’re going.
INTERVIEWER: “Well, to underscore what you were saying. Now that you could be embedded in Detroit, in the U-M center for innovation which will really begin to deliver on the Ilitch’ vision of “District Detroit” is going to be key. We’ve waited for a long time to see some of these things bear fruit that could be a real game-changer as well.
Christie Baer thank you so much for schooling us on DNEP! We appreciate it!”
CHRISTIE: “Great, thank you so much for having me!”
