Separating Your Business Self from Your Faculty Self

Posted on March 29th, 2009, by Meggin McIntosh, Ph.D.

Recently, a Life of E’s member sent in this question:

I am interested in developing a line of teaching tools that come from my experience teaching graduate students and faculty. In developing teaching tools or publications that grow out of a university career, how do you carefully separate your business self from your faculty self? Can you do both at once?

This is such a wonderful question – and my answer is based on my own experience doing this very thing…and everything I’ve learned since then, too.

Establish a company (and there are a boatload of blog posts on this site related to that). You need to set up a separate entity for everything you are doing related to your teaching tools (or other ideas or products that will spin off of this project). You will need a checking account that is just for this as well as designating a credit card for this. You can start at as a DBA rather than incorporating, but I wouldn’t wait too long on that. Anyway, read more about the business set-up questions in the category dedicated to that.
Begin to think about yourself separately. You have your university self and you have your entrepreneurial-separate-from-the-university self. Designate times when you are working on your entrepreneurial projects – and see it as separate time and a separate part of your life and work. Avoid working on it while at the university (writing, making phone calls, or whatever) but rather work on it at home. It’s not that university folks don’t frequently work on their college work at home–we all do, however, going the other direction is what you want to avoid, I think. People are a little testy in the academy when someone shines – let alone when someone displays and entrepreneurial sense and then, heaven-forbid, actually makes money from it.
Avoid talking about your teaching tools, etc. with others at the university. Again, you may be excited about it…and they may be jealous. There’s no need to get others worked up unnecessarily. You want to stay under the radar (not secretive, not sneaky by any means). Just under the radar. Announcing what you’re doing (which wouldn’t be your style anyway) is not going to help you in any way.
Find others – nearby or far away – who ARE excited and DO want to know what you’re doing. The beauty today is that we can find MasterMind members/colleagues/supporters anywhere in the world.

So, I hope this gave you some information…it’s a very large question and this will give you some beginning feedback. We can continue to explore it on the next Email Extravaganza.