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Thunderbird students help University of Arizona club turn cattle into cash

A team of Thunderbird School of Global Management students led by Professor Gary Gibbons, Ph.D., has developed a sustainable business model to turn cattle and swine into cash for a collegiate club at the University of Arizona Meat Science Laboratory in Tucson.

“It’s real-time consulting on a for-profit venture at a major university,” said Gibbons, a visiting professor of global entrepreneurship at Thunderbird’s Walker Center for Global Entrepreneurship.

The Collegiate Cattle Growers Association at the University of Arizona currently relies on subsidies to stay afloat, but a plan developed at Thunderbird would help the club become self-supporting through the sale of high-end beef and pork products to faculty, staff and students at the Tucson campus. Gibbons said the club would oversee all phases of the business, “from calf to cellophane package,” using existing herds at the Meat Science Laboratory.

After two trimesters of work, the Thunderbird consultants will present their plan in August to University of Arizona faculty and student leaders.

“They are doing a great job with animal husbandry,” said Alessandro Nobili, one of a dozen Thunderbird students who analyzed the club’s operations and studied the Tucson market. “But they felt like they lacked some tools in terms of business management. Our challenge was to fill this gap.”

Nobili, an accelerated MBA student from Italy, said the project has allowed Thunderbird’s international students to see a different part of Arizona and practice their cross-cultural communication skills. Other student consultants working on the project have come from Mexico, India, Russia, Guatemala and the United States.

“Part of the Thunderbird challenge is to learn to speak the same cultural language as your customer,” Nobili said.

Another challenge with the cattle project was to keep the business model simple. Nobili said this is important in a college setting, where students move through the program every two or three years and take their knowledge with them after graduation.

“The risk is to apply all the concepts you learn ‘as is’ without digesting the material and making it simple for the people who need to carry out the project,” Nobili said. “If you don’t listen to your customer, you risk creating a business model that is perfect on paper but not doable.”

Gibbons calls this “framing the problem,” something that is difficult to teach in the classroom. “That’s the key thing students don’t get taught except through practical experience,” he said. “Otherwise you just have theory.”

Gibbons, who earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Arizona, organized the consulting project as an extracurricular activity for student volunteers. Depending on how things work out, he said the collaboration with the Collegiate Cattle Growers Association could evolve into something long-term.

Thunderbird offers a wide range of degree and nondegree programs for companies, working professionals and full-time students, including executive education, traditional and accelerated MBAs in Global Management, Executive MBAs (in the U.S. and Europe), Evening MBA, Global MBA On-Demand, the Global MBA for Latin American Managers, the Master of Science in Global Management and the Master of Arts in Global Affairs and Management.