Monthly Archives: October 2012

Student Spotlight: Sterling Hill

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Sterling Hill, BHP & Finance ’13 spent the spring semester in Washington D.C. participating in the Archer Program. The Archer Program brings UT students to D.C. to allow them to experience working in government and politics. There are around 30 students per semester accepted from across the UT system schools. We sat down with him to hear more about his experience in the program and what he plans to do after he graduates.

Why were you interested in the Archer Program?

I have always been fascinated by politics and am minoring in government. I thought it would be a good opportunity to get outside of the business school and wanted to merge my interests in business and politics. I applied to the program, then shortly after I was admitted, I found out that I was going to have the opportunity to work for the financial sector.

Tell me more about what you did while you were in D.C.?

I was working for the Financial Services Round Table, whose mission is to protect and promote the economic vitality and integrity of its members and the United States financial system. They represent the interests of the 100 biggest financial institutions in the world. For example, when the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act came through after the financial crash, they represented the interests of the banks and financial institutions. I was an intern in this area and worked in the Government Affairs Department and worked directly under the chief lobbyist. I had the opportunity to attend a lot of committee hearings with politicians. My project for the semester was compiling election updates and results for lobbyists and politicians.

My favorite aspect of the program was being around 30 other super bright students who were all working at really interesting places. After talking with them, I was able to learn more about their experiences and it opened my eyes to other areas I am now interested in, like global trade.

Did you have any epiphanies about your career after school from the experience?

I did. I love Washington D.C. and learned more there than I probably have in all of my schooling so far. I am more knowledgeable now about politics. The experience helped me gain clarity on which avenue I want to pursue for my career, which I don’t think is politics after all.

What has been your favorite class at UT?

In the business school, it was Finance 376 taught by Robert Duvic. It taught me about global trade and how it affects the economy and people’s standard of living. It made me realize there is more to finance than just the numbers and showed me the actual human impact. Outside of the business school, I really liked the Theatre and Dance class that I took. I ended up going to see a bunch of shows on campus because I enjoyed it so much.

What are you involved in outside of class?

I am part of a service organization called Brothers Under Christ. It is a group of 200 guys who meet together each week to make a positive impact on campus. I also work for a technology startup in Austin called Predictable Data. They create data mining software for small businesses. I help with sales and finacials. I am also involved with a UT student organization called Students for Educational Reform, which educates students on the issues in education reform, while getting them involved in local schools.

What do you wish you had known coming in?

Get involved in something other than business to open your mind to new experiences and broaden your world view. Each time I got involved outside of the business school, it gave me a broader perspective of what is truly important.

Four Recent Alums Share Experiences in Dell Development Programs

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The BHP is pleased to have Dell as a corporate partner this year. Dell has employed many BHP alumni over the years. BHP alumnae Casey Lehmann has worked there two years and says, “It is a great company to work for that empowers future leaders to collaborate with global teams, develop ideas and run with them.  There’s a work hard, play hard mentality, focused on driving for results through collaboration, leadership, and engagement.  The culture is also very open and encourages getting to know people from across the globe and outside of your day-to-day job.”

There are several development programs throughout Dell that focus on providing college graduates with a breadth of experiences that they can take & build upon in their future career.  These programs typically provide you with exposure to the senior leadership team, as well as mentoring, networking, community service & teambuilding opportunities.  Four recent BHP grads took the time to share their experience in development programs at Dell.

 

Mandy Ellison

Graduated 2010, MPA and Business Honors

Global Audit and Transformation (GAT)

Working on the Global Audit and Transformation team at Dell has given me the opportunity to learn various parts of the business through diverse assurance and internal consulting engagements that typically last 4 months each.  Past projects have included mapping the end-to-end sales process, reducing complexity in server manufacturing, realigning call center key performance indicators, auditing services revenue recognition and testing the India balance sheet accounts.  During my two years, I have travelled to the Philippines, India and Brazil to assist with training and engage in regional projects.  Working at Dell is a great fit for me because of the opportunity to work on challenging, cross-functional projects with global teams.

