Cruising the Web

Cruising the Web

MBA Student Uses Business Skills to Build Company’s Online Presence

BY DANA HOYLAND
Rice News Staff
October 28, 1999

There is a saying that goes: When it comes to doing business on the Internet, there are two types of people–the quick and the dead. In his new role as vice president of Vacations To Go, Emerson Hankamer is working very hard to ensure that he is one of the quick.

Hankamer, a second-year MBA student at the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, began working for Vacation Publications–parent company of Vacations To Go–as part of his Action Learning Project (ALP), the final 10 weeks of the first year when MBA students venture out into the world as full-time “consultants” for local companies.

While most students set their sights on working for big-name companies during the ALP, Hankamer said he became interested in Vacation Publications after speaking with the organization’s president, Alan Fox.

“The fact that the president came to Rice to select his team demonstrated that he would be personally involved, which was critical to me, since I wanted exposure to the decision-maker,” Hankamer said.

During the project, Hankamer was part of a handful of Jones School students who researched ways to raise awareness and circulation of one of the company’s publications, Where to Retire, a magazine for seniors. The students’ ultimate recommendation to Fox: put the publication online.

For Fox, the decision to bring in a group of MBA students was a way to infuse fresh perspectives and ideas into his organization.

“I liked the idea of bringing in a group of bright outsiders with different backgrounds and few preconceived notions to focus on new business opportunities in our market,” he said.

The ALP “really crystallized all the things we learned at the Jones School up to that point,” Hankamer said. “We were in a real-life consulting situation.”

As the project came to an end, Fox asked Hankamer to stay on as a full-time intern for the summer. For the first three weeks, Hankamer spent most of his time at Rice, researching the viability of putting Vacations ToGo, the company’s cruise-only travel agency, online.

But, as he delved deeper into the research, Hankamer realized that Vacations To Go was on the cusp of a wonderful, albeit fleeting, opportunity: The Internet would give the company the ability to sell their discounted, last-minute cruises online, reaching thousands more people than with traditional advertising and at a much lower cost. But the team at Vacations To Go needed to act quickly to take full advantage of the opportunity and beat the competition to the Web with their low-cost cruises.

“Although our research revealed that there were not any dominant cruise-only agencies online, we knew it wouldn’t be long before there were,” Hankamer said. “And, even as we launched the site, competition started heating up.”

Within a matter of weeks, Hankamer was leading the team at Vacations To Go into the vast world of the Internet. Because only one computer in the office was connected to the Web, the first step was getting staff members wired to the Internet. Next, the team set out to design the look of each page to be included in the Web site. “From colors to font to content, we designed the majority of the site in-house,” Hankamer said.

Hankamer and his team then turned to a local Web hosting and development firm to get the site up and running online. Hankamer and the others watched as their project “went live” in the form of their Web site, http://www.vacationstogo.com.

From conceptualization to launch, the Vacations To Go Web site took only 12 weeks. Hankamer credits the enthusiasm and dedication of the company’s employees for making it happen in what he called “record time.”

It was during the process of getting Vacations To Go online that Fox approached Hankamer with the offer to be vice president. “It was an easy progression for me to make him an offer,” Fox said. “He was already handling the responsibilities of VP by the middle of the summer.”

For Hankamer, who had been elected student body president of the Jones School in the spring, the offer was an incredible opportunity, but also required that he make a decision about whether he would return to the Jones School to earn his MBA with the rest of his class.

Hankamer realized that if he waited, because of the fast-paced, ever-changing nature of the Internet, the opportunity would be lost.

“Leaving Rice was tough, but it was also crystal clear to me that the convergence of the Internet and Vacations To Go was my entrepreneurial opportunity, and I wasn’t about to watch it pass me by,” he said.

With the support of his wife and parents and with the consent of Gil Whitaker, dean of the Jones School, Hankamer took a leave of absence to pursue a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity.

“We were reluctant to grant Emerson a deferral of his second year, but realized quickly that this was a rare opportunity for him to pursue a dream,” Whitaker said. “We do hope for quick success because we would welcome him back warmly to finish his degree with new insights to share.”

As vice president of Vacations To Go, Hankamer is in a position to use what he learned in his first year in the MBA program, and he believes his time at the Jones School was instrumental in helping him succeed.

“The Jones School does a great job providing an environment–a team-based environment–where you have to apply a lot of real-life skills right away,” he said.

Hankamer is working with Fox and other staff members to continue to make the Web site customer-friendly and straightforward, while allowing it to grow as much as possible. Eventually, Hankamer envisions Vacations To Go selling other types of vacations in addition to the cruises currently offered.

Hankamer also sees the future demands of the Internet changing quickly and the skill set needed to adapt to those changes shifting as well.

“In the future the people who will be successful on the Internet are bringing business skills to the Internet as opposed to technical skills,” he said. “Early on, the technical skills won out, but that’s changing.”