James W. Ritchie [pictured at left], a member of the BYU-Hawaii/Polynesian Cultural Center Presidents' Leadership Council, has volunteered to serve as the new director for The Willes Center for International Entrepreneurship.
He will succeed Gregory V. Gibson, J.D., effective June 1. Gibson will continue in his role with the BYU-Hawaii School of Business faculty.
Ritchie, who is from Heber, Utah, is currently the principal of The Ritchie Group: Real Estate & Investments, which among other projects is developing a 335-unit luxury condominium project on Kauai; but since he graduated from BYU in Provo in 1966, he said he has been involved in "literally hundreds of businesses, partnerships and joint ventures."
"We have started many, many businesses, and at one point we owned 26 separate hands-on entities in every size," he said, noting these have included car and farm equipment dealerships, feed mills, campgrounds, motels and hotels, restaurants, rental properties, travel agencies and two hospitals, among others.
As a former senior vice president for the Franklin Quest Company [now the Franklin Covey Company], Ritchie helped open operations in Japan and Hong Kong, and helped take the company public, leaving it in 1994 at a billion-dollar cap rate. He also recently helped start a bottled water company in Samoa.
More recently, Ritchie served a Latter-day Saint mission president in Virginia and missionary training center president in West Africa. He and his wife, Carolyn, also served as senior missionaries in New Zealand for two years and in Africa for four years. "In between those years, we'd come over here for the PLC and other meetings," he said. "We love coming to this campus and have been here many times."
"We've been in businesses from chickens to the corporate world, and we've had lots of experience," said Ritchie, who credits first learning the principles of entrepreneurship from his very hard working parents and also as a young man from his Latter-day Saint mission president in Scotland, the late David B. Haight, a California businessman and former member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.
"He gave me a formula with four things," Ritchie recalled: "Get your education, go home, make your mark and get prepared to be used."
"For example, this is our fourth mission — my fifth. We've spent 19 years out of our 42 years of marriage as fulltime missionaries or volunteers. We say that not to boast, but to show that the formula really works. We had to be able to sustain ourselves during those years: The idea was you had to be successful enough so you could donate yourself and be of use in the Church. You can't do that if you can't eat."
"The formula works. We've been teaching it everywhere we served," he said. "And all those years, we've been working with this [university] age group," added Carolyn Ritchie.
"BYU-Hawaii students, no matter what their majors, are going home to a world that if they aren't entrepreneurial and don't understand these practices, they won't be able to compete in the world. If they don't get that experience here, they may never get it."
"I see our role as teaching the basics of entrepreneurship to every student at this school so they can go home with at least a vision of time management, people skills, attitudes and peak performance," Ritchie continued. "They need to develop all those kind of habits and learn those personal leadership and business skills."
"They need to be able to go home and use those skills and their professional training in dealing with people. Without the vision of what an entrepreneur is — to look for opportunities and take advantage of them — they won't be able to compete. They won't be the professional, business or leaders that the Church needs."
"We see our role as the facilitators to ensure that every student — not just the business students — get exposed to those key principles," Ritchie said. "The university would really like every student who comes here to be touched by the Center [for International Entrepreneurship]."
In addition to training, the BYU-Hawaii Center for International Entrepreneurship sponsors an entrepreneur in residence, annual conferences, and business plan competitions at BYU-Hawaii and in Tokyo.
As part of his introduction as the new CIE director, Ritchie and his wife came to Hawaii this time with 50 other members of their family, including eight children and their spouses, and 34 grandchildren. "We love coming to Hawaii," he said. "This is our third family vacation here."
"The family is really crucial to the formula," Ritchie added. "If you can't succeed in your home, it doesn't matter how many businesses you own and how good you are in the community."