 

Elyse May

Graduated 2010, Marketing and Business Honors

Commercial Leadership Development Program (CLDP)

The Commercial Leadership Development Program was an amazing opportunity straight out of undergrad that truly set me up for success and enabled me to excel in my career early on.  The program is 2 years long and consists of four, 6 month rotations, starting in sales, and then allows you to drive your career based on where your personal and long term career goals lie. My four rotations were consumer sales, Dell@ marketing and sales support lead, media planning budget manager, and small office business planning. Through my four rotations, I got to launch a new channel, understand how Dell spends our marketing dollars, and the intricacies of putting together actions to drive strategy. The structure of the program is great because it allows you to see firsthand the collaboration across the business units and helps you understand how sales, marketing, operations, finance, and all other business functions are intertwined. In addition to your everyday job, the program provides you with brown bags with the senior leadership team, mentoring with CLDP alumni, and other development opportunities that allowed me to build my professional network.

 

Rachel Robinson

Graduated 2010, Finance and Business Honors

Finance Development Program (FDP)

I am a recent graduate of Dell’s Finance Development Program (FDP), a 2-year rotational program designed to develop future leaders through a breadth of experiences and MBA-style coursework. The program offered me several great opportunities, including a one-year international assignment in Singapore. Working in Asia really strengthened my global skills and enhanced my understanding of Dell’s supply chain operations. I have now joined the Global Audit and Transformation (GAT) team, where I will continue to gain breadth and international work experience as well as develop my controllership skills. I love working for Dell because I’ve been given roles with large scope areas early in my career, and I’m constantly challenged to learn about different areas of the business. Dell is truly a great place to work!

 

Casey Lehmann

Graduated 2010, Finance and Business Honors

Finance Development Program (FDP)

I also participated in Dell’s Finance Development Program, and completed four six-month rotations throughout the Finance organization.  Each role (Services Finance, Software Pricing, Treasury & Global Operations) was very different and allowed me to explore what I liked and didn’t like about each area of the business.  In addition, I was able to grow my business & financial acumen through the curriculum & simulations the program provided.  I was also able to get involved in extracurricular activities, such as on-campus recruiting & planning networking events with executives early on in my career.  Since graduation, I have joined the Integration Management Office (IMO) at Dell, focusing on integrating the companies we have recently acquired.  Dell has been a great fit for me, because the support & encouragement from the leadership team throughout the company inspires me to put my best foot forward & learn something new every day.

Connect with us!

Twitter: @CareersAtDell

LinkedIn: Linkedin.com/company/dell/careers

Facebook: Facebook.com/delluniversityrelations

Dell.com: Dell.com/careers

Mandy_Ellison@Dell.com

Elyse_May@Dell.com

Rachel_Robinson@DELL.com

Casey_Lehmann@DELL.com

COO of Southwest Airlines Mike Van de Ven Shared Advice with BHP Students

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Mike Van de Ven spoke to students this week in the BHP Lyceum Course. Van de Ven is the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Southwest Airlines. He joined Southwest in 1993 as the Director of Internal Audit, became VP of Planning in 2001, and took on his current role in 2005.

He started his career at Arthur Young & Co. (now Ernst & Young) as an auditor, where he said he gained insight into companies of all sizes and learned to solve complex problems. He worked on the Southwest Airlines account for 10 years and became so interested in the company that he ultimately decided to leave the company and join Southwest full time. He took a pay cut and moved out of his posh office to a small office with just a card table and a folding chair. He was so excited about the job and company’s potential for growth, that he said he didn’t mind.

One of the biggest lessons Van de Ven said he learned right away from Southwest President Emerita Colleen Barrett was that if you want to lead people, you have to serve people. She taught him the importance of serving the people who are making your company great. Under her direction, he served hot dogs in the blistering heat to ground crews, and painted walls and hung photos around the office. A student asked him about the great customer service and friendly attitude Southwest is known for later in the class, and Van de Ven said he thinks part of that can be attributed to executives of the company serving and recognizing their employees.

