In the MBA programs at the Daniels College of Business, things often come full circle.
Kirk Roberts
After Kirk Roberts, now senior VP of strategic development at floor care company Bona, completed the Executive MBA program (EMBA) at Daniels in 2007 to gain more knowledge of the international sector, he immediately came up with a new task: figuring out how to stay involved with Daniels.
Not wanting his relationship with the College to end, he became close to several Daniels professors and continued to stay involved in the EMBA program, starting to guest lecture before asking what more he could do to help DU students.
“Both from a personal perspective and from a Bona perspective, I wanted to give back to the program,” said Roberts, who has been with the Malmö, Sweden-based company (its U.S. headquarters are in Englewood, Colorado) since 1992 and is now also an adjunct professor at Daniels.
It was a similar story for Carl Mittleman, who has worked at Aramark, the Philadelphia-based food and facilities management company, for 30 years and in 2020 was promoted to become the company’s chief operating officer. Mittleman got his Executive MBA from Daniels in 2009—an experience, he said, that provided him with valuable opportunities, relationships and education.
“Engagement with industry leaders and corporate executives was one of the most rewarding parts of my EMBA experience, and it’s important to me that today’s students are afforded the same opportunities,” Mittleman explained.
The result: Both Bona and Aramark have been major partners of Daniels for the past several years, sponsoring corporate and global challenge projects for Daniels MBA students.
“These are alums who have really great experiences with the EMBA program and are also leaders within their organizations, and then they inquire, ‘How else can we stay involved at Daniels? How can our organizations be involved? How can we give back to the student experience?’” said Kate Dillon, senior director of corporate and community relations at Daniels.
A cohort of Online MBA students visited Aramark in Prague.
Bona and Aramark—as well as Roberts and Mittleman—are “unbelievably involved and committed—helping their companies plug in, sharing their own expertise and giving back,” Dillon said.
Those partnerships, particularly with the global challenge in which MBA students work with an organization while traveling abroad, have been a vital value-add for DU students.
“These are really important capstone experiences for the MBA program to have these hands-on learning experiences, especially for the global component of their degree,” Dillon explained.
Peter May, now chief operating officer of All in Technology in Denver, knows about that firsthand. He worked with Bona during his global challenge in 2021 as part of a group that went to Madrid, Spain, to figure out how to make customers more regularly involved with Bona. The group came up with the idea of going to the market for flooring-as-a-service—for regular upkeep, cleaning and refinishing—so that customers were regularly in contact with Bona. It was an idea that Bona then wanted them to pitch to heads of the European sales division.
“It was awesome because they really let us run it and go after different things,” May said. “It was so much more than many other students experience working with companies like this. [Bona] really let us get in there and be consultants.”
May said the experience pushed him outside of his comfort zone—in a good way—and gave him the confidence and experience he needed to “not be afraid to dig into a problem.”
“The biggest thing I took from the experience is not to assume that because I’m an outsider or because I don’t know as much about the specific market or the product, that I can’t come up with great ideas,” May said. “There are ways to think about these real-life business challenges, even from an outside perspective.”
After realizing how much he enjoyed the process, May ended up consulting in his first few years after graduating from Daniels.
“[The experience with Bona] taught me I wanted to be in a strategy type of position,” he said.
Denver MBA Cohort 6 worked with Bona in France before making a final presentation at the company’s Denver office.
Partnerships help both sides
The partnerships have been helpful for Daniels students, but they have been a big boon for the companies as well, said Mittleman, who also has been a guest speaker in classes at Daniels.
“Aramark has truly enjoyed our partnership with Daniels and the students who have participated on our corporate and global challenge projects,” he said. “The Daniels MBA students provided valuable insights to support real issues within our business and had an immediate impact on improving our results. Their work has been outstanding.”
Aramark has even hired Daniels students they’ve worked with after completing the challenge, Mittleman noted.
“We’ve been able to give back in many ways—in the classroom, in the field and through employment opportunities,” he said.
The partnerships are “100% a win-win” for both the organization and the students, Roberts said, adding that Bona has used “a lot of the research that Daniels students have done and recommendations that they’ve given to our teams.”
For the students, Roberts added, it’s been great to not only get real-world experience, but to find out more about the companies.
“Bona isn’t a large, Fortune 500 company,” he said. “We’re a privately held, family-owned, 106-year-old company that is very passionate. I tell students, ‘We’re a big fish in a very, very small pond in our in our industry,’ and it’s a unique thing for them to go out and explore that when they’re in the process of doing their MBA programs.”
Another benefit of the Daniels partnership is finding and nurturing talent that can help organizational success, as well.
“One of my ‘whys’ in this season of my career for Bona is developing our vision and our long-term strategy, but also to help grow the next generation of leaders,” Roberts said. “That’s what allows me to sink that passion into the University of Denver and specifically in Daniels.”