By Tricia Cherry —
The speaker for a recent TEE Time was none other than Miami Hamilton’s own Dr. Bernard Caldwell, better known around the campus as Coach B, currently the coach of the women’s basketball team. Coach B has been with Miami Hamilton since 2017. He spoke about this history with entrepreneurship and gave advice about it, and higher education in general.
Coach B grew up in Washington, DC and began cutting his neighbor’s grass at age thirteen, and this paid fairly well. According to Coach B, he has a childhood friend who is still cutting grass thirty-five years later. The entrepreneurial spirit continued into college when, living in dorms surrounded by fellow students who were either too busy or didn’t know how, Coach B took up doing their laundry for twenty dollars a basket. In both of these cases, he brought on more people and began overseeing their efforts, noticing a pattern forming.
Also, during his own college years, a sorority approached him with a request: They were having a graduation party in their dorms and would buy everything he would need if he would cook for the event. At this point, Coach B joked about this particular job—getting paid to cook, no need to buy anything for it, and being surrounded by girls—by saying that “this cannot go wrong.” His roommate at the time was a baker, and the two began catering out of their dorm room from that point on. This paid for the remainder of his college years.
Entrepreneurship requires three basic elements: the identification of a need to be filled, and therefore a potential clientele; financial literacy; and a viable idea. Complications and occasionally outright failure is inevitable in some cases, Coach B warns. But, what matters is what you do in response. One of his and a friend’s earlier ideas, for example, was a resume-writing company. This seemed like a good idea at first, but as technology grew and free tutorials appeared online, demand shrank. During the fitness craze of the 1990s, they tried to break into the market, but it eventually floundered because it was based on a fad. However, both of these left Coach B and his partners with skills and qualifications they carry to this day.
Back in 2022, Coach B launched a company called College & Career Coaching, LLC. Their services, available to Butler County Ohio and surrounding areas, include assistance in college applications and FAFSAs, standardized test prepping, and learning various careers. He claims that this came from becoming an expert at FAFSA ten years prior to the launch. Having filled out his own FAFSAs, followed by those of his children and helping many students with the process afterword, Coach B became very familiar with the process. This, along with everything else that goes into a college application, set off the alarm of need in the coach’s head and College & Career Coaching was born.
When asked about what it’s like looking back, if someone were to tell the young boy mowing grass where he’d be today from following what those around him needed, Coach B said that he had people as far away as California seeking his guidance, and after wondering how these people heard about him in the first place, he said that they he never imagined the place he’s now in.
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