Another experience he shared with the students was what it was like to be six months on the job as the head of planning for the airline on September 11, 2001. “It was the most eventful and chaotic day of my professional life,” said Van de Ven. There was a massive amount of problem-solving needed and he didn’t know if the plan he had for the airline would still be viable after what happened. “You will have defining moments like this in your career,” he told the students. “The things you are doing today will prepare you for these. Situations are going to arise where you don’t have an answer and you are going to have to fall back on something you know.”

Here are a few of the things Van de Ven knows and shared with the students.

  • “Pass the lunch test” – be interested in people and a good communicator, because if someone doesn’t want to go to lunch with you, you can’t be a good leader. Also hire people you want to go to lunch with.
  • “Have a mantra” – his has been to be “In scope, on time, and in budget” and he learned that from his time as an auditor. Good processes and procedures are key, but you also have to narrow problems down and solve what is most important first.
  • “There’s something about Mary” – actually, it isn’t something about Mary that is important, it is something special about you. You become crucial to an organization when there is some kind of experience that only you can provide.

In addition to these lessons, he stressed the importance of networking while you are in school, citing connections he made to professors and classmates whom he ended up working closely with later in his career. “Be deliberate in the connections you make now. The people you are sitting next to in class now are going to be the leaders of companies twenty to thirty years from now,” he said. “I never in my wildest dreams would have thought I would be COO of Southwest Airlines.”

Michael Massetti of AMD Shared Insight Into the World of Supply Chain Management

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Michael Massetti, Corporate Vice-President of Supply Chain for Advanced Micro-Devices (AMD), gave the BHP sophomores a taste of the infinite number of variables that go into supply chain management during his visit to the BHP Lyceum course last week.

Massetti has an electrical engineering degree, and started his career with IBM working in the technology and design sector. He spent 18 years at IBM, then moved to Dell to work on product lifecycle development. One point he stressed with students was being flexible and open to learning new things. He decided not to go super deep into one particular industry, but instead left his career more open and several job moves later, he has been fortunate to take on roles he never would have imagined having.

From Dell he went to Alcatel-Lucent where he led the strategic sourcing team and the overall platform strategy team. He then joined Tekelec  as VP of Global Procurement and strategy, until he was recruited away by a former IBM colleague to his current role with AMD.

Many areas fall under the umbrella of supply chain he told the students. “There are about 20 different disciplines, and you need to understand all of them on some level to be effective,” he said. Customer service, manufacturing, inventory, capacity and order-entry software were just some of the areas he cited as examples. Problem-solving is one critical skill that Massetti said he uses frequently. “No matter how a problem starts, it ends up in supply chain.” He talked about the need to be anticipatory and mitigate risk, but also be able to think on your feet and solve issues as they arise.

Originally from New York, Massetti is a fast-talker and a fast-thinker. He is also very engaging and has a dominating presence, which has no doubt come from years of management at a high level. He said he believes that one can learn to be a better leader, but that he also believes that people do or do not have a propensity towards leadership from a very young age. In his current role, he leads a large global team of supply professionals. His tips for being a better leader include establishing respect and rapport with your employees, being able to communicate well, and building a plan for your employees to help them grow.

Alumni Spotlight: John Honts – Senior Managing Director for Evercore Partners

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Alumni Spotlight: John Honts – Senior Managing Director for Evercore Partners

In his role as Senior Managing Director for Evercore Partners in New York, John Honts, BHP ’92, has been involved in numerous merger and acquisition deals over the years. Evercore has carved out a position as the largest independent advisory firm and Honts has advised CEOs on some major deals including Sanofi on its acquisition of Genzyme, Wyeth on its sale to Pfizer, and CVS on its acquisition of Caremark. Honts recently sat down with us to tell us more about his career path and the M&A process.

