Thursday of last week we had the pleasure of having as our guest speaker Monmouth College Board of Trustee member Larry Gerdes.

This was a rare opportunity to tap into the experience and knowledge of someone with not only nearly four decades of entrepreneurial experience but also many years of experience as a facilitator and evaluator of entrepreneurial activity (as a venture capitalist).

Below, class member Matt Juhola nicely summarizes what we learned from Mr. Gerdes.

Regards,

Prof. Gabel

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Larry Gerdes spoke with our class and shared his many stories with us from his humble beginnings as a small town kid from Illinois to becoming business partners with Monmouth College alum Walter Huff which led to his involvement as a venture capitalist.

Mr. Gerdes was born and raised in Walnut, Illinois to German immigrants and lived there until he attended the University of Illinois to pursue an agriculture degree. While he was at U of I, he was interested in business and took accounting, finance, and marketing courses. He continued his business education by enrolling in graduate school at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University.

His amazing entrepreneurial journey began in 1974 while working at a bank in Peoria when Larry met Walter Huff who was seeking $1 million to install mini computers throughout hospitals that could hold medical information. Larry continued to work with Walter Huff by getting him the funds he needed for his company, HBO and Company, and ultimately left his bank job and jumped at the opportunity to become partners with Huff and moved their company to Atlanta despite being advised not to by his mentors.

In 1981 Gerdes and Huff went public with HBO (and made $15 million and turned several of their employees into instant millionaires). Ten years later, the company was sold to McKesson for close to $13 billion.

As if that was not enough, Mr. Gerdes then started working with one of his mentors, Don Lucas, at Sand Hill Financial Company in California and helped double the size of the company, increasing its revenue to $150 million. Larry would go on to make 59 investments through Sand Hill, with the most prominent being in Oracle, an American multinational computer technology corporation. Huff and Gerdes continued to work together and in 1991 started Gerdes Huff Investments, a private investment firm based in Atlanta, GA.

One of the companies Mr. Gerdes took over and had great success with was Transcend Services, a company in Atlanta then run by several women who outsourced medical records of hospitals. Gerdes had Transcend focus its service on medical transcriptions so the company could become successful in the market. He originally invested $700 thousand and eventually sold the company to a major competitor for a substantial profit.

Larry still ventures into other companies, primarily healthcare based, and is an active investor to this day after 40 plus years of experience. He continues to have success in his ventures by using data to make better decisions and believing in good management teams that work hard and believe in their system, much like he did with Walter Huff as a young professional.

Matt Juhola