Allon Lefever says “business is in my DNA.” He has ample proof to support this statement. The former director of EMU’s MBA program has helped to start 22 companies, taken six of those public on the NASDAC, and currently serves on 11 boards, including three in Harrisonburg. Summit Community Bank, Virginia Poultry Growers Co-operative, and ComSonics, Inc, an electronics manufacturing company, are all benefiting from his wide range of expertise acquired from more than 35 years in the business world.

This month’s Royal Connections business spotlight focuses on the Hampton Inn in Woodstock, Virginia, an LLC started nine years ago by Lefever and his partners Gerald Horst, class of ’72, of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Carl Harman, class of ’67, of Harrisonburg, Virginia. All three partners have strong EMU connections: Both Horst and Harman are former members of the EMU’s Board of Trustees, and their sons, Kyle Horst ‘02 and Hans Harman ‘02, earned business administration degrees from EMU. (Hans is also a current trustee.)

Lefever is managing partner at the Woodstock hotel, and shares the story of how he got involved in the hospitality industry below.

Among other mentoring that he seeks to provide, Lefever has hired EMU students to work as customer service representatives. Each summer, he also offers a three-month internship to a student from LCC International University in Lithuania. This is a “great experience for them, us and our guests,” he says, adding that interns gain professional experience, learn more about business ethics, and enjoy cultural exposure. (The connection with LLC comes from Lefever’s involvement as a former board chair and board member. LLC is also a host site for EMU’s Lithuania cross-cultural group).

To learn more about entrepreneurship in general and Lefever’s professional career, consider taking a look at his recent book, (FaithHappenings Publishing, 2017), a lively compendium using the metaphor of mariner as entrepreneur.

How did you become a business owner?

Prior to becoming director of the EMU MBA program in 2003, I had served as a senior executive in a couple of large family businesses, helped to found 22 companies, and taken six of those companies public on NASDAQ, including an internet company in 1999. Business is in my DNA!

One endeavor was a hotel company I helped start for High Industries, Inc., in Pennsylvania. In the process, I built eight hotels for them, four of which were Hamptons.

While serving as the MBA director, and liking the hospitality industry, I began to investigate if I could build a hotel nearby where I could oversee the operations. Two investors were interested in joining me, and we selected Woodstock as a location that did not have a Hampton Inn, and could support a Hampton. We bought three acres of land off Exit 283 on Interstate 81 and built the 92-room hotel.

What appeals to you about the hospitality industry?

I’ve served in management of agriculture, manufacturing, and internet companies. I like many types of businesses, but find those directly serving the customer to be the most rewarding. I like forming a company, building a strong team, setting vision, mission, and values, and then letting the team perform. The hospitality industry is especially focused on serving the customer, many of whom really appreciate a friendly, clean, and effectively run operation, so I love the challenge of building a great hospitality team and serving the customer!

Tell us a bit more about your hotel in Woodstock.

In our first full year of operation, our hotel staff (26 year-around and 30 in the summer peak months) earned the coveted Lighthouse Award, given to a Hampton Inn that ranks in the top 5% in customer satisfaction. Over the years, we have been the #1 ranked Hampton for customer service along Virginia’s Interstate 81 corridor.

We have recently won the best hotel award again, from the Virginia Daily News survey which they conduct annually. The hotel has consistently improved both occupancy, and revenue in our nine years of operation. This is the result of the outstanding, customer-focused team that has chosen our Hampton as their place of work and reward! We focus on values, caring for others and customer service.

Over the years, you have taught and mentored many entrepreneurs. What do you particularly value about sharing your expertise and seeing others succeed?

As an entrepreneur myself, I especially enjoy watching and helping emerging entrepreneurs. A number of my students have started successful businesses. In my consulting business, I continue to coach and mentor a number of entrepreneurs and CEOs. Even my board service has an element of directing and coaching a business, which I thoroughly enjoy!

At EMU, I taught entrepreneurship courses to MBA graduate students and undergraduates, as well as principles of management and management strategy at the undergraduate level. My own core values aligned well with those integrated into the university’s business curriculum: integrity, ethics and serving others.

Teaching provided many opportunities to share ideas about leadership and business with young aspiring students. I love seeing them get excited about a business or organization idea which they have developed, and the learning and satisfaction of preparing a business plan. My favorite class session was when students in my entrepreneurship class would present their business plan to their classmates.

How do your values affect your business practice?