Tell me a bit about your career path.

After I graduated from UT, I went to work for Merrill Lynch as an investment banking analyst. I spent three years with Merrill, two in New York and one in London. I then went on to Stanford business school and graduated from there in 1997. I took a job with Evercore in ’97 and have been with the firm ever since. Evercore was founded in 1995, so when I joined, it was a small boutique with about 10 professionals and 20 employees in total. Now there are around 850 employees and the company has expanded both geographically and in scope. Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) advisory work is the biggest thing we do. I have been a generalist in M&A for most of my career and have been specializing in M&A for health care clients since 2007.

Why did you choose to work for Evercore?

I wanted to do something more strategic and thoughtful. I knew I was interested in M&A. Evercore has always followed a classic style of banking, by focusing on a handful of clients and giving them the best advice possible.  We compete against the global full service banking firms, and to be competitive, we have to consistently provide our clients with creative, high quality ideas, as well as superior execution.

What factors come into play when you are advising companies on mergers and acquisitions?

At the heart of M&A is strategy, and we work closely with CEOs to determine how inorganic moves such as acquisitions or divestitures will complement the overall strategic game plan for the company. The first step when working with a company is typically to evaluate a range of possible options and determine the most attractive ones. Then comes the art of what is possible. For instance, if there is a company you want to buy, figuring out if it is acquirable by looking at the motivations for all parties involved, and if a transaction is feasible from a financial perspective. Then, we get into tactics, such as how do you make an approach to a target, and what do you do next if the target is not receptive to the approach. This involves exploring alternatives such as making your offer directly to the target’s shareholders by releasing it publicly or moving on to the next possible target.

In identifying the best options, we think about what  the transaction would do for the company strategically. For example, we look at how it would affect market share, the complementary fit of products and services, and customer and supplier synergies. When analyzing a transaction from a financial standpoint, we look at its effects on a variety of metrics including growth rates, margins, earnings per share, return on capital, leverage, and credit ratings.

We work in teams of four to five people on a typical project. The team is headed by a senior managing director, which is my role, and includes an analyst, which is what a new BBA graduate would do. The analyst is mainly responsible for the financial modeling and quantitative analysis that enables us to make conclusions.

A transaction normally takes about six months from the time we start working on it to when it is announced. Once it is announced, companies take it from there to close the deal. I am usually working on two to four live projects at the same time and still pitching new ideas to clients to refill the pipeline.

What do you enjoy most about what you are doing with Evercore?

It is a very thoughtful business. We are always trying to come up with new ideas for companies. I like that I am able to work directly with CEOs on their business strategy. I also appreciate the hard-working and talented group of people here. We have several people who went to UT in the senior ranks and a large UT contingent at various levels at Evercore.

What advice do you have for students wanting to go into a similar position to yours?

Doing an internship in something similar to this would be a plus and a strong accounting background would also be helpful. Focus on your analytical and quantitative skills. Also make sure you are comfortable in Excel doing analysis and financial modeling. Coming out of Texas, I had a good set of financial skills. Students should supplement those skills by demonstrating an interest in banking. A good way to do that is to talk to others about what investment banking is about so that you have a good understanding to draw upon in an interview, and have a sense as to whether investment banking is a career you really want to pursue.  Also, students should think about whether they would like to work for a boutique advisory firm such as Evercore, or a full service bank, and how the firms are different from a cultural and reputational standpoint.

How did your time in the BHP affect you and your long-term career path?

I liked staying with the same group of people in my classes. There were about 40 students in my BHP graduating class. It was a very talented group. I appreciated having the best professors and smaller classes. Some classes were really eye opening for me.

Do you have any advice for current BHP students?

Try to find something that you are really interested in and focus your job search around that. When I graduated from both UT and from Stanford, I had to do my own work to get the jobs I wanted. Companies weren’t recruiting for those specific positions. Leverage your alumni network and friends and seek out what it is you want. I used the alumni network and made it clear to people that I wanted to go to New York.