Program has firm foundation

The Hogan Entrepre- neurial Leadership Program passed two major milestones in 2004, graduating its first class and getting its own quarters at Gonzaga University. Not bad from a standing start just four years ago.

So good, in fact, the Hogan Family Foundation has launched a similar program in Hawaii, and is looking at the potential for another in China.

All this from a program that germinated from the chance meeting of the Rev. Robert Spitzer, Gonzaga University’s president, and Ed Hogan, who with wife Lynn founded the Pleasant Hawaiian Holidays vacation business in 1959. They endowed the $100 million Hogan Family Foundation in 1998 with proceeds from the sale of the company.

About that time, Hogan attended a Spitzer lecture on ethics, liked what he heard, and eventually agreed to fund a curriculum that combined business education with ethics and entrepreneurial elements.

The foundation kicked in $150,000 to underwrite the program’s first year. The ongoing contribution is $250,000, and the foundation also pledged $750,000 to the creation of the Hogan Entrepreneur Center, which was dedicated last month. The center is just part of a radical transformation of the Jepson Center that has also expanded space for graduate studies in the School of Business Administration.

The Hogan Center includes a classroom and boardroom fitted with high-tech bells and whistles, offices and labs where the program’s 80 students can massage their own ideas for businesses, and those of would-be entrepreneurs in the area.

Director Paul Buller says graduate students have been brought in to help satisfy the demand for help, with more than 20 projects ongoing. This interaction between students and community, not an ivory tower, has been the Hogan program’s objective since its inception, he says.

Next IT Chief Executive Officer Fred Brown says he agreed to sit on the program’s board because “I thought it was a real cool concept.”

If anything, he says, the execution has been cooler.

Fostering entrepreneurship by placing the program’s students in internships or other situations where they gather real-world experience will anchor them in the community, he says. “I think we’re doing a great job of educating a group of kids who can be the foundation for the Spokane economy.”

And not just kids. Brown and Ed Hogan hit it off so well as program board members Hogan has joined the board of Next IT.

Hogan, whose home is in Thousand Oaks, Calif., gets effusive when he talks about Gonzaga and Spokane. “It’s been wonderful, the relationship,” he says.

An attempt to launch an entrepreneurship program at another university fizzled, he says. At Gonzaga, “they have done exceptional things.”

Himself a beneficiary of mentoring by more experienced businessmen, Hogan says he enjoys the opportunity to perform the same service to others, and bring in other successful individuals as well. He plans to bring a noted California judge, a contractor and an insurance consultant/University of California Los Angeles professor along on a trip to Spokane next week.

Spitzer, he says, “has more than delivered.”

Encouraged by the success at Gonzaga, Hogan says the foundation a similar entrepreneurship program at Chaminade University in Honolulu. The two schools exchanged students last summer.

Now, he’s looking all the way across the Pacific Ocean. Cross-pollinating entrepreneurs, Hogan says, will help make the United States and China stronger economic partners.

“My dream is to get some of the Chinese students over to Gonzaga, and to get some of the Gonzaga students to go over to China,” he says.

And that first class, which took a bit of a risk just stepping into an untried program four years ago?

Of the 17 graduates, all but two are either employed or in graduate school. Sarah Taylor tries to keep track as head of an informal alumni group she hopes can advise succeeding classes.

“We were just given so many opportunities to meet people in the community,” says Taylor, who works for the Desautel Hege Communications firm in Spokane. Other graduates work for S.L. Start, Next IT, and GenPrime, also Spokane companies.

Taylor says she learned how to take a risk. How to run a business. How to appreciate customers and vendors. And how to give back to the community. She is a volunteer with Rotaract, the junior version of Rotary.

“It’s neat to be finally settled in Spokane,” says the Seattle native.

Neat, too, that the Hogans have settled on Spokane.