982. A Day in the Life: What’s It Really Like to Be a Professor of Entrepreneurship?

“I had the good fortune of working for a company, Paychex, my second job after college, which provided payroll, benefits, and insurance services to CPAs whose clients were mostly small entrepreneurs. This proved to be a seminal learning experience for my career because over the course of a couple of years working with hundreds of these clients, I quickly saw a couple of key patterns that gave me early insights into the work that I am doing today. These highly motivated individuals typically had a keen interest in a business niche or had an idea they had come up with that they wanted to test out in the marketplace. Too often, however, when they moved past the start-up or launch phase of their business and into the vital next step of recruiting, training, and developing their workforce, these talented individuals did not possess the experience or knowledge essential for moving their organization to the next level. Over the next decade working with Vertex in sales and ultimately high-level management roles serving their much larger companies, I added a broad and deep perspective regarding the cultural and leadership dimensions of a business. These experiences were the foundation for my own company, Strategic Collisions, International, LLC, where we work with start-ups and established businesses to help them produce profitable growth through consulting, learning and executive coaching services.”

John H. Wilson (PhD, MBA), also known as The-Entre-Professor, is an entrepreneur, intrapreneur (corporate entrepreneur), scholar, and public speaker with more than twenty years of experience in the technology industry. Recently, Dr. Wilson left Corporate America to pursue a full-time faculty position at Drexel University as a teaching professor in the Charles D. Close School of Entrepreneurship and to launch Strategic Collisions International LLC, a development consultancy dedicated to helping entrepreneurs to launch, grow, and thrive. Dr. Wilson provides unique expertise and inspiration to start-up and scale-up businesses seeking to produce profitable growth through consulting, learning, and executive coaching services.