Russ: This is TheBusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at TheBusinessMakers.com. It's featured guest time and I just happened to be out of the studio this morning. I'm on the campus of the University of Houston, the home of the Wolff Center of Entrepreneurship. It happens to be rated number one this year in the Best Undergrad Programs for Entrepreneurship by Entrepreneur Magazine and the Princeton Review. My guest is Dan Steppe, the Director of the Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship. Dan, thanks for giving me some of your time, and congratulations.

Dan: Thank you very much. This is a lot of fun, and I hate to tell you but we deserve it.

Russ: That's cool. Dan, I remember, I was here one year ago, and your program came out of nowhere to be second in the nation. At the time, it just seemed to surprise everybody and you, guys, were turning back flips. Here we are, a year later, and you're number one.

Dan: When I came here in 2000 after starting a number of companies and decided to give back to the city of Houston, which has been absolutely a miracle to my family. I would not have accomplished anything without being in the city of Houston, so this is my way of giving back. I assumed like a visit with the dean, and basically, wanted to know why we were keeping all of the wonderful things at the Bauer College of Business such a deep secret. There was really no good answer to that question, so I tried to explore and penetrate the market. I found out that, in fact, the University of Houston and the Bauer College of Business - and within it, the Wolff Center - was, in fact, a diamond in the rough. It was time to polish that diamond and get it out to the society. Now, we're receiving the accolades that, as I said before, I think we deserve.

Russ: Giving back, you have done it. I got to tell you, you know that I have visited lots of the university campuses of the other entrepreneurship programs, and you got some incredible competition out there.

Dan: Yes, it is incredible competition, and it does, like every competition does, spurs you on to be entrepreneurial, be creative to try a different idea. We did that in 2003, for example, when we said, "Why not teach entrepreneurship across the entire campus of the University of Houston, all 35,000 students?" The first time we thought about that, it was obviously an ambitious goals since we were starting with a student population of 35 people in our program. However, we said, "Why not?" That "why not" entrepreneurial attitude evolved into taking the courses we have in the degreed program, calling those down to two or three classes we could offer in either certificates or business minor. Now, we're teaching 3,000 students across the University of Houston.

We're not going to be satisfied until we're teaching 6,000 students at that point in time, which is probably, a few years away. We will be giving a certificate in entrepreneurship to every single human being who graduates from the University of Houston, independent of whatever they are concentrating in, whether it's music, anthropology, architecture, engineering, business, etc. Right now, we have 3,000 of those such individuals and we're trying to double that to be 100% of the University.

Russ: So, the way that program works today, you have some people that really are serious about a small group. But then, beyond that, you're going after the whole student body. Is that accurate?

Dan: Exactly accurate. The group of approximately 35 people graduated with a Bachelor of Business Administration in Entrepreneurship, it is a degree that the State of Texas has validated as early as 1993 when we started. And then, as you say, there's a larger group whose interest is really working for someone else, their interest is really being an architecture or a musician and so forth. We're showing them how understanding how the entrepreneurial system works, how that impacts our economy, drives a lot of their business interrelationships, their careers and so forth. The more they understand that, they dramatically increase the value that they have to their corporations.

Dan: The bottomline of that is not meant to decrease but it is the bottomline, and namely corporations whether they're the Philharmonic Orchestra or DuPont, is making an investment in the student. That investment must earn a rate of return or that student will not have that job. As soon as they see themselves as an investment that needs to produce a rate of return, they then see the value of "Now, I have to understand how those corporation works, how do I contribute. How can I contribute more, and how can I contribute more creatively in entrepreneurial? That's what we're at after, and it's happening.

Russ: Back to this number one rating, do you think that that had a lot to do with you winning this contest this year that you have expanded the whole entrepreneurial study program across the student body?

Dan: No, it did and it didn't in that last year, we had the same program going at that point. Instead of 3,000, we had about 2,000. At that point, the Princeton Review rated us second in the country. At that time, when I visited with the individuals and asked them why, they did indicate that this new program, which was rather dramatic across not only Houston, but across the United States of America, was an important contributor. Since then, we've added to this by a number of what I call social entrepreneurship.

