It’s no secret the Bayou City is synonymous with entrepreneurship.
In fact, according to Fortune, the Houston metro ranks No. 3 for the most Fortune 500 companies in the country — behind New York City (61) and Chicago (29). So, it should come as no surprise that the University of Houston would be a conduit for keeping the city’s entrepreneurial spirit alive.
And the man responsible for producing the next generation of business leaders is UH professor Dave Cook, who has led the C. T. Bauer College of Business’s Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship to the top spot of The Princeton Review’s Top Schools for Entrepreneurship for the past six years in a row.
“If there’s one thing that I’m proud of here — yes, I like the ranking, the businesses we’ve started and the money we’ve raised, but we’ve changed a lot of lives,” Cook said. “The companies (those students start) are going to look different because of what we’ve done here.”
Cook has worked for the Wolff Center since 2006, starting out as a student mentor, before becoming director of mentoring in 2009. He took over as executive director of the program in 2017.
Over the years, he’s seen numerous students go through the Wolff Center, which has produced successful entrepreneurs like Brooks Bassler, founder of Houston-based BB’s Tex-Orleans, and Ody De La Paz, co-founder and CEO of Houston-based Synsetec Inc.
“When you leave here, you’re not only going to have the theory, but you’re also going to have the reality of having applied it in a real situation.”
-Dave Cook, Director of the Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship, University of Houston
What sets Wolff Center students apart from other aspiring entrepreneurs, Cook said, is these students are expected to start businesses now to begin learning from their mistakes.
“When you leave here, you’re not only going to have the theory, but you’re also going to have the reality of having applied it in a real situation,” Cook said.
Cook sat down with the University of Houston to talk about his approach to running the program.
Q: Tell me about your experience as an entrepreneur.
A: I worked in the corporate world for 15 years with a Fortune 500 Company. I fully intended to leave after two years — I wanted to start my own company — but every year, they put me in a different role. I was constantly learning.
When I finally did leave, I was confident I could do my own thing. I ended up starting a food brokerage business that started with seven people and ended up reaching 77 people in a year. It was explosive growth. We had amazing partners and vendors and clients that we represented.
Over time, I was able to use the relationships I had built with people who had become my customers and clients.
After 15 years, I retired. I wasn’t a good enough golfer to do that every day, so I started consulting locally. I started consulting for Texas A&M University, and eventually made my way to the University of Houston, where they were growing the entrepreneurship program.
I started mentoring one kid and that got me started.
Q: What was your initial plan when you started supporting the entrepreneurship program?
A: One of the first cohorts I mentored said, “You know, this isn’t just business. Can we start thinking about values? Can we think about the real reason businesses fail, which is not just because they run out of cash, but leadership makes poor choices.”
We put together this whole program around character: Do you have purpose in your life? Do you have a strong “why”? That morphed into understanding why, and looking into relationship-building, leadership and teamwork.
Now, when a student graduates, we give them a coin with the program’s four core values and 16 behavior competencies.
We started fleshing out curriculum and programs around these values.
Q: Why is mentorship important to this program?
A: When I came here, there was one mentor for two or three students. The goal was to get a mentor for every student. Last year, we had 637 mentors and 28 students. There’s nowhere else on the planet where you’re going to have that kind of energy.
The belief that every student should have a mentor comes from my own journey. I have a single mother who raised me, and there were a lot of people who really did extraordinary things in my life to get me to where I am and mentor me.
Those mentors and their interactions with students are life-changing and have a residual effect that goes out into the future in a way that transforms not only who they are, but the trajectory of how they’re going to lead.
Q: How did you acquire so many mentors?
A: It all starts with students. If you have passionate, good students, then people want to be around them.
Say you have 30 kids, and they have 30 mentors. Those 30 mentors say, “Hey, you know, you’re working on a technology in the oil and gas field. I know a guy who would be the perfect person for you to talk to.”
That guy goes, “Hey, I have a friend in the venture capital world,” or in the banking world or a lawyer or wherever. That network of goodwill is all centered around this core of finding extraordinary students.
Students at the University of Houston are extraordinary, but here at the Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship, we pick the entrepreneurially spirited ones.
Q: How has your experience teaching leadership classes at the corporate level translated to teaching students?
A: The only difference is ego.
At that time, they didn’t know anything more about leadership than my students do. Most of them grew up cutting produce or meat in a store, and they would get promoted. Suddenly, they’re the head of Kroger or Safeway — they’re the head of all these businesses.
No one ever trained them on anything along the way, so the first day (of those trainings) was about building trust. Once you get that, it opens the door for them to say, “I have this problem.”
When you’re with a bunch of people, somebody else can say, “I had that same problem, and here’s how we handled it.”
The same thing happens here at WCE: We don’t just talk about theory. Each student is on a team and is leading a team. So, if we’re talking about trust or communication, it’s on the team. If there’s a problem, it’s happening right now in this moment.
Check out the Houston Business Journal’s November episode of the Texas Business Minds podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to learn more about Dave Cook outside of the University.