So You Want to Be an Entrepreneur?

Michael Ayers, The Commonwealth Practice
Not many people are inspired to go back to school after hearing a poetry reading. For Michael Ayers, co-founder and CEO of The Commonwealth Practice, it was a poetry reading that helped him chose a school.

The turning point for Ayers, who had been working on leadership development initiatives at 3M, was a presentation by David Whyte—a poet, lecturer, and corporate consultant. “It was sponsored partly by the College of St. Catherine,” Ayers says. “I thought, any place that’s going to bring in a business consultant/poet sounds like an interesting place to look at.”

So he enrolled in St. Kate’s master of arts in organizational leadership, which allows students to choose one of six concentrations, including strategic management and healthcare leadership. “The MAOL is what an MBA ought to be,” Ayers says. “An MBA is about administering businesses. That’s different than an MAOL, which is about leading organizations.”

Ayers worked full-time at 3M while attending classes on weekends. He finished his degree in 2000 and, in 2002, left 3M to start Commonwealth, a Minneapolis consulting company.

Just as important as the master’s degree itself, Ayers says, was the content of his courses at St. Kate’s. “I had a communications class, with writing and speechmaking. I was getting a chance to sharpen those skills and pick up some things I hadn’t picked up before,” he says. “In other cases, it was broad kinds of things, like the importance of having a personal mission statement, that guide how I go forward.”

Lynn Baskfield, Wisdom Horse Coaching
Lynn Baskfield has been riding horses since she was seven. She’s also been an entrepreneur for most of her life. It’s little wonder then that she ended up combining her two passions in Twin Cities–based SpiritDance and Wisdom Horse Coaching, her life-coaching business endeavors that use horses to teach life skills.

Before Baskfield even hit upon the idea of equine-assisted learning, she had immersed herself in workshops and conferences aimed at deepening her knowledge of the mind-body connection. She brought those lessons to her business at the time, a beauty salon in Minneapolis where she incorporated mind-body-spirit wellness talks.

Recognizing that a graduate degree would complement her previous studies and give her an important credential, Baskfield looked into the programs available at the Twin Cities campus of St. Mary’s University, which offers master of arts degrees in areas such as management, international business, and human resources, in addition to a PowerTrak MBA.

She graduated in 1997 with a master of arts in human development, an interdisciplinary graduate program that allows students to customize a program that combines their scholarly interests, life experiences, and career goals. “St. Mary’s program is very individualized in that we design our own degree program with the help of an adviser,” says Baskfield, who concluded her degree with a position paper on life coaching.

So did the hard work pay off? Without a doubt, Baskfield says: “The content that I studied, and the different courses I took through St. Mary’s continues to inform the work I do.”