We teach at the Kipp Academy, which is a high school system, where our students are teaching there, we're an integral part of Teach America. We have a number of other high schools like Clear Creek. We're trying to get the students to be emissaries of entrepreneurship, bringing it to the high school level. We're participating with Prepare for Life organizations, specifically in the local as well as national, what they call lemonade day, which is teaching very young people how the entrepreneurship program looks like, what the process means through as simple as a lemonade stand. We're also working with the Petron's administration for people coming back from Iraq war. We have a number of programs which is just taking entrepreneurship out of this university and impacting and interacting with the entire fabric of Houston.

Russ: We're talking with Dan Steppe, the Director of the Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Houston. The program ranked number one by Princeton Review and Entrepreneur Magazine this year. We'll be back with more after this. You're listening to The BusineMakers Show, heard here and online at TheBusinessMakers.com.

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Russ: This is The BusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at TheBusinessMakers.com, and continuing on at the Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Houston with Dan Steppe. This is the program that's ranked number one by Entrepreneur Magazine and the Princeton Review for this year. Such a cool award, and you got to tell me Dan, you and I are business people and I know a lot of the people on the program are business people. How, in the world, are business people able to integrate with university academia?

Dan: It is an interesting marriage, and it does take some tongue-in-cheek as well as creativity, because it is what it is. However, we not only interact with them positively for one very important reason. Entrepreneurship, the way we teach this is not in competition with or in conflict with the normal practices of teaching. Rather, we say to the students as well as the faculty, that what we're teaching is how to apply all of the knowledge that these other courses, inside of the University, have imparted to the student. So, we're not trying to undo marketing or reinvent accounting and so on. We're simply saying that the students who've taken these classes were not necessarily going to give you a lot more info about details. We're going to give you information about how to use the information, marketing, finance, accounting, and so forth to make business decisions, to start companies, grow companies. How do you process that? How do you go from an idea that you had over dinner to a feasibility study through to, "Does it make commercial feasibility?" through to actually doing this.

Dan: The beginning part of that process needs to be done in 24 or 36 hours. If you have a fertile mind, by the time you get to Friday, you'll have so many ideas to analyze that you'll never get started. So, you have to be able to quickly say, "Idea one is really not very good, it's not feasible. But idea two is feasible, I'm going to spend another day out of my life analyzing this in trying to move that forward." That gives us the position of complementing and enhancing what the University is doing and not being in conflict with it.

The other dimension of that, just to give you an idea, when we created the certificate in business minor and brought that across the University, you might also asked the same question. What are the people in the music school think you were doing. Why are we there? What sense does this make? We went to the Deans of every college first, and we found was that they were thinking of the same thing. How can they bring other business, other issues, other dimensions into the School of Music? But they realized that, in the School of Music, they had nobody to teach those. Just like the people in business don't know anything about singing or playing a trumpet, or the people who know how to play a trumpet don't know anything about business.

Russ: So you're saying they actually welcomed you.

Dan: Every single one of them did. Furthermore, we made this a pretty easy deal. We really didn't want anything from them. It's our classrooms, our teachers, we really didn't ask a lot from them other than a very critical component. That is to advertise what we do to their student body, suggesting to their student body that our electives and our certificates are valuable to them. They listen to their professors and deans more than they listen to us. That's a pivotal issue, I think. This may sound a little braggadocio but it just happens to be the facts.

That is, we operate this Center in old fashion Business 101. We create a service and a product, we advertise it to the customer, the customer shows up, uses part of his tuition money to buy our product. That requires us to advertise, and we, literally, are the only part of the University of Houston that advertises across the University, encouraging people to come visiting with us, listening to seminars, videos, and anything else we can think of in a normal advertising motif to encourage them to come and try. Then the word of mouth gets going just like selling any product in the United States.

The critical reason I'm giving you that idea is that if you look at the number of credit hours that the students are allowed to take beyond what's necessary to graduate, is very small. So, we require them six and eight credit hours to finish our program at the certificate level. That literally means that these students are not graduating with 126 credits, they're graduating with 135 credits, some of them spending an additional six months in the school to just get our program. So, we're doing something right when the student is spending more of his money, spending more of his time trying to get this program.

Russ: So, we're speaking with Dan Steppe, the Director of the entrepreneurship program that's ranked number one by the Princeton Review and Entrepreneur Magazine. You mentioned earlier that social entrepreneurship has this role in the program these days. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Dan: I'm a great believer in that number of points of views I mentioned earlier this is why I'm here. I sold my companies to semi-retire, my wife jokingly wonders why I'm working 90 hours a week and I'm retired, but that's another question. But giving back is part of life, and the best thing that I could think of, we give plenty of money in ways charitably, but the giving of one's time and leveraging. When I interact with 30-40 people in a classroom, those 30-40 people graduate, they talk to 100 people, the 100 people talk to a thousand people. Now, this message is moving forward.

