Justin Hur, a 2026 Notre Dame graduate, majored in global affairs and minored in social entrepreneurship. He now works as an analyst at a private equity fund.
The most useful thing I learned at Notre Dame about supporting entrepreneurs was not how to build a pricing model or read a balance sheet. Instead, it was how to stop seeing an entrepreneur as a business problem and start seeing them as a whole person. Only then can you build a solution that works in the context of someone’s actual life.
I did not understand that when I entered Professor Michael Morris’s Consulting and Development course during the fall of my sophomore year. My teammate and I were paired with two South Bend entrepreneurs. One sold kettle corn, and the other prepared taxes for families and independent contractors.
Because I knew the Business 101 vocabulary and had completed projects for campus business clubs, I assumed I was ready to transform their businesses.
Our first meetings exposed how little I knew. The entrepreneurs had loyal customers, but they lacked much of the infrastructure I expected: business bank accounts, formal bookkeeping and functional websites. My instinct was to fill every gap with a polished deliverable.
For one client, we built a sales-tracking spreadsheet — then learned that she did not own a laptop and could not use the data we had organized. The spreadsheet looked useful to us but was useless to her.
That failure taught me that a technically correct answer can still be the wrong solution. An entrepreneur’s business decisions are inseparable from their resources, responsibilities, preferences and circumstances. Real partnership begins by understanding those realities, rather than arriving with a ready-made answer.
I thought I had learned that lesson by the time I finished the course. Then, during the summer following my sophomore year, I traveled to Cape Town through Entrepreneurship and Empowerment in South Africa, a program administered by the Keough School’s McKenna Center for Human Development and Global Business. In Khayelitsha, one of Cape Town’s largest townships, I worked with Xola, an entrepreneur who owns a security and closed-circuit television business.
At first, the work felt familiar. I had taken two courses with Professor Morris and felt confident building pricing models and bookkeeping systems. But within a week, my familiar frameworks began to crumble. Xola had no profit-and-loss statement, no consistent prices and more than a hundred invoices that were difficult to reconcile. After working through them, our team estimated that supplier mismanagement was costing his business about 350,000 to 400,000 South African rand (approximately $22,000 to $25,000) each year.
Even then, the obvious solutions were not always realistic. We suggested storing wholesale inventory in his unused garage, but Xola explained that robberies made that impossible. We proposed branding his vehicles and equipment, but doing so would make them targets for theft or destruction. What looked efficient on a spreadsheet did not account for the environment in which he lived and worked.
As Xola trusted us, he shared more of his story: his struggle with addiction, the losses he had endured and the long process of rebuilding his life. That conversation changed how I understood our work. We were not simply reorganizing invoices or improving margins. Instead, we were partnering with a person who had already shown extraordinary resilience and who knew his own circumstances better than we ever could.
Recently, Xola messaged me to share a success story: His business had generated more than 1.5 million South African rand (more than $90,000) in annual revenue. His progress belongs to him; our contribution mattered because it was built with him, not merely for him.
I carried that lesson back to South Bend and into the McKenna Center’s Collaboration Hub, a student-led consulting space serving graduates of the center’s South Bend Entrepreneurship and Adversity Program. At the hub, local entrepreneurs work with student consultants on pricing, marketing, bookkeeping and operations. I began by supporting quality control, reviewing student deliverables and doing my best to recognize the warning signs of an idea that might look impressive but fail in practice.
During my senior year, I helped hire and train 35 student consultants and took on a management role. My responsibility was not just to improve their work. It was to help them begin each engagement by seeking to answer key questions: What does this entrepreneur want? What constraints shape the business? What tools can the owner realistically use? What would meaningful progress look like in this person’s life?
That approach also shaped a partnership with the Jubilee Initiative for Financial Inclusion, a student-run lending nonprofit. I underwrote six potential loans for entrepreneurs seeking to expand their businesses, including one who needed a generator to operate a second cooking burner at weekend markets. The numbers mattered, but they only made sense when connected to each entrepreneur’s goals and day-to-day reality.
In the business world, people often praise “failing fast,” and they talk as if failure is a strategy you can schedule. But that was not my experience. I failed slowly and repeatedly: a spreadsheet for someone without a laptop, an inventory plan for a garage that could not safely hold inventory and marketing ideas that created more risk than opportunity.
Ultimately, these slow failures were valuable. They were a real-world education, one I could not have received in a classroom.
Through my experience with the McKenna Center’s programs in South Bend and South Africa, I learned that service is not the act of delivering an answer. It is a form of accompaniment: listening carefully, respecting another person’s dignity and expertise and building alongside them.
The strongest solutions begin when we see the entrepreneur first — not as a collection of business problems, but as a whole person.