In a career spanning 30 years, Jim Hamerly has worn many hats – and all successfully. With all his knowledge and achievements, he still comes across as easy going, approachable and quick to relate to others, which is perhaps why he is the Director of Business Community Relations at California State University, San Marcos (CSUSM).
Hamerly graduated from MIT with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and then moved across the country to the University of California, Berkeley for a master’s degree. He then obtained his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Hamerly founded or co-founded several companies, including a Web applications start-up called DigitalStyle that was later acquired by Netscape.
“As an open source (free of distribution restrictions) advocate, I was closely involved in the release of Mozilla, a free browser whose main competitor was Microsoft’s Internet Explorer,” Hamerly said.
He became the Vice President of Browser Software Development at Netscape, which was then acquired by AOL Time Warner, where he was made the Vice President of Browser Development.
Dr. Jim Hamerly at work at California State University, San Marcos. Photo: J. Kat Woronowicz
“I left AOL to home-school two of my younger children, and with the expectation of starting a new company. I also wanted to build a solar-powered, off-grid home on Palomar Mountain,” said Hamerly, who explained that his home now exceeds LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification standards.
While he thrived as an executive for big corporations, he prefers to work with small, creative companies and sits on the boards of several start-ups, primarily software companies.
Around the same time in 2001, his daughter -- who was then enrolled at CSUSM -- asked him to share his expertise and knowledge with the students at the School of Business by teaching the Entrepreneurship course. This was how his association with the school began.
A year ago, Hamerly assumed the position of the director in charge of interacting and coordinating with the business community on behalf of several outreach programs the university runs, while continuing to teach graduate and undergraduate courses in entrepreneurship, information technology and operations management.
One of the outreach programs, which is 15 years old, is the Senior Experience Program which has graduating students working in groups of four to five, consulting on topics such as supply chain issues, marketing plans and financial analysis, for nonprofits, corporate entities and government agencies.
“We do about 50 projects every semester. For-profit firms pay $1,000 for this, which goes to the foundation to offset the program costs, but it is offered free to nonprofits. Each team member contributes 20 hours a week, so companies receive about 1,000 hours of total consulting time in a semester,” Hamerly said.
Each project has a faculty adviser, with Hamerly overseeing the whole program. Students meet with the adviser each week and they also go onsite to meet the corporate sponsor.
Dr. Jim Hamerly teaches entrepreneurship at California State University, San Marcos. Photo: J. Kat Woronowicz
Hamerly emphasizes that it is not an internship and the students function as outside consultants.
In one recent consulting project, his students worked with San Marcos-based microbrewery Stone Brewing to identify the best location in Orange County for a new distribution center.
The company knew where its customers were in the county and wanted to minimize the distance and cost of trucking.
“This was an optimization problem as well as requiring real estate analysis. Our students came up with recommendations about the area and the buildings that were available for rent. They also forecasted growth in Orange County,” said Hamerly, who is enthusiastic and proud of his students’ accomplishments.
Another noteworthy project was for the city of Poway, which wanted to understand where its residents were shopping, since it was concerned that it was losing sales tax revenue with people going outside the city to shop.
The student group developed a customer analysis study and surveyed Poway residents. The city was also concerned about road access and wanted to know if congestion at a main thoroughfare became a factor in going outside to shop.
They noted that a higher percentage of residents than expected actually shopped within the city but that many residents did not know where the city boundary for Poway ended and which shopping sites became part of the city of San Diego.
The students’ list of recommendations included which new retailers to bring in to Poway.
“They found that the most requested stores were Trader Joe’s and Super Wal-mart. There is a vocal group objecting to a Super Wal-mart in the city, so this survey of 7,500 residents stands as proof of the residents’ demand,” Hamerly said.
Some students have received job offers at the companies where they did their consulting projects. Others have gone on to found their own companies.
“At the College of Business Administration we consider ourselves to be a training center for the local industry. I tell prospective recruiters that we train your future employees,” said Hamerly, pointing out that “95 percent of our students stay local after graduation, unlike with the other area universities, where students are often from out of town or state and they tend to look beyond San Diego for career opportunities.”
With 9,500 undergraduate students at CSUSM and about 1,800 students enrolled at the College of Business Administration, the school has an excellent curriculum and Hamerly encourages people to check out options for full and part time M.B.A programs and to avail the services of the corporate outreach program, which provides quality consulting at a nominal price.
Nov. 20, 2009, 5 p.m. -- San Diego's web video news: Today's breaking major business events, economic, and financial announcements from the Daily Transcript/San Diego Source newsroom.
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