Dan: I don't want to get too evangelistic about this, but in our total current economic condition, the answer - maybe the only answer - to how the US economy is going to get back right it up and moving forward is the entrepreneurs that represent the United States of America. The entrepreneurs already represent 70% of the employment growth over the last 8-9 years. The employment is not coming from General Motors - as you can see, they're on the road to bankruptcy - or a whole variety of other companies. They're coming from these young entrepreneurs.

This is very important work that we're doing here. We take a lot of pride in it, and I think we're making a difference. The give back is also something, we move to the children - I call them children, I better stop doing that, I'm aging myself - and tell them that you also need to give back. You're in college, you can afford to graduate and join Teach America and teach in high school. If you can't do that, you can afford to spend an afternoon or a midday over one of these high schools teaching these young high school students about entrepreneurship at that level.

If we don't get this message out to people in high school, then, by the time they get around to figuring this out, they've already been attracted to non-productive methods. You have to give to students an option. This is why you do not want to do that. I'm here in high school, I grew up in the slum of New York. I know what you're talking about. There is an answer and education is the answer. Entrepreneurial education is particularly the answer. So we think we're doing something that has a number of values, not just "getting money," but giving back and integrating with the youth in society.

Russ: We're speaking with Dan Steppe, the Director of the Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Houston. The number one ranked such program by Entrepreneur Magazine and the Princeton Review. We'll be back with more with Dan after this. You're listening to The BusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at TheBusinessMakers.com.

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Russ: This is The BusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at TheBusinessMakers.com, and continuing on from the University of Houston, where I'm visiting with Dan Steppe, the Director of the Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship. I guess you don't get tire of me describing it this way, Dan, but the number one ranked program by Entrepreneur Magazine and Princeton Review this year.

Dan: You can say it again if you like.

Russ: You've mentioned a couple of times, and I know a bit about your past. But, share with our audience a little bit about where you came from and how you got to this point.

Dan: You got to get this great Houston accent in New York City. I was born there, so was my wife. I grew up on the "wrong side of the street," certainly we were poor but we didn't know we were poor, everybody was poor around us. But thank God I had a very strong mother influence, and that mother very much believed that the way out of "our under economic condition" was education. I heard it once when I was five years old, I was going to college, I didn't even know what college was, but I was sure I had to go. That led to, ultimately, me getting a scholarship to go to college from Billow Watch Company where my mother worked. From there, I went to college, get a Chemical Engineering degree. Unfortunately, when I came out as an engineer, I then found out I was a lousy engineer. So, I went immediately back to MBA school and got an MBA, which the combination of the two worked very well. I started work with Exxon, had a number of extraordinary occupational experiences, learned a great deal about business, and Exxon moved to Houston, Texas in 1970.

Russ: That's how you got here.

Dan: That's how I got here. While I was here for a very short time, I said, "Thank you, God. This is heaven." The business is growing, it's a very positive environment, the banks are very receptive. I basically left Exxon to do what I did for Exxon, which was oil trading. That moved into oil leasing, where I was leasing various pieces of equipment to the oil companies. That went forward to when Southwest Bank of Texas was starting, I was one of the founders of Southwest Bank, which is now called Amegy Bank. I then had an opportunity in California to start a shipping company, ships would transport oil, I did that. That ran in to difficulties because of environmental issues so I used my engineering degree and I had two patents, which then made the ships environmentally compatible. That was what we ultimately sold in 2000, then I just thought education is my way of giving back, and as I said before, retire.

Russ: Wow! You are definitely giving back. Dan, I really appreciate the time once again, that you've given to us here on The BusinessMakers Show.

Dan: My pleasure. I'll really, thank you for the opportunity, come back anytime.

Russ: You bet. Major congratulations are in order, just keep going. I wonder what you're going to do next year, man.

Dan: I don't know, but whatever is above one, we're going for it.

Russ: We've been talking with Dan Steppe, the Director of the Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Houston, the number one school for this year as ranked by Entrepreneur Magazine and the Princeton Review for Entrepreneurship Programs. You're listening to The BusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at TheBusinessMakersShow.com.