MBA Alumni Highlight!! Nick Tober
Nick Tober Canisius MBA’08
Nick Tober is a staunch proponent of experiential education. Virtually every day he applies concepts acquired in his MBA classes to some aspect of managing QuadGear, a company he and four classmates launched just two years ago. “There’s a certain knowledge you take away from actually doing things—trial and error,” he says. The company began on the basis of a business plan Tober and his cohorts wrote for a class in Entrepreneurship during the last semester of their senior year at Canisius College. “As soon as the gears got put in motion, we said, ‘You know, we could actually do this,’” Tober recalls. “We were passionate about seeing it up and running.” As members of the Canisius chapter of the community service organization Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE), the fledgling entrepreneurs decided to use profits generated by the company to fund SIFE-sponsored community outreach and consulting programs.
Today, operating from rent-free headquarters in the basement of the college chapel, QuadGear turns out such customized merchandise as apparel, pens, mugs, fleece blankets, lanyards—”anything you can think of,” Tober explains. “Our primary business is Canisius—clubs, departments, special events”—but recently they’ve expanded their customer base to include Shea’s Buffalo Centre for the Performing Arts and other organizations in the community.Their bottom line has expanded as well, from $20,000 at the end of the first seven-month fiscal year to nearly double that total this year. The staff includes 14 employees, of whom 12 are undergraduates and two, including Tober, are MBA students. Tober hopes the business will become a magnet for undergraduate business students who decide to earn an MBA before entering the corporate world. Running the company provides “real experience, and employers will recognize that in job interviews,” he says.
In the meantime, he’s working to fuse the didactic and practical aspects of business education at the college. He assists in teaching a business course called The Apprentice, alongside faculty advisor Dr. Patricia Hutton, professor of economics, “to help in succession planning for QuadGear” and address the management turnaround that will occur inevitably every few years as the company’s student employees graduate. Right now the course provides Economics credit or a free business elective credit at the undergraduate level, and Tober hopes to secure academic credit for MBA students who enroll as well.
He also envisions the creation of a Center for Ideas at the college that would forge closer links between the Career Center, the Wehle School of Business, and other departments, as well as promote community-based learning opportunities to further grow experiential learning. Toward that end, he and current SIFE President Jonathan Casey have co-authored and submitted a proposal to the college administration that would “take the college to the next level.”