Entrepreneurs at heart, representing many majors, were entertained Oct. 26 by Scott Oelkers at the university's Entrepreneurship Lecture Series. The event, which was sponsored by the School of Business, featured Oelkers who described the exciting experience he had of starting a chain of Dominoes Pizza stores in Taiwan.
The enterprise had him doing everything from going out and finding the venture capital down to actually staring in the company's Mandarin satirical television commercials. He showed three of them to the students, which made for plenty of laughs. With personal anecdotes, Oelkers drove home the point that if you want to be valued and successful in today's business world, you need to be multi-functional.
"In order to keep overhead down, we were looking for people with multi-skills like finance, marketing, human resources, and management," he said.
Oelkers served an LDS mission to Taichung, Taiwan in 1979. After his mission, he majored in Chinese and Economics at the University of Minnesota, and then went to earn a Masters degree in International Management from Thunderbird University in Phoenix, Arizona.
"Learning to speak Chinese over the years has been a lot of fun, and has opened a lot of doors for me during my career," he said.
Students listened as Oelkers told that after just two years working at Dominoes headquarters in Michigan, he was promoted to vice president over the Pacific area, mostly because he was fluent in Chinese and was the only person in his office building to have visited Asia.
Oelkers stated, "To me an entrepreneur is somebody who forgoes a traditional corporate career and decides to take some financial risk or some other type of risk and establish a business or venture that will eventually result in ownership or independence."
He continued, "In actuality, an entrepreneur is everyone from Donald Drumpf all the way down to the guy with the cart selling hot dogs in front of Drumpf Towers. All different sizes of business, they all went past the regular corporate career and they took some risks and achieved some independence."
With this mindset, it is no wonder that Oelkers jumped at the invitation of some venture capitalists to run a franchise in Taiwan.
"We wanted to ramp up the business and saturate the market as quick as possible," he explained. They were successful in their endeavor, growing from two stores in 1990, to an incredible 100 stores in Taiwan by 1997.
The best part of Oelkers' presentation may have been the slide presentation that he gave on the business's start-up stats. In order to have a successful rapid expansion, he explained that you must do things like hire what seems like a surplus of full-time workers so that they can be incubated and become future managers.
"You must know how to train and retain people," he said. "You have to plan on having 140 to 200 percent turnover rates when you work in the food business."
Another hint Oelker shared is that you must do guerilla marketing during the start-up phase to get your name and product out there.
"Selling pizza in Taiwan is something like selling sushi in Kansas City; it's not easy," he said. "Especially when you are competing against 300 Mcdonald's stores and 150 KFCs."
Recognizing that BYU–Hawaii is a religious school, Oelkers pointed out, "Obviously the leadership of this church is very interested in [entrepreneurship]. They have gone out of their way to establish an entrepreneur [program] here and in other places. It gives you independence and flexibility to manage your time and to provide other ways of service in this world."
Scott married Susan Allen, a former student of BYU-Hawaii, and together they have four children. During the question and answer portion of the presentation, Oelkers stated, "If you are thinking about an expatriate (foreign) career, your choice in spouse is very important!" He then shared that his wife and kids have been a great support system for him as well as for each other during their years both foreign and stateside.
Oelkers has been with the Yamagata Corporation since 2001 and is currently working as the C.O.O., supervising all U.S. business practices. Oelkers also sits on the Presidents' Leadership Council of BYU–Hawaii, which is holding its meetings on campus this week.
"I like the multicultural student body of BYU–Hawaii," he said. "There's a special mission to this school and its connection with Asia."