My values absolutely drive the type of businesses I enter, the way I select and develop associates, and the policies and procedures I implement. I believe very strongly that values drive culture. I first think about the culture important for a business to be successful, and then emphasize the values that will build that culture.

For example, for the Woodstock Hampton, I decided the overriding culture should be “A Caring Culture.” In employee orientations, we spend time talking about this value and how we practice those values in organization:

1. Always caring for one another as associates and employees.
2. Always caring for our guests.
3. Always caring for the community in which we operate.
4. Always caring for the world we live in, contributing to a better world.

What are some of your best business insights?

• To always treat all persons with dignity, including employees, guests, vendors, etc.
• To do good planning, including a 3-5 year strategic plan and an annual plan;
• To clearly communicate both LT and annual objectives, so that the team knows the objectives and gets excited about delivering the goals.
• To think carefully about how those goals will be fairly measured and then communicate regularly to those responsible for the implementation.
• To find ways to give back, to make work rewarding and meaningful, and fun!

Among the 150 alumni contacted for this Crossroads, this note was struck often: the importance of the integrity of the individual financial expert and, by extension, the company represented by that person.

Most interviewees seemed to feel they had secured the right work situation for their skill set and ethical values. But they didn’t always arrive at this point immediately upon licensure as a CPA, completing an , or earning a Certified Financial Planner designation. Perhaps a dozen interviewees parted from jobs at some point in their work journey as a result of feeling compromised or burned out, eventually finding something that fit them better.

Matthew Clemmer ’02, for example, was looking for a way to get a toehold in asset management when he landed a job in October 2005 with a Chicago-based private equity firm. There he joined an investment team managing a portfolio of over $200 million worth of real estate and commodity assets. Initially Clemmer thought this was his first big opportunity. Yet he left in July 2006 (10 months later) – so suddenly that he had lined up no other job – after realizing that his integrity was being compromised by dubious ethical practices.

In August 2008, at the start of the Great Financial Crisis – about the time his former employer was entering receivership – Clemmer was enrolled full-time in the MBA program at Boston College, while his wife, Sara Joy Bergey Clemmer ’03, was a campus recruiting manager for KPMG, one of the Big Four accounting firms.

“I went underground [i.e., to grad school] for two years, while the financial world unraveled,” Clemmer jokes.

Today Clemmer loves what he does and, more importantly, who he does it for. Employed by Trilogy Global Advisors, a boutique investment management firm that manages $14 billion of institutional equity assets, Clemmer is an investment analyst focused on industrial and material companies domiciled in emerging markets – such as those in China, Brazil, and Indonesia. He is part of an investment team in Orlando, Florida, which manages assets for large public and private institutions globally.

“We invest so that pension-holders can retire,” he says. “We look for high quality companies that have durability, that are not a flash in the pan.” And such companies, by definition in his mind, need to demonstrate high ethical and corporate governance practices to be sustainable over the long term.

Importance of “guiding values”

Allon Lefever, an adjunct business professor at EMU, urges his MBA students to start with “guiding values” – put in writing and reviewed regularly – in any enterprise they undertake.

He often offers his own example: He worked with his son, Rod, and another business partner in the late 1990s to build an Internet service provider, OneMain.com, that went public in March 1999 with an Initial Public Offering that raised $215 million. They more than doubled OneMain’s customer base in 18 months and then sold it to Earthlink for $308 million in September 2001.

Before they did any of this, however, the three business partners agreed upon these five “guiding values,” which were presented to all potential investors:

• People – we will treat people (our employees, customers and suppliers) with fairness and respect.
• Quality – we will consistently and continuously exceed the expectations of our customers.
• Integrity – we will deal honestly and fairly with people in all our business relationships.
• Mutuality – we will work for the mutual success of our employees, customers and shareholders.
• Innovation – we will develop innovative solutions to meet our customers’ needs.

At a critical stage in the growth of OneMain, Lefever and his partners discovered that a significant client specialized in Internet-transmitted pornography. They ceased carrying his business on their network, despite the financial loss.

Lefever said he was fortunate to spend his first 16 years after college with a food-processing company that demonstrated that it was possible to uphold one’s religious beliefs and be profitable. The company was Victor Weaver Inc. (sold in 1986 to Holly Farms). By age 33 Lefever was vice president of operations, responsible for 2,000 employees. “Victor Weaver and his son Dale were very clear on who we are and why we do what we do. There was no work on Sunday, for example. Even the trucks didn’t get on the road until 12:01 a.m. Monday.”

