John Thornton believes the single trait that defines an entrepreneur is perseverance. Long before he became a successful developer, Thornton dug deep into that character trait when he decided to stop selling Oriental design rugs and launch his own mill.
He and his business partner, Dale Reynolds, decided to produce inexpensive rugs with pile heights and patterns that would pair with contemporary and country furnishings. Along with Reynolds’ monetary commitment, John Thornton invested $20,000 of his own money and mortgaged his house. Thornton and Reynolds quickly realized they could not hire a large staff, so they were involved in making the rugs, finishing the rugs, selling, shipping and, finally, delivering the rugs.
“You know, I think that we worried a lot about whether we’d go broke or not before we started the company,” Thornton says. “But for some reason, once we got the doors open and we started, I never worried about going broke. I mean, I really just didn’t. That was looking backwards, and I refused to do that. We worked so hard. We worked seven days a week. I remember we started the company the day my oldest son was born, January 25, 1984, and I didn’t take a day off until a Sunday in May.”
Thornton is one of a host of entrepreneurs who uniquely touches the lives of students in the UTC College of Business, offering special insight and inspiration to those enrolled in the entrepreneurship program. Graduates engage in a rigorous academic program to learn critical aspects of business. This foundation is complemented by course work in creativity, innovation, finance and new ventures.
These future business owners are exposed to nail-biting business stories, like the one Thornton recalled from June of 1984, when he met with a bookkeeper after owning his rug company for just five months. Thornton knew the business had earned enough money to pay the bills, but he had not yet drawn a salary.
“I remember peering over his left shoulder and looking at that income statement - that one page - and immediately focusing on the bottom of that page,” Thornton recalls. “I said, ‘Where are the brackets?’ He said, ‘What are you talking about, where are the brackets?’ ‘I’m looking for the brackets indicating how much money we’ve lost,’ I said. And he said, ‘There are no brackets.’ We had made $80,000 dollars in that first five months, and it was one of the greatest things I’d ever seen,” he says.
The bookkeeper had come from the accounting firm of Joseph Decosimo, the man Thornton calls “the dean, the greatest.”
Joseph Decosimo’s own entrepreneurship story began after working as a partner for an established accounting firm for 20 years. He made his bold move 37 years ago when he rented office space in the BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee building for himself, Jerry Adams and Marion Fryar. Today, the firm has grown to a staff of 300, located in offices all over the Southeast. Still, Decosimo’s philosophy remains simple: “The best source of new clients is a satisfied client,” he says. “I always made my approach as though the only client I had was the one I was talking to.”
Decosimo tells entrepreneurship students to believe in the idea they have. “You have to be adventuresome; you have to know that there are going to be risks, that you could fail, and even with the idea and possibility in your mind that perhaps you might fail,” he says. “The idea of being on your own and independent of others is the driving force of an entrepreneur.”
UTC created an entrepreneurship undergraduate degree program so that students could be exposed to an integrative curriculum across disciplines. It is the fastest growing major in the UTC College of Business, with 244 entrepreneurship students - a number that has tripled in the last four years. Students study marketing, advertising and finance.
Dr. Richard Becherer meets entrepreneurship students at the graduate level. Becherer, who holds the Clarence E. Harris Chair of Excellence in Business and Entrepreneurship at UTC, believes it is important for entrepreneurship students to hear the voices of experienced business leaders.
“We have a lot of first-generation college students,” says Becherer. “One of the things I like to do is expose them to people who have started their own businesses so these students can see that these are just regular people that had ideas and ran with them.”
Becherer created the Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame at UTC to honor the legacy of business leaders like Thornton and Decosimo, and to inspire students. Each year, pioneer and contemporary entrepreneurs are honored at a dinner of 250 community leaders, faculty and students. Inductees’ photos and stories are grouped in Fletcher Hall so that students can read the stories.
“If you really look at entrepreneurial success stories, you’ll find they are not typically about securing a patent or developing a world-changing thing,” says Becherer. “Entrepreneurs just find a slightly different way of doing something that’s been done for a long time.”
It was the realization that there was a tremendous opportunity for repetitively building small retail stores in shopping malls throughout the country that launched Bob Corker’s business. Now a U.S. senator, this inductee into the UTC Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame later worked on larger projects and took his business to 18 states, growing it to acquire and develop commercial real estate.
Before he launched his own construction company, Corker says he learned the basics; he became a construction laborer, and when he graduated from UT Knoxville he became a construction superintendent.
Corker recalls a memorable interview with an employer. “He asked me what I wanted to do and I said, ‘Well, look, in five years I want to either be sitting in your seat or have my own company.’ Of course, he leaned up out of his chair and got kind of excited. In four years, I was able to start my own company. I think that employees who are like that - who you know are going someplace - they’re not a threat, they’re the best employees you could possibly have,” he says.
Corker is encouraged by that same energy he sees in UTC business students and delights in the positive feedback he receives about the university from his constituents across the entire state.
“You would not believe the number of people who come up to me and talk about UTC. They talk about how much they love the fact that their daughters and sons are attending UTC and what a great city we have here,” Corker says. “It’s just a great combination to have an excellent business program. And because the community is the way that it is, once you attract these young, bright students who are all charged up, they stay here, which is something that maybe didn’t happen 10 or 15 years ago. I think it is such a huge asset to our community to have a business program like we have at UTC. It bodes well for us down the road - for our economic future.”