The American Marketing Association held a Q & A session with Ken Tudhope of Project Pro Search, Boris Bugarski of mUrgent, Gregg Champion of Champion Media & Entertainment, and Jan Mittermeier of Cofiroute. Students were able to ask questions and gain valuable insight from these successful entrepreneurs.
After working for a large specialized staffing firm Ken used his talent and extensive list of contacts to start his own staffing company. When asked about it Ken said his biggest fear was that he wouldn’t be successful. But this fear dissipates a little more year over year as he gets used to running his own company “All of the sudden it’s 2 years later and you look back and say ‘We’re going to make it’”. Ken values his time with his family, and owning his own business allows him the freedom to take vacations and spend time with them.
Boris and Gregg had a rather different approach to business. Both of them say that they sleep 2-4 hours a night, and worked without a day off for years after they started their companies. Boris runs his company with his twin brother Aleks. mUrgent is an email marketing company that mainly markets for restaurants. When asked if he markets his own company the same way that he markets for his clients he replied “If you love what you do, you never work a day in your life.” What he meant by this is that it’s in his nature to do his best because he doesn’t want to fail, whether he is marketing his own product or someone else’s. “Put me in a Cold Stone and I’ll make the best ice cream in the world,”says Boris. He is also a ’97 Mihaylo graduate and advised students to get involved in the groups and resources available to them at school. He says not participating in these activities when he was here is his big college regret.
Gregg has started two of his own companies: Champion Media & Entertainment and OneCubicle.com. Champion Media primarily works on marketing campaigns for larger companies and Onecubicle is a job networking site for “twenty somethings” that acts as the link between Facebook and LinkedIn. When asked what kind of car he would like to drive, he said that as an entrepreneur you are the CEO and janitor of your company. You can’t come rolling into work in a Range Rover while asking your employees to cut costs. He drives a Lexus hybrid which he calls a “Soccer mom car.”
Jan is Senior Vice President at Cofiroute USA. Her accomplishments include overseeing a $300,000,000 expansion of the John Wayne Airport and implementing her plan that allowed Orange County to emerge from its biggest bankruptcy in just 18 months. However, she says that her biggest accomplishment has been raising her two sons. When asked if it is hard to hold her position as a woman she said that it had been a tough journey, but things are better than they were when she started out. Jan is a perfectionist in her work but has, and always will put her family first.
