June 2008
Getting Their Hands Dirty
Students Help Wharton Small Business Development Center Client Help Farmers
Bob Pierson, founder of Farm to City, has been called the father of the modern neighborhood farmers market in Philadelphia. But a bunch of kids from Wharton managed to teach him something about his markets that he didn't know-and that he's already putting it into practice in hopes of bettering his business.
This past spring, Pierson volunteered to serve as a consulting client for students taking the spring version of Management 100, Wharton's foundational leadership course for undergraduates. The class, says Chris Maxwell, one of its professors, is designed to be a living laboratory. "We don't lecture much. We give the students readings, but experience is key in the course." To that end, the students act as consultants to Philadelphia-area businesses like Pierson's.
A group from one of Maxwell's sections, for example, analyzed the promotional materials for Farm to City's two divisions-its farmers markets and its Winter Harvest food-buying club-to pinpoint strengths and weaknesses. (Winter Harvest is an online service that lets people order locally produced foods during the winter and spring when farmers markets don't operate.) As part of the effort, the students interviewed Pierson's current and potential customers. What they learned surprised both them and him-but to understand why you have to know a little more about Bob Pierson and Farm to City.
Pierson recently was named 2008 Small Business Person of the Year for the Region by the U.S. Small Business Administration after being nominated by the Wharton Small Business Development Center and based in part on his engagement in Management 100. This section of Management 100 is a collaboration between the Wharton Small Business Development Center and the Wharton Undergraduate Division which provides carefully guiding oversight to each project. This spring alone fifteen businesses were paired with student teams. The teams performed an audit of the participating company's external communications program culminating in a presentation to the class and to the client at semester's end.
Therese Flaherty, PhD, director of the Wharton Small Business Development Center (Wharton SBDC), which helps Management 100 identify firms that might benefit from the students' efforts, says, "Part of the reason the students and clients work so well together is that the Wharton SBDC is very careful in the selection, recruitment and vetting of possible clients. We are looking for exemplary businesses with exceptional CEOs to be good examples for the students."
Pierson, who has a doctorate in biochemistry, was drawn to locally grown food back in the early 1970s, while living in Madison, Wis. There, he helped organize a food co-operative-in effect, a nonprofit grocery-and a farmers market. Once he and his wife moved to Philadelphia, his interest in local food and farmers market endured, but his career as an environmental consultant consumed much of his time. But memories of Madison kept tugging. So in 1996, he and a couple of friends decided to start a farmers market in Philadelphia. It was the seed from which Farm to City would germinate.
Around this time, Pierson also decided to leave environmental consulting and, in a stroke of serendipity, learned that Philadelphia's Food Trust was seeking a director for community markets. He joined and ended up starting its first seven farmers markets, too. By 2002, he was thus well-schooled in the region's farm economy and ready to strike out on his own. So he left to start Farm to City, with the vision of organizing, administering and promoting farmers markets.
"For me, farmers markets are just sheer fun-seeing all the great food come in, seeing the people come to the markets," Pierson says. "And the farmers themselves are all just characters." Plus, he says, the markets remind him of Italy, where he studied and met his wife. "Our first customers at a market are often people who come from Europe or have had a European experience. In Italy, all people talk about is food."
With Farm to City, Pierson organizes markets-finding sites, recruiting farmers-and then administers them. Each farmer pays a flat fee to participate, and Pierson handles licensing, bookkeeping and marketing. He added the Winter Harvest division on the thinking that farmers need income and consumers' want wholesome food after the end of the usual growing season.
When David Gurian-Peck, a rising Wharton junior, heard Pierson's tale, it appealed to him immediately. Pierson was one of several entrepreneurs who presented their businesses to Gurian-Peck's section of Management 100. Each presenter-all of them recruited by the Wharton Small Business Development Center-hoped to entice a handful of students to analyze his or her businesses' public relations and marketing efforts.
"Several of us had some awareness of the local-food movement and cared about that," Gurian-Pecks says. "And Dr. Pierson sounded like someone who knew what he was looking for and would be receptive to our suggestions.
Gurian-Peck and several classmates started out by trying to determine who Pierson's customers were and what they wanted. That would seem easy. After all, people have to show up at a farmers market to patronize it. So the students figured that they could just survey them there. Trouble was, the farmers markets weren't operating during the spring semester, when the project took place.
So instead, the students opted to interview pedestrians at three sites where the farmer markets would be held once the growing season began. "We were nervous about approaching people on the street," Gurian-Peck recalls. "But when we said that we were students from Penn, people were pretty receptive. A surprisingly large number of people did fill the surveys out." The students also surveyed Winter Harvest's customers.
Pierson had long figured that his two divisions drew the same sorts of customers-that is, folks who share his commitment to locally grown food and his mission of supporting local farmers.
The students learned that that wasn't the case. People who shopped at the two venues had different values. "Winter Harvest consumers, they're the true believers in local food and supporting local farmers," Gurian-Peck says. They thus shopped at the farmers markets, too.
But they weren't the bulk of the farmers-market customers. Instead, many of those shoppers were just people who wanted fresh produce and didn't think very deeply about its origin. (Granted, locally grown food should be fresher since it doesn't spend much time in transit.) Perhaps even more important, the students learned that plenty of the passersby weren't shopping at Pierson's markets even though they said that they cared about the freshness of their food.
"That was a major insight for me," Pierson says. "These people didn't care about supporting farmers. They didn't care overtly about their health. But we'd been promoting health benefits and helping farmers. So this year, we're pushing freshness. I got a door hanger made that's going to 7,500 households that says, 'Fresh is Back,' and lists the locations of several of our markets.
"I was also surprised that we weren't reaching a lot of people who walk by the locations of the markets every day," he adds. "We have to do a better job reaching those people. The door hangers should make a difference."
Gurian-Peck, for his part, found the consulting project equally valuable, gleaning lessons that he hasn't yet gotten in his lecture-based classes. "This was a chance to get a sense of what people really do out there in the world. When I tell my parents and friends what we did, they say, 'You worked with a real company?' It also gives you a sense that consulting doesn't have to be working at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey. These small businesses are more fun and down-to-earth."
If your Pennsylvania based business is interested in involvement with Management 100, contact the Wharton SBDC for more information: http://whartonsbdc.wharton.upenn.edu/contact.html
Posted June 2008