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BizBuzz Student plans to SCORE with BBA.
What is Carole Bernstein (MA ’73), who already has a PhD and has retired from the successful business she launched in the late 1970s, doing as an undergraduate in the college’s BBA program? “I want to volunteer for SCORE—Service Corps of Retired Executives—a group that offers free business advice to entrepreneurs,” she said. But considering her background—having founded Get Smart, a store of educational products that grew to four stores and distribution to South and Central América—shouldn’t she be able to do that? “I need the knowledge,” she said. “My approach was to shoot first and then decide where to aim. So, I made every mistake possible, and before I start giving advice, I want to know that I can help people based on solid background, not just on my mistakes.” Passion served where knowledge was lacking. Bernstein’s path to business success began in 1979, when she went to buy some educational products for her two-and-a-half-year-old son. With her master’s degree in education administration from Florida International University and a PhD in education, she knew what she wanted. Finding it was a different matter. “I couldn’t find what I was looking for, and certainly not all in one place,” she said. “Within a month, I had signed a lease on space at a mall in West Kendall. My business background was zero. I didn’t realize how many businesses fail. I didn’t know about business plans, and I didn’t know what ‘undercapitalized’ meant.” After fitting out the 1,400-square-foot space that was to become the first Get Smart store, she had only $2,000 left.
Customer service savvy proves essential. Though her business background was nil, she had the right instincts for what might be the most important aspect of retail: customer service. “You have to hire nice people,” she said. “You can do a lot of training, which I did, but you can’t make someone nice. Their parents had to do that long ago. I always wanted to hear from customers that they found what they wanted and most importantly, that they were treated well. Nothing upset me more than to learn on rare occasions that someone hadn’t been treated as well as they had expected.” One technique she used with her staff—which numbered eighty when the store grew to its multiple sites—was to have them imagine their favorite famous person and pretend that person was the customer they were about to serve. Bernstein gains recognition from the university. In 2004, at the university’s Torch Awards ceremony, Bernstein received a Distinguished Alumni Award. Also, a banner bearing her photo and a short biography were part of a recent two-day “Entrepreneurship Fair” at which an array of thirty banners celebrating alumni entrepreneurs from across many disciplines occupied the first floor of the Green Library on the University Park campus—part of a nationwide event called EntrepreneurshipWeek USA. “These banners show something that I believe—that you don’t need a degree in business to become an entrepreneur, especially if you take a few courses in entrepreneurship,” she said. “Sure, a business degree would have been handy. For instance, my accountant would have appreciated it if I had known what a debit was.” Entrepreneur turned student sees BBA as smart choice. Bernstein chose the university because she knew if from having gotten her master’s degree in the College of Education, has local family, and because it was less expensive than the University of Miami, where she also had gone to school. “Although I don’t know much about business, somewhere along the way, I learned about ‘return on investment,’” she said. She’s taking two courses at a time and expects to complete the BBA in three more years. She’s finding it challenging to decide what to take. “There are so many interesting courses, I want to take everything,” she said. Cautious about offering advice yet, Bernstein does encourage hopeful entrepreneurs to be persistent. “To succeed, have a really good idea and be passionate about it,” she said. “Failure is when you quit.” |
“I had about six feet of shelving in the space. When people came in, I would tell them we were expecting more products, and I would order more every time I had money to do so,” she said. “Even buying the shelving showed how little I knew. The sales person asked me what size shelves I wanted, and I said I didn’t know. He asked me the size of the products that would go on them, and I said I didn’t know.”|
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