Next Lefever joined the management team of High Industries, then led by two Mennonite brothers, Dale and Calvin High, son of the founder, Sanford. “Sanford would walk around the [steel] bridges being built by his company and tell his workers, ‘Do a continuous weld and give it a good measure.’ He always encouraged his employees to deliver more than the required specifications.”

Today Lefever runs smaller businesses – mainly a successful Hampton Inn in the Shenandoah Valley, plus some real estate investments. “I’ll be the first to admit that it’s increasingly difficult to stand for one’s values and implement them in a big company,” he muses. “The bigger you get, the more you lose control.”

Regaining control on the home front

After a succession of high-level jobs with the two largest privately held companies in the United States – Cargill and Koch Industries – Denise Yoder Miller ’85 and her husband, Luke Miller ’87 (accounting major, followed by an MBA) decided, “One of us is going to have to get off the corporate race track.”

They agreed Luke would keep running the race. He is based at the corporate headquarters of Cargill in Minnetonka, Minnesota, where he is a strategist, working to rationalize the ways 70 business units of Cargill interact with customers in 65 countries. ¹

Denise, a CPA, had been feeling ambivalent about her long work hours in the high-pressure Koch environment after she gave birth to their first child, Nicole, in 1999. Yet she also identified strongly with her highly responsible job. She was information technology controller, responsible for a $370-million shared service group for which she did financial reporting, budgeting, and forecasts.

When Nicole was 3, Denise had an epiphany: “I was at the point in my career where when I looked around, those above me had their secretaries purchase birthday gifts for their children. It occurred to me, why did I have a child if I wouldn’t be able to spend time with her? We had this beautiful daughter, and I decided I wanted to spend two years with her before she started school.” (In 2005 their second daughter, Samantha, was born.)

Previous to Koch, Denise had been financial analysis manager for Thorn Americas Inc., with annual revenues of $1 billion, and before that, financial analyst for Cargill’s division in Wichita, Kansas, with revenues of $300 million.

From Very Important Person in the corporate financial world, Denise rapidly moved to being Somebody Quietly Cherished in her family, children’s elementary school, and church. Denise runs a database of 400 classroom volunteers who serve an elementary school with 700-800 students within a district of 10,400 students. She is the volunteer treasurer for Emmanuel Mennonite Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Previously, she was the volunteer treasurer for the non-profit Ten Thousand Villages store in nearby St. Paul.

“As a unit, Luke and I are balanced – I am able to give back where needed while he does the corporate job. It’s the season of my life. I would not have been satisfied at 23 to do what I am doing now. But now I really want to be able to have a purpose.”

She says she’ll likely resume full-time accounting by the time the children leave the nest, but she hopes it will be for a charitable foundation or the like.

Better business, community

Fred Brubaker ’66 can look back on his 34 years as lead accountant for a succession of two companies that produced products for maintaining lawns and gardens, the Steiner Corporation and Ventrac. He helped these companies provide desirable jobs for more than 100 folks in Orville, Ohio (pop. 8,380) – thereby fueling the local economy – while providing good-quality equipment to consumers.

Brubaker’s career in Orville began when two acquaintances from EMU, brothers Glenn ’66 and Roy ’68 Steiner, sought someone they felt they could trust to do the finances for Steiner Corp., their family-owned company.

Brubaker had been a major at EMU. He then taught in Honduras with the Eastern Mennonite Board of Missions for three years, before returning to college for an associate degree in . This was in Wooster, Ohio, which led to working for the seven Steiner brothers.

“For 20 years, we in the management team would talk every day,” says Brubaker. “I would tell them what the numbers meant, though I can’t say I gave them the best advice at the beginning. I was on a learning curve, along with company.”

Today, Ventrac remains in the hands of the Steiner family and does about $15-$20 million in sales annually. Its top-selling product is an all-wheel-drive compact tractor, with over 30 possible attachments. Brubaker is mostly retired, though he works about a half day a week for Ventrac. He also does the books for SpringHaven, a local counseling center, and runs a small tax-return business.

In today’s fast-paced world of multi-national deals and mergers, Brubaker may be one of a vanishing breed who can look around at the community where he has lived for more than 40 years – where he and his wife raised their daughter, Jacinda (Zook) ’97, where the Steiner brothers lived – and see the impact of his life’s work in his immediate environs, not to mention the usefulness of nearly 8,000 Ventrac tractors spread across the nation. — Bonnie Price Lofton, MA’ 04, editor

1. Cargill has 142,000 employees worldwide and gross annual revenues of $133.9 billion.

EMU is offering a series of seven seminars designed to help persons sharpen their leadership and conflict management skills.

EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP), MA in business administration program and the Adult Degree Completion Program (ADCP) have teamed up with the Harrisonburg-Rockingham Chamber of Commerce and the Shenandoah Valley Small Business Development Center to focus on topics ranging from negotiation skills for a “win-win outcome” to dealing with various personality types in the office.

The seminars will begin late January, meeting 9 a.m. for noon on seven Fridays in classroom 211/212 of the University Commons. (See campus map.)

‘People-Handling Skills’

“In my 30 years in business, I’ve noted that the vast majority of middle and senior managers are highly competent in their fields of expertise, but some lack the people-handling skills they need to be fully successful,” said Allon Lefever, director of EMU’s MBA program and entrepreneur. “This seminar series will offer practical help in this arena.”

“It’s been a wonderful opportunity for EMU to work more closely with organizations like the Chamber and SBDC to add the element of the ‘people-side’ of business to their existing and excellent array of services,” said Susan Landes Beck, a CJP administrator and initiator of the series. “With these joint efforts, the Valley has a practical package of training opportunities for local persons who want to grow in all areas of their leadership, business, entrepreneurship and management skills,” she added.

Costs, Schedule and Registration

The cost is $59 per seminar or $349 for the entire series, with a 10 percent discount for Chamber members.

Instructors are seasoned faculty members from EMU’s CJP, ADCP and STAR (Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilence) programs as well as from James Madison University and the Wharton, Aldhizer and Weaver law firm.

The schedule follows:

• Jan. 25: Leading Healthy Organizations in a Changing Environment;
• Feb. 1: Building Your Business and Your Integrity;
• Feb. 22, Cultural Awareness Matters: Effective Communication in Today’ s Diverse Workplace;
• Feb. 29: Personality and Communication Styles at Work;
• Mar. 28, Practical Leadership: Using Your Style to Effectively Lead;
• Apr. 11: Transforming Conflict Among Team Members;
• Apr. 25: Negotiation Skills for Leaders.

Persons attending the entire series will receive a certificate in organizational leadership.

To register or for more information, visit http://www.emu.edu/seminarseries or call 540-432-4651 or e-mail pi@emu.edu.

It

Approving several new academic programs and taking actions to strengthen the future of the university was the primary focus of the Mar. 24-25 meeting of the EMU .

The school’s governing body heard a summary report with recommendations that followed nearly two-years of comprehensive work by a "prioritization" steering committee.

Prioritization report

The 13-member group, chaired by University President , led a process of evaluating all university programs to ensure that they fit the university’s mission to serve the Mennonite Church and larger world.

Dr. Swartzendruber gave a Powerpoint presentation on the project. The goal of the campuswide effort, he said, is "to experience healthy organizational change that will make EMU a stronger,even higher quality program in the days ahead.

"This has been a transparent process all along, with findings and committee proceedings and recommendations posted on the web site for everyone to read," the president said.

The board took action to approve the prioritization report, with many of the recommendations to be carried out in a gradual, "evolutionary" fashion.

Merging departments

Among the changes, the board approved a recommendation to merge the art and communication departments to form the , effective fall 2006.

Marie S. Morris, undergraduate academic dean, pointed to the advantages to be realized by merging the two departments, noting that "the faculty are young and passionate about their discipline, with a positive effect on students.

"It is important to model a faith-based collaboration in the context of a liberal arts and Anabaptist faith context where students are equipped to engage in creative activity in a variety of media forms," Dr. Morris said. "Students will be enriched by the mixing in classes of students who are working in traditional studio arts and those working in digital applications. The critical analysis, combined with working side-by-side, will push each student to a greater level of excellence," she added.

The board also approved recommendations to add a major in digital media and a major in photography, effective fall 2006. Both programs are in response to student interest and will provide increased collaboration of students and faculty, improved advising and mentoring and more efficient budgeting and instructional space use.

New MBA track

Also approved was a new health services administration track within the program, starting fall of 2006. Allon Lefever, MBA director, said the courses will be offered on-line and will take two-and-a-half years to complete the certificate at one course a semester.

