Streamlined full life cycle sales for Entertainment

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well welcome and uh thanks for joining us my name is Ron Cook I'm the program director for the entertainment business master of science degree program I'm really excited to be able to tell you a little bit about our degree program which we affectionately refer to as ebms I thought a good way to attack this today would be to spend our time together answering the three questions I'm asked most often the first and most obvious question is why why in the world anybody in entertainment want a master's degree then I thought we'd spend a couple minutes talking about the what is it specifically the questions I get all the time is what's the difference between a master of science and entertainment business and a traditional MBA type of program and then finally I thought we'd wrap up with how we do it you know what are the strategies and methods that we use in order to give a highquality education before we go there however I thought I would just preface this information by talking a little bit about what I like most about being a full sale University and that's the people that I work with because working with a talented group of Educators the interesting thing about full sale is that they're not just teachers they're people with what we refection we refer to as a backstory and that backstory always has some tie ties to the entertainment and media Industries that's the one thing I love most about this place does anybody here like to go to concerts at all any anybody what's the one thing that would get in the way of you being able to go to as many concerts as you would like to go see too damn expensive exactly last concert I went to not to show the you know timing of this went to see Justin Timberlake fortunately was given tickets but I heard that had I bought those same seats it would have been about 250 bucks a piece of course by the time you have the requisite $12 beer wine whatever is your choice and you pay for parking you've just made an investment that's roughly the equivalent of a mortgage payment to go to a concert so one of the things I love to do outside of full sale is to produce concerts I still love to play in them that's sort of a rush to get up on a stage and and play music in front of a large audience that's a lot of fun let me give you a little bit of a piece of advice those of you aspiring concert promoters you can either produce a concert or play in it but don't try to do both because it's hard to yell at yourself when it's time to go on stage you know somebody has to be in charge this is what it looks like when I'm working now let me clarify not only is this not anything special here at this great University it's something that lots of people do lots of people playing music producing music recording music shooting full length motion pictures everywhere it's what makes full sale University awesome we were to talk about our degree program let's begin with the why the first answer to the why is a very bad scenario and that scenario goes like this right now in this great country of ours there are millions and millions of people that are out of work unemployed and if you think I'm about to make a pitch that having a master's degree is going to solve that I'm not that's absolutely not true but here would be my argument if there are a limited number of jobs in entertainment and media or any industry what I would argue is having a master's degree doesn't put you at the top of anybody's list but I would argue it probably moves you off the list somewhat gives you a little bit of a competitive Advantage the other thing that's very important these days is that employers are telling us that business literacy is simply no longer optional employers these days don't want to hire somebody and train them for a year they want to hire people that can walk in the door and perform right now do meaningful work they tell me things like Hey Ron don't send us someone that can't read a financial statement don't send us a graduate that can't Assemble and execute effectively a marketing plan don't do that they expect if people are going to to Aspire to be senior leaders in an organization they expect to have an an advanced degree and these Advanced skill sets that that we teach and finally they tell me they're looking for entrepreneurial skills and let me just Define that briefly it means a lot of things to a lot of people two things I think that employers are looking for with entrepreneurial skills at least what they tell me the first is this when you join an organization and you're going to make business decisions using their money employers want you to act like it's your money like it's coming out of your own pocket and they expect that we prepare graduates that are going to make prudent sound well researched business decisions as though the money is coming out of their own pocket number two they're looking for people with ideas but let's face it Business Leaders are looking for ideas that can make money so we spend a great deal of time in our graduate degree programs here at full sale talking about how we can monetize a business idea why would somebody pay us for what we love doing second question is what is the degree program and I told you the number one question that I'm usually asked is what's the difference between what we do here at full sale and what a traditional MBA program would do I went to a traditional University the biggest difference is that typically an MBA program is dealing with traditional Industries we might make believe uh we're an automobile manufacturer we're General Motors or Ford and we're going to assemble vehicles and there will be issues in case studies with marketing and finance and legal issues and all sorts of things well we don't have time to do that here at full sale and our students could care less about factories that they will never own so our program is focused 100% on entertainment and media we don't talk about financing a factory but we do talk about what's involved in financing financ ing a f length motion picture or a video game or an album or taking an artist out on a world tour that's our Focus here now what we teach is not too different than what you might expect from a traditional University except that we teach it as it applies to the entertainment and media Industries so again if we're looking at the legal issues associated with something we're not usually talking about manufacturing we're talking about creating and protecting intellectual property in the form of musical works or films or computer animation sequences and that kind of thing so everything we teach is oriented only toward entertainment and media terms of how we do it the first thing we do the purpose of graduate school is different than an undergraduate degree program the purpose of graduate school is to take what we're learning and apply the concepts directly to real life business scenarios in an undergraduate program we might sit attentively while somebody a talking head I'm the expert listen to me now tell me what I just said now prove to me you know what I just said here's a test and I grade you on it and we decide if you got something out of that particular course that's not what we do in graduate school we go out together we find the answers through research and then we look at how those answers are going to apply specifically to real world business cases in our case of course course to the entertainment and media Industries so to get there what we have students do rather than do a a thesis as I did back when I was in school and the cave paintings were on the wall and that kind of thing we have students take a business idea they create they're interested in and they build it into a full-blown business model over their one year