In this conversation, Bob Boniface shares his journey from working at General Motors to pursuing an MBA at Harvard Business School and eventually transitioning into entrepreneurship through acquisition. He discusses the value of an MBA, the application process, the impact of COVID-19 on his business school experience, and the lessons learned while running a business post-MBA. Bob emphasizes the importance of networking, being open to new opportunities, and the skills gained from an MBA that have helped him in his entrepreneurial journey.
I grew up in Detroit, went to Vanderbilt for college, moved back to Detroit, and love the auto industry. I come from a family that has ties to the auto industry - my dad's a car designer for General Motors, so I always wanted to join the auto industry. I didn't have the artistic ability to be able to draw cars.
When I was working at General Motors, I worked in the manufacturing finance department. What that looks like is a lot of operational finance that goes on with building out the budget for plants across North America so they can build cars under budget and make sure that they are running efficiently. On a day-to-day basis, I was working with engineers and figuring out how much it costs to build a car, how many people we need, and where we're going to move production a couple years out. I loved the job. I thought it was super interesting, and I had always planned to stay in the auto industry long term.
My idea of getting an MBA stemmed from working at General Motors and seeing some of the leaders around there, what their path had been, and trying to see how I could get to their level.
Did you feel like you had to get an MBA, or could you have progressed to that level without it? How does General Motors think about the value of the MBA?
GM historically was a very MBA-centric organization. People say, to their detriment in a lot of cases, that they're too focused on the numbers. But if you look at a lot of the senior leadership there - Mary Barra, Mark Reuss - people that make the decisions, they all have MBAs. I didn't feel so much pressure to do it; I wanted to do it. I thought it'd be something that could help me get more well-rounded in my background. When I was at Vanderbilt, I was an economics major with a minor in finance and corporate strategy, so I took a lot of business-type classes and accounting classes. I had a general idea of what the classes would look like in an MBA, but from my time at GM it was clear that I was weaker in certain areas that I could improve upon by going to get a full two-year education.
The timing snuck up on me. Right out of school, I took the GMAT right after I graduated. I had gotten the advice from other people that the GMAT is very math heavy, very quantitative, and the more time you spend in the workplace, you might lose some of that ability to take standardized tests. So in the first couple of months after school, I took the GMAT. I was ready - I had a five-year window on this thing, and knowing that most people apply four to five years out of school, I could do that.
When I actually applied - I applied in the fall of 2019 to start in the class of 2022 - the application process snuck up on me. I had always told myself that was the year I was going to do it. I looked around and said, "Okay, I've got some great work experience here. My stock at GM was high at that point. Professionally, I was coming off a couple of really cool projects." And from there I thought, this is a really good time to apply. I had a great boss who could help me with reference letters and things like that.
Some people pursue an MBA because they're not happy in their current situation and want to pivot. I waited because I knew I was going to have a really good story a year out, based on the projects I was working on. It really is a great time to apply when you have that kind of momentum, because you can craft a very strong application.
What was your narrative for why an MBA, and what you said you wanted to get out of it in your applications?
My plan was to go back to GM after my MBA - that could still happen in the future. I was working in manufacturing finance and wanted to move into a division within the company called portfolio planning. That division does the most MBA-like work - they work with engineers, design, finance, and capital planning to build the business case for cars. They're looking five to ten years into the future to determine what cars the company is going to make: what segment to target, what the manufacturing footprint will look like, and how to marshal all the forces and get everyone on the same page to start planning. It's a very cool department. The person running it at the time was a Harvard Business School graduate, so it was easy to look at that department and say, "This is exactly what I want to do." It's staffed by a lot of people who have MBAs.
That's what I wrote my essay about. I talked about some of my experiences and expanding on my résumé, but looking forward I said: if I want to be a leader, I'm at this inflection point where I don't really want to do finance necessarily within the company anymore. An MBA will give me perspective on other industries and other verticals and fields within the company, and from there I want to use that to get into a department that can really leverage those skills.
The essay was a lot about the value of strong leadership. Growing up in Detroit, I had experienced forty to fