Most business students spend four years in a classroom before anyone lets them make real decisions with real money. They learn the four Ps, how to build a pro forma in Excel, and write a business plan for a coffee shop that will never open. Then we hand them a diploma and act surprised when their first business goes about as well as my kids’ lemonade stand in January.
I’m not throwing rocks from outside. I chair a business program, I teach, and I’ve written plenty of those assignments myself. But before I came to Lancaster Bible College (LBC), I spent years building companies. I founded a digital marketing and lead generation company, grew it, and sold it, and I still run a small marketing business today alongside my CMO consultancy work. Almost everything I know about business I learned by doing it in a room full of partners significantly smarter than me, getting it wrong, and fixing it the next week. Very little of it came from someone explaining it to me while I took notes.
So when our department started planning a B.S. in Entrepreneurship, I wanted the program built around a lab where students build and operate a real business while they’re still students.
The Evidence for Doing
The research here is pretty one-sided. In 2014, Scott Freeman and his colleagues pulled together 225 studies comparing lecture with active learning in undergraduate science and math courses. Students in lecture-only classes were 1.5 times more likely to fail, and exam scores in active learning sections were about 6 percent higher. The biggest gains showed up in classes of fifty or fewer, which describes nearly every class at a school like ours. Those were STEM courses, and much of the “active learning” was modest stuff like group problem solving and answering questions in class. If small changes inside a classroom move the numbers that much, I’d expect running an actual business to move them further. I can’t prove that with a meta-analysis yet. I have watched it happen with every employee and partner I’ve ever trained.
Business is also a discipline where knowing and doing drift apart fast. A student can define contribution margin on an exam and still underprice a job by 30 percent because they forgot to count their own drive time. You only catch that mistake when it costs you something.
Side by Side Is How Jesus Trained People
This model isn’t new; in fact, it’s as old as the Gospels. Jesus called twelve men to follow him, and for about three years they walked with him, watched him teach, heal, and handle hostile crowds, and asked him questions afterward. In Luke 9, he sent them out to do the work themselves. When they came back, they reported what they’d done, and he pulled them aside to process it. Luke 10 repeats the pattern with the seventy-two. Watch me, do it with me, go do it, and come back and tell me how it went.
Paul worked the same way. In Acts 18, he lived with Priscilla and Aquila in Corinth and made tents with them, and a few verses later they’re the ones taking Apollos aside in Ephesus to explain the faith more accurately. They learned at a workbench, next to someone who knew more than they did, and then they passed it on. I don’t think it’s an accident that the way God chose to form people looks so much like an apprenticeship.
There’s a character piece to this as well. It’s easy to say the right thing about integrity in a case study discussion. You find out what you believe about honesty the first time a customer overpays you, or a vendor offers a kickback, or you have to tell a client you missed a deadline. A Christian business program should want its students to face those moments while a mentor is still close enough to help them think it through.
What the Lab Looks Like at LBC
Here’s what we’ve built and what we’re proposing.
The first piece is the Founder’s Chair, which we’re launching as a pilot with the goal of making it a permanent part of the program. Seniors compete to co-found a service company in front of a board of mentors/local entrepreneurs. The winner gets equity in the pitched business and runs it as general manager, with a board mentor sharing equity and working alongside them. Each venture will act as its own LLC with real customers, real revenue, and a real P&L. The student isn’t playing a simulation where the worst outcome is a bad grade. If the company doesn’t sell, it doesn’t eat.
The second piece is a set of three Masterminds courses in the proposed major that replace a traditional internship. Students meet with volunteer established entrepreneurs who will walk alongside the student, aiding them in getting their business off the ground. We’re building those relationships through partners like local family business centers, local chambers of commerce, and long-standing business and college relationships.
The third piece is an established concentration in mergers and acquisitions, which I haven’t found offered in any other Christian college entrepreneurship major I’ve looked at. In our metro area, small businesses employ 54.9 percent of workers, compared with about 46 percent nationally. And more than half of U.S. employer businesses are owned by someone 55 or older. A lot of those owners will need a buyer in the next decade. I’d like some of our graduates to learn how to buy a good business and run it well, because starting from scratch isn’t the only path to ownership.
Students want this. When we polled our business majors on which concentrations they’d choose, 115 of 185 responded, and entrepreneurship ranked first out of ten options.
What Changes for Faculty
This model asks more of professors, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise. You can’t run a P&L you can’t read, so students still need accounting and finance taught well, and some of that will look like a lecture. The difference is that the lecture serves the business. When a student’s company is short on cash in March, the class on working capital lands in a way it never does in the abstract.
The faculty role moves toward coaching. I spend less time presenting and more time sitting with a student looking at their numbers and asking why their close rate dropped. That’s slower and harder to grade. It also raises real questions about liability, money, and what happens when a venture fails, and every school will need to work those out with its own leadership and lawyers.
Failure is part of the design. A student who loses a few thousand dollars and a semester of effort in a supervised lab has paid cheap tuition. The same lesson at 35, with a mortgage and kids, costs a lot more. I’d much rather my students fail while I’m still in the room.
An Invitation
Christian colleges have a real advantage here. We’re small, which is where active learning works best. We already believe that faith gets worked out in daily life, and business is one of the places where it gets worked out most. And our tradition hands us a model of discipleship that is basically apprenticeship.
If you’re building something similar at your school, I’d like to compare notes. I suspect a lot of us are trying to solve the same problems, and we’d figure them out faster together.