President Loren Swartzendruber gives a summary of the campuswide "prioritization" process to the EMU board of trustees.
Photo by Jim Bishop

"The courses will emphasize case studies and ethical considerations and will prepare potential managers of nursing homes, retirement communities and other health care systems," Lefever said.

The trustees also approved recommendations to discontinue several academic programs with low enrollment, effective fall 2006 – the German major and minor, the economic development major and minor and the marketing minor.

"We weren’t certain when this process started where we’d end up, and in fact, we’re far from done at this stage," Swartzendruber said. "This huge task will mean little if we don’t continue working on it on an annual basis."

Other business

The trustees also:

–Approved a preliminary operating budget for the 2006-07 fiscal year of $25.5 million, a 3.6% increase. The new budget includes $ 5.5 million in student scholarships, a one percent wage increase for faculty, staff and retirees and $1.4 million toward capital projects;

–Approved five-year contracts for 10 undergraduate faculty members and one seminary professor and promotions in rank, effective fall of 2006, for seven undergraduate faculty;

–Heard that revenues for 2006-06 are at $944,520, about $130,000 above the same time last year, with 17 contributions of $50,000 or more received so far the current fiscal year. The board also was told that first-year student applications and deposits are "substantially ahead of 2005."

As a child Jason Garber liked to “play business.” By his mid-teens he owned one.

Now 21, the enterprising college senior has racked up more business savvy than some people twice his age.

Garber was six when his family got their first computer, an IBM PS2. “I jumped on it pretty early,” he says. While other children were still learning to read, he pretended he was in business and made signs with desktop publishing.

He was a natural with computers. Word of his expertise got around his home town of Hutchinson, Kan. In his teens he was spending so much time helping people he decided to start charging.

“I picked a rate pretty well at random, $15 an hour,” says Garber. “I thought that was big money then.”

As he got busier he kept bumping it up. At $50 an hour he was still “as busy as I could tolerate.”

By 15 he was president of his own company, Next Step Systems, which handled two lines of computer hardware, installed and configured networks and did web design.

Being so young in business had its perils. One day in high school he received a pink excuse slip that said “emergency.” He rushed to the school office, fearing a family crisis. Relief washed over him when he learned it was a call from a client who urgently needed help with a computer system Garber had installed the previous weekend.

Since he was too young to drive, his father had to leave work to take him to the client, 22 miles away.

“I was learning how to keep customers satisfied a great deal faster than I had anticipated,” Garber recalls.

When a national computer magazine profiled this midwestern wunderkind the editor had to ask for clarification: “Who or what,” he queried, “is 16 years old

A new pilot effort will seek to strengthen ties between Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA) and business students at EMU and other Anabaptist-related schools.

MEDA, an association of 3,000 Mennonite business people, has a dual thrust of promoting a Christian witness in business and operating business-oriented programs of assistance to the poor. Its efforts include micro-finance and production/marketing programs in 10 countries and business training and community development programs in a number of major cities across North America.

An agreement to work at exchanges, internships and learning/research opportunities was recently formalized by Howard Good, MEDA’s vice-president of North American operations, and Allon H. Lefever, associate professor of business and director of the MBA program at EMU.

The agreement, which may be replicated at other institutions, will build on MEDA’s ongoing relationship with Mennonite colleges. Business students receive complimentary copies of “The Marketplace” magazine and are eligible for reduced rates at the annual MEDA convention. The arrangement seeks to expand business students’ understanding of the integration of faith, business and development, involve more of them in MEDA’s work and provide more learning opportunities within MEDA’s program.

“This process has already started [at EMU],” Lefever noted. “We’re exposing students more deliberately to MEDA’s thrust of faith, business and development by distributing ‘The Marketplace’ directly into the classroom and making assignments based on its content, using it as a reference,” he said.

“We also want to identify areas where MEDA’s need for certain kinds of analysis can be matched with MBA students who have to do an applied project. An example would be a product from a MEDA program that needs some assessment in terms of cost structure and world demand,” Lefever added.

Plans also call for a sponsored internship program for undergraduate or MBA students; an annual MEDA-sponsored speaker or lecture series, increased connections between EMU business students and the Harrisonburg MEDA chapter and greater awareness of MEDA values and projects in the school’s SIFE chapter (Students in Free Enterprise).

From the MEDA side, benefits include more potential student interns for MEDA projects; increased student attendance at the annual MEDA convention; and greater engagement by students with issues of faith/business/development.

“We hope to reach agreements like this with other Anabaptist-related colleges that have business departments,” said Good.