with us at full sale we use lots of guest speakers I mentioned I came here originally as a guest speaker to talk to students about financing companies isn't it interesting you know the reason why we use a lot of guest speakers we want students to actually hear from these experts we have somebody here almost every single week it might be a movie producer it might be a concert promoter it might be a a video game specialist I've had the opportunity on this lovely stage here in our performance venue to interview everybody from Again movie Producers to the largest concert Promoter on the planet Planet the guy that does those concerts you watch on TV where there are hundreds of thousands of people overseas it's like Woodstock but he does it eight or nine times a year I got to sit on this very stage and talk to him about what that's like one of my favorite guest speakers of all time again on this very stage that I'm very humbl to be on today with you was Don Felder a name that I grew up with because he was with a little band called The Eagles when he turned around on this stage and he picked up his his guitar and he came back and he said I'd love to play a little song for you maybe you've heard of it and he played Hotel California and you could hear a pin drop this was not a man that knows how to play Hotel California this was the man that wrote the song Hotel California and made his livelihood doing it isn't it interesting the thing that interests me most as an educator I like to think I'm a pretty good educator so let's say I'm on my aame I could tell a student something 10 times 10 times provide a world of examples and do a really good job of explaining something the instant a famous person walks in the door and says precisely the same thing our students go well that's what I'm talking about right there well why is that it's simple it's because I'm an educator do I know what I'm talking about absolutely can I teach it sure I can have I lived it as my entire life not in a million years but he has and that's why we bring in lots and lots of guest speakers and the final point I would make that we do here is sort of a duh and the duh is we have a very talented and experienced faculty I thought I'd share just a couple of them with you to give you an idea of the type of people we have teaching our students William Thompson Bill teaches our final project course I would just invite you to look at the top bullet and the bottom bullet he came from Wall Street tremendously experienced guy great educator but look at the bottom bullet you know Bill gets to vote for the Grammys every year because he creates and distributes his music Worldwide ladies and gentlemen I've been playing music since I was 11 years old I don't get to vote for the gramys but Bill does how cool is that Cassandra we call her Cassie Willard she's a partner in a local entertainment Law Firm here in Central Florida look at the last bullet for her she's also the vice president of the Florida Bar Association she teaches our students every day in the classroom and like every other instructor online as well how cool is that and finally last but not least Kim craft who is not only our department chair but also teaches media publishing and distribution another very accomplished entertainment attorney with a long list of clients but look at the last entry for her several years ago she won the VH1 song of the year competition with a composition that she wrote you wouldn't know it to look at any of us and this this is a scary thought but we actually have lives outside of the University how odd huh and we can bring that experience to bear as we teach our students providing as we call it here that real world education now the objective of our degree program is one of two things really the majority of our students when they graduate they become what we affectionately refer to as entrepreneurs they take jobs in entertainment and media companies they move up the ladder hopefully make lots of money and that's the career they pursue too a minority of the students that graduate however because we've taught them these Advanced business skills and what's involved in launching a company they'll actually go out and become entrepreneurs and do their own thing to accomplish either of those paths we have them do that one thing that I mentioned earlier rather than put together a thesis a reflection a research paper we have them actually build a business from scratch from idea to execution putting together an entire plan to demonstrate they have the business literacy uh required in order to execute that what I would say about potential career paths for our graduates I would ask you to acknowledge a couple of things this list was different a year ago than it is today it's different today than it was then it will be different a year ago than it is today and so on and so forth and the reason why that's so important to us is that we seek the input of employers to tell us where things are headed not just where they are so when we bring in groups of employers not just to recruit our students we bring them in to ask them questions and we ask them things like where are the jobs right now but more importantly where are the trends that will create future jobs we take that information and we can immediately add to our curriculum so that we're preparing our students not just for today but for the jobs of tomorrow my two favorite questions in talking to employers are typically this what's the number one thing you're looking for in and a graduate from any University not just full sale University and then secondly what are you looking for that we could do a better job of what do we need to work on number one thing employers are looking for these days initiative that came up time and time again they want graduates they're they're the first thing in the morning that are the last to leave at night that are demonstrating a hunger to learn everything they can about the company and move up in the ranks that's the number one thing when I say what don't you like what they don't like are students that would be ill prepared to communicate with people and I mean written communication in the form of being able to write present proposals being able to stand up as I am now in front of a group of people and present an idea or the solution to a problem and when I further ask them what's the one thing they really don't like what they really don't like are people that get too immersed in technology so that it doesn't become a facilitator for doing business it becomes an impediment the example that they always give is this and they tell me that this being able to communicate instantaneously globally is great we need to leverage that and they tell me that we as Educators need to balance this with a big helping of this let me tell you a little bit about myself and my company and what we can do to help you so we teach both of those skill sets here at full sale because both are important in terms of being successful in business so a quick recap for you the first is that we focus specifically on entertainment and media we don't spend a lot of time talking about any other Industries only the ones that we serve our students take an idea that they create not one that we ask them to in the form of an assignment they develop that idea throughout their entire degree program into a full-blown business plan and present that at the end to demonstrate they've acquired the business literacy to execute that plan we use frequent guest speakers and we bring in lots of outside experts so that our students get to hear that real world perspective and finally we have a very talented and experienced faculty that can bring their real world experience to bear with our students so thank you very much for allowing me to spend some time with you I appreciate it thank you