Pandemic doesn’t deter business students in C4
By Tom Donahue
Q: What’s the difference between the legendary rock band The Beatles and St. Bonaventure University’s student-run business consulting club known as C4?
A: When the going got tough, The Fab Four broke up. And the only hurdle before the lads from Liverpool was a clash of egos.
C4, on the other hand, had to confront a global pandemic, a big red stop sign that froze the world in its tracks, threatening to not only halt the work of C4, but send the club back to square one, if not dismantle it completely.
But C4 is alive and thriving today because its core group of students refused to stop working with local businesses through the pandemic, said Dr. Todd Palmer, associate professor of management, chair of SBU’s management and marketing programs, founder of C4 and the club’s faculty adviser.
“I’ve worked with a lot of student teams, but nobody has owned it like these students,” said Palmer. “They found a way to continue working with several Allegany bars and cafés through the pandemic year because they were sincerely worried about them. They would not stop, and it was an honor to be part of their journey.”
Kristen Reynolds, who worked closely with the Burton as a member of C4, earned her MBA from St. Bonaventure in May.
Hold that thought as we fast-forward to today, when we find C4 as a key player in a multifaceted network of programs aimed at helping local businesses find and solidify their footing in still-challenging economic times.
Those players include St. Bonaventure’s Innovation Center, which puts SBU students at the core of efforts to help budding entrepreneurs turn ideas into startups, then into thriving, scalable businesses.
The center was created in 2020 with a pledge of $500,000 from Olean philanthropists James Stitt, executive chairman of the Cutco Corp. in Olean and a former member of St. Bonaventure’s Board of Trustees, and his wife, Carol, former longtime executive director of the Cattaraugus Region Community Foundation.
The Stitts, along with Palmer and Dr. Matrecia James, dean of St. Bonaventure’s School of Business, helped establish the center and recruit its executive director, Tom Cullen, a 2000 SBU graduate and one of the many Bonaventure alumni with whom Palmer has networked for many years. Cullen had startup experience of his own, having spent nearly 20 years in Chicago where he founded a high-speed trading firm and a software development consulting business.
Then there’s the Laine Business Accelerator, a program that provides startup companies and established entrepreneurs with a three-month boot camp featuring a range of services to fine tune and grow their businesses, from management training and office space to venture capital financing. Funded by the Olean Business Development Corporation’s Erick Laine Entrepreneurship Fund, the Laine Accelerator is a collaboration involving more than a dozen businesses, nonprofits and educational institutions, such as the Olean Campus of Jamestown Community College.
The accelerator is named for the late Erick Laine, former CEO and chairman of Cutco, and a former member of St. Bonaventure’s Board of Trustees.
Serving as the third leg in a tripod of support for local businesses is C4. When five Cattaraugus County businesses were selected as the Laine Accelerator’s very first clients in 2021, they were strongly encouraged to work with C4.
“It ended up working out incredibly well,” said Charlie Randall, who earned a BBA in marketing in May and is now an admissions counselor at SBU. “It meant that businesses were coming to us, and were committed to working with us, instead of us having to go door to door asking if businesses needed help. It really set us up for success. Last year was the craziest and most successful that C4 has ever seen.”
But back to the pandemic year.
In March of 2020, campus was shut down and students were sent home to finish that spring semester in virtual classrooms. Campus reopened for fall semester 2021, but under strict new rules aimed at preventing the spread of COVID-19.
For instance, Randall, who was starting his junior year, couldn’t walk out of his on-campus apartment to visit a fellow C4 classmate who lived in the apartment right next door.
“I wasn’t allowed in there, and we couldn’t meet anywhere on campus. We couldn’t organize,” said Randall.
But the need for C4 was greater than ever. “A lot of businesses were in total chaos,” said Palmer, and among those hardest hit by COVID-19 restrictions were bars and restaurants.
Todd Palmer
“We were back on campus, but we were socially distanced and had all these rules. That’s when the guys in C4 came to me and said, ‘Hey, Palmer, we still want to do this.’ One of my graduate assistants, Mark Vaccaro, was really keen on this. Mark had worked in C4 for three or four years prior and was now my grad assistant in charge of C4, but he realized that because of COVID he was in charge of nothing.
“I remember Mark saying, ‘We have to do something,’ and he was talking to the other members of the club. I forget whose idea it was, but someone said, ‘Let’s meet at someone’s house off campus.’”
At the time, Vaccaro, now an auditor for the Big Four accounting firm Ernst and Young in New York City, was in the last year of the university’s five-year accounting/MBA program, and when he peered into the future he didn’t like what he saw.
“People lose interest in a club pretty quickly when there’s no work for them to do,” he said.
Instead of hitting the “pause” button, C4 got to work, recruiting not only new businesses with which to engage, but new C4 members.
“Dr. Palmer had this idea to bring together bars and restaurants that were having problems as a result of COVID,” said Vaccaro. “So we brought in about 10 students who were interested in C4, split them up, and had them reach out to different bars and restaurants in town.”
Engagements were opened with several Allegany taverns and restaurants including the Burton, the historic Main Street bar and restaurant.
While C4 members were able to connect with the business owners through virtual platforms, campus COVID restrictions made it difficult for the club to conduct a key aspect of its operation: weekly group debriefing and strategy sessions.
So every Sunday, Palmer and his C4 students met in the backyard of a student’s off-campus house in Allegany, sitting in a big circle, careful to maintain social distancing and other COVID safeguards.
Jon Boilard, who earned his BBA in accounting in May, was one of new C4 recruits that year and remembers being impressed by the commitment of the club members.
“Just seeing everybody’s determination, traveling to this person’s off-campus house and sitting in the backyard, no matter what the weather was like — and sometimes it was freezing out — was something I wanted to be a part of,” he said. “Everyone was serious about what they were doing and we all wanted to do well. You don’t find that a lot of places.”
Randall admits that there were few “hard deliverables” presented to the club’s handful of clients in that COVID-restricted year.
But that’s not the point, said Palmer.
“At least we were treading water. The students understood that maintaining the club’s structure, recruitment and training was absolutely essential,” he said.
And if the club had not continued to meet?
“To be honest, we would have probably had to restart everything,” said Palmer. “A university is a collection of all these little communities that make the place go, and if you let a community go it takes a long time to rebuild it. The fact that these students were able to keep C4 going was super important.”
If you wonder if that matters, fast-forward again to present day and ask David Przesiek of Scottsdale, Arizona, who earned a dual degree in marketing and management from St. Bonaventure in 1989 and has enjoyed a career in the risk-related side of health care.
David Przesiek, ’89, is a co-owner of the Burton.
When the Burton came up for sale in 2019, it caught the attention of Przesiek and three of his Bona buddies, John Flanagan, ’89, Brian Attea, ’89, and Kevin Patwell, ’88.
“Three of us had worked at the Burton, two of us met our wives there, and all of us have a very strong connection to the university,” said Przesiek. “So when it popped up for sale the text messages started flying. We ended up making the deal happen in December of 2019. It was actually Friday the 13th.”
Not a good omen, you might say.
“We’d done our risk analysis, but the one thing we didn’t factor in was a pandemic — and it happened four months later,” said Przesiek.
Meanwhile, because of the new owners’ strong ties to the university, they’d already expressed an interest in connecting with St. Bonaventure students.
“We worked with Dr. Palmer to get a couple of students, and that’s where C4 came in,” said Przesiek. “And God love them, because this was during the pandemic, right? First you’re closed, then you’re open, but with very limited capacity, limited hours and really tight rules for masking and other things. So the students were trying to navigate those waters along with us. We challenged them to come up with ideas to expand the scope of the Burton from a business perspective, and they did great work.”
The Burton became a focal point for C4, said Vaccaro, who worked the account with Kristin Reynolds, who earned her MBA from St. Bonaventure in May.
“They were new owners and were all Bona grads, so they really wanted to work with the school and establish a long-lasting relationship. Working with them and keeping them at the center really helped us,” said Vaccaro.
As a direct result of C4’s work, the Burton started a trivia night. “It created another night for us and the students love it; I mean they love it,” said Przesiek.
C4 was also challenged to help bolster the Burton’s social media presence and their work “changed our strategy,” Przesiek added. “The students sharpened the messaging, created more consistency and helped with the recruitment of more followers. What they brought us was greater connectivity to our customer base, particularly to students.”
Dr. Kryn McClain (left) and Paulina Colonna, co-owners and operators of C4 client Paragon Behavioral Health Services.
A similar C4 success story is told by Olean native Dr. Kryn McClain, co-owner and operator of Paragon Behavioral Health Services. Paragon has 80 employees and maintains three offices, one of them in Olean, its main office for outpatient programs. Paragon is one of the businesses selected as the Laine Accelerator’s five inaugural clients last fall.
“We didn’t know we’d be gaining access to C4. Frankly, I’d never heard of C4 before,” said McClain, who earned her master’s in community mental health counseling from SBU in 2011.
Assigned to work with Paragon were C4 members Randall and his classmate Cecilia Lauciello, who will complete requirements for her bachelor’s degree in management this summer. McClain, remembering her own days as a college student, had modest expectations, which Randall and Lauciello blew up on day one.
“They were just phenomenal. I was definitely not that mature and motivated at that age,” said McClain. “The quality of these two was something I don’t think I’ve ever seen in undergraduates. They were on point, professional and they knew their stuff.”
The relationship was so beneficial that McClain hired Lauciello as Paragon’s social media content manager.
“She manages all our social media and she’s just rocking it,” said McClain. “Her voice, her tone, how she writes, her research … Our numbers have gone up over 100 percent in our engagement, so she’s on it, she’s wonderful. We can’t say enough good things about CeCi. I think of Bonaventure and the School of Business in the highest regard.”
The praise showered on C4 students doesn’t surprise Professor Palmer.
“Take social media, for instance,” he said. “Charlie Randall can spend hours talking about analytics, how to analyze competitors and how you’re comparing to them. And Maddie Heyden and Brianna Shay (both BBA management, 2022) worked extensively with their client, actually setting up and implementing marketing events. Then there’s Jon Boilard, a great accountant who worked extensively with his client on their accounting system. These students are really good, and the nice thing about our students is they can do whatever, from research to nuts and bolts.”
School of Business Dean James is also impressed by the work of C4.
“These students take what they learn in the classroom, and through experiential learning, and apply it in the business community in ways that make an immediate and long-term positive impact,” she said. “Dr. Palmer and the student consultants embody our mission and personify engagement impact and innovation. I am very proud of C4. I believe these are the young leaders who will change the business world for the better.”
But the C4 story likely has a different ending had that core group not been committed to working through the pandemic.
“That was absolutely essential,” said Palmer. “It was these students, who quietly embodied Franciscan values better than anyone, who moved this along. This upcoming year C4 may be working with up to 10 companies. I think it’s going to be a great year because of those students who busted their butts two years ago to have meetings in a backyard.
“Unlike the Fab Four, C4 kept the band together.”
(Tom Donahue, ’76, is the content webmaster at St. Bonaventure.)
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