The Consulting and Business Development Center’s success grows from significant investments from individuals, corporations, and foundations. Donate to the center and help us train future leaders, improve small businesses, and advance our economy through job creation and business growth.
Establish an Endowment
Consulting and Business Development Center’s donors have established key endowments that are transforming our work, growing our impact, and ensuring our success. These endowments enable the center to expand the number of businesses reached each year and make it easier for students to complete their education while learning from entrepreneurs and small business owners.
To learn how to establish your own endowment or to contribute to an existing endowment through a multi-year pledge, planned gift, or contribution of an appreciated asset please contact Michael Verchot, Director, Consulting and Business Development Center at [email protected] or (206) 543-9327.
Donate
With your generous help, we will provide assistance to the small business community by planning to:
- Double the annual number of businesses reached by our student consultant from 400 to 800
- Build tailored COVID-19 recovery programs that allow small businesses to
- re-hire some of the workers that they laid off during March-May 2020
- return to profitability or increase profitability
- adopt new technology to become more resilient
- develop new revenue streams and customers
- create business continuity plans
Your help allows us to reach these goals.
Give Now
Become a Professional Advisor
Through the Consulting & Business Development Center’s Foster Consulting Program, students are matched with business owners for six-week consulting projects to help with a specific business need. The Center matches three advisors, typically project management or consulting professionals, with each student team to help them deliver value to the client and reinforce learning and professional development. Advisors support the students by providing professional expertise in helping the team solve business challenges, as well as connect the students to business resources that can assist the client companies. These advisors play a pivotal role in the success of the center and contribute to student learning and to business growth. If you’re interested in utilizing your Professional Consulting skills to mentor and support students we encourage you to apply.
Roles & Responsibilities
- Conduct a weekly meeting with the team to provide support, help the team identify key issues that need to be addressed, and help the team develop recommendations for business improvement.
- Team meetings are generally held at the UW campus. We prefer that advisors attend the weekly meetings in person, but on occasion, conference calls can be conducted.
- Respond to email requests for help and support on the student project.
- Connect the team with other resources that the client business may need. These might include attorneys, accountants, marketing consultants, and bankers.
Time Commitment
1-2 hours each week for 6 weeks
Advising vs. Performing
- Reviewing and providing feedback on project management deliverables
- Facilitating a project planning session
- Helping students find resources or connecting them to industry experts to help them with their project
- Questioning the students and encouraging them to think deeper
Apply now
Founders and Faculty
The Consulting and Business Development Center was founded in 1995 by Dean and Professor Emeritus William D. Bradford, Professor Emeritus Thaddeus H. Spratlen, and MBA student and now Center Director, Michael Verchot with a mission to solve real-world problems and capture emerging opportunities for small businesses owned by people of color or those located in under-served communities. Today that work continues to transform business education and grow wealth-creating businesses with a dedicated team of staff, faculty, students, alumni and business leaders.
Thaddeus H. Spratlen
Professor Emeritus Thaddeus H. Spratlen is the founding Faculty Director for the Consulting and Business Development Center. The Center’s core endowment fund that supports undergraduate student consulting teams is named for and endowed by him. Over 2,000 UW students have consulted with 500 businesses since the Center’s inception in 1995. Spratlen is also the lead author for the Multicultural Marketing and Business Consulting textbook (2012).
Professor Spratlen joined the Foster School of Business in 1972 and focused his research and publications on urban, racial, ethnic, and social policy aspects of marketing and related business disciplines. Examples include the harmful effects of tobacco industry target marketing of Blacks and minority groups, research that sought to determine advertising’s impacts on smoking and societal quality of life. He has written 75 articles, chapters, and other documents in edited publications.
Professor Spratlen was the Associate and Acting Director of Afro-American Studies (1980-1982) and Faculty Legislative Representative (1992-93) for the UW. In 1994 he received the U.S. West Andrew V. Smith Faculty Development Award for outstanding service to the school and to the University. As a professor, Spratlen emphasized taking the classroom into the community through projects by students, designed to solve real problems of local small, and often, minority-owned businesses. This move from conventional lectures to service learning was crucial to the founding of the Business and Economic Development Center. Implementation of this mentoring-advising learning model has been transformative for sponsor and recipient businesses, students, faculty, and business school teaching models nationally. Spratlen, focused his career on mentoring and advising support for students; and won several departmental awards from undergraduate students.
Professor Spratlen’s distinguished record of service beyond the University include First Vice-President, ACLU of Washington, and President of the Board of the Jacob Lawrence Catalogue Raisonne Project. His program innovations have had important national impacts, including his role as co-founder of the Caucus of Black Economists that became the National Economic Association in 1975. He championed the expansion of the Ph.D. Project to increase representation of minority faculty beyond accounting to other business school disciplines, including marketing. He also pioneered the Ph.D. Project’s focus on mentoring. In August of 1997 the Ph.D. Project, recognized Professor Spratlen for lifetime achievement noting his extensive efforts to diversify the field of marketing. His innovations and service continue to inspire students and serve the larger university community.
William D. Bradford
Dean and Professor Emeritus William D. Bradford was Dean of the Foster School of Business during which time he worked to launch the Consulting and Business Development Center. In 1999, he stepped down as Dean and assumed the role of the Endowed Professorship of Business and Economic Development (now named the William D. Bradford Endowed Professorship) for more than a decade when he also served at the Center’s Faculty Director.
The Center’s Bradford-Osborne Research Award was created upon his retirement from fulltime teaching to both recognize his life’s work and to create an incentive for other researchers.
Dean Bradford has published more than 75 scholarly articles with most focusing on issues related to entrepreneurs of color. He has authored or co-authored three books and more than 50 articles on finance during his career. His research informs the Center’s business assistance programs including the formation of the M3 model of improving Management skills, growing access to Markets through contracts and supply chain partnerships, and increasing access to Money through loans and investments.
In addition to UW, he has taught at Stanford, Ohio State, U. of Maryland, New York University, UCLA, and Yale. He has been a consultant to numerous firms and has had international lectureships in corporate finance and entrepreneurship in the UK, Indonesia, Egypt, the Ivory Coast, South Korea, Canada, China, and South Africa. Professor Bradford’s teaching areas are Entrepreneurial Finance, Venture Capital, Managerial Finance, and Management of Financial Institutions. Professor Bradford serves on the Board of Directors of the Commerce Bank (Seattle), and was a member of the board of directors of the Russell Trust Company from 2000 to 2008.
Michael Verchot
Michael Verchot is the founding director of the University of Washington’s Consulting and Business Development Center and a Lecturer in the Marketing Department at the Michael G. Foster School of Business. He is also the National Lead for Ascend – a nation’s largest ecosystem network focused on the growth of businesses owned by people of color, women, and veterans.
Michael has received numerous awards including:
- The National Minority Business Advocate of the Year Award from the US Department of Commerce’s Minority Business Development Agency
- The Boeing Company’s Supplier Diversity Global Solution Provider
- Champion Award from the Northwest Mountain Minority Supplier Development Council
- Diversity Award for Community Building from the Office of the Vice President and Vice Provost for Minority Affairs and Diversity at the University of Washington
- Lex N. Gamble Award for Excellence in Case Development and Curriculum Innovation from the University of Washington Foster School of Business
- President’s Award from the Washington State Hispanic Chamber of Commerce
- Crystal Eagle Award in Education from the Tabor 100 (an association of Black business owners)
- Visionary Award from the NW Asian Weekly
Michael is a columnist for Minority Business News USA magazine and co-author of three studies of African American businesses in Washington State and two studies of minority-owned businesses in clean tech. He has served on more than a dozen nonprofit board of directors and governmental advisory committees including the Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Holiday Commission. He received his MBA from the Foster School of Business and his undergraduate degree from Springfield College in Massachusetts.
