Our most recent guest speaker in the Midwest Entrepreneurs class was the most explicit and detailed example of some taking advantage of an outsourcing-based entrepreneurial opportunity that I have seen in nearly four years of teaching the class.

Randy Vickroy, a 1976 graduate of Monmouth College, came and shared his amazing story of developing unique expertise within large corporations which was eventually leveraged into consulting entrepreneurial success.

Randy is currently Executive Financial Consultant for Liberty Consulting Group of Pennsylvania, and is based in Denver, CO.  More about his firm can be found at:  http://libertyconsultinggroup.com/. Key to his entrepreneurial success via outsourcing has been to do things utility firms could do themselves not only cheaper, but also more efficiently and otherwise better.

I turn things over to class member Cary Wicker for more details on Randy Vickroy and his ongoing outsourcing-based entrepreneurial success story.

Prof. Gabel

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This past Tuesday we had the pleasure of having Randy Vickroy present to our class his career working within the Utilities industry and discussing how he developed entrepreneurial opportunities before turning to management consulting in the industry with Liberty Consulting. This was an especially unique presentation because Randy is  a graduate of both Monmouth College and Monmouth High School that was raised locally. In addition, his family has run a local business—Vickroy’s Furniture (http://www.vickroysfurniture.com/)—for over 60 years.

Mr. Vickroy began by going over how he started his path towards getting into the business of financial analysis, corporate finance, asset valuation, financial planning and management consulting. He decided shortly after graduating from Monmouth College to pursue an MBA from the University of Denver and specialized in finance. This in turn made him a very attractive and competitive job candidate and after a conversation with one of his professors at the University of Denver he was able to land a job within three days through his network.

His first position when hired by a gas and electric utility company was financial analyst which tasked him with finding ways to raise money to build power plants and transmission lines. He was able to do this by issuing stocks and bonds, leveraging assets and finding ways to saving the company money through the funding of these projects. This is where the gears started turning for Randy once he was promoted after a few years to a managing director.

As managing director he had a team that helped him develop and manage innovative alternative financing methods to fund infrastructure projects for the company. This is where Randy had the idea to refinance several groups of assets through captive finance subsidiaries, and to eventually retire the traditional utility mortgage. This saved the company in excess of $20 million annually and, as you might guess, attracted the attention of senior management.

Continuing in this line of thought he found more ways to save the company money and tried to show ways that he could provide his expertise to assist in forming these financial instruments for the industry as a whole through his contacts at Merrill Lynch and Lehman Bros. Alas, these banks turned down the offer because they were receiving enough commission selling mortgages. Randy saw an opportunity at this point to pursue consulting on the same re-financing opportunities with other companies, a market of about $70 billion, and founded his own consulting company.

When only 35 years of age, Randy folded his consulting into the Liberty Consulting Group, and helped Liberty to develop a consulting business with high-profile utility clients that thrives to this day. Randy works with a team of other utilities experts to provide consulting services to some of the largest utility companies and their regulators in the US.

Randy has helped Liberty build a very successful practice. This would not have been possible if he had not first been so highly motivated to develop his specific expertise and parlay it into an entrepreneurial consulting opportunity. Helping these enormous utility companies has been a wonderful achievement in assisting them to better finance and efficiently use resources to continue to help build American infrastructure and develop American energy to be the competitive industry that it is today.

Cary Wicker