Better Than an MBA

Jul 2019

“The degree I earned from LDS Business College changed my life,” says John Bazyk of Granby, Connecticut. Now vice president of sales at a corporate security integration firm, John feels so strongly about his time at LDS Business College that he recently joined our community of sustaining donors. “I have a lot of friends that have MBAs from prestigious universities, and I feel like the education I got was better than their education,” says John. “When we sit down and we talk about how to build a business, they’re just kind of lost.”

Backed Up by Experience

He feels strongly that the skills he learned at the college are really what have carried him to his successes today. “I had an income goal for the age of 30, and I actually hit it at 27,” says John. Being so successful has made John reflect on why his family has been so blessed. “When I was reflecting about the blessing of my income, I honestly felt that I owed that success to the skills that I developed at the business college—not just for the things I learned in the classroom but for my interactions with the teachers and the fact that they had actually run businesses in the real world. They taught us things that a PhD who had never run a business before couldn’t ever teach.” For example, John shared how he had to deal with a certain employee situation and reached out to a few former professors who helped him figure out what to do. “My friends don’t have that type of relationship with their teachers,” he continues. “You can get that in a small classroom where the teacher actually knows your name.”

Proven Successful

“Two weeks before I graduated, I was working at a company in Utah and promoted to run our business development program. The guy whose place I took had an MBA. When I told them I was graduating from college they assumed that I was graduating with a much higher degree than an associate’s degree. I never told them because they never asked, so I never brought it up. It came up about six months later, after I had taken our team from $20,000 a month in sales revenue to over $400,000 a month in sales revenue, so they didn’t care at that point. When I left, they brought in another MBA who they felt would keep everything going. Within two months their sales tanked back down to about $40,000 a month. Again, the philosophy that I implemented came right out of my classes at LDS Business College.”

Continued Improvement

“When I see how the school continues to grow and improve the way education is delivered to its students, I want to support an organization like that,” says John. “As long as a student applies themselves at the business college and takes it seriously, they’re going to leave having the ability to get a job and do very well. I wish that we could hire more people from the business college, but nobody wants to move from Utah to Connecticut. If there was a way for me to find out which students are interested in moving to the East Coast, we have multiple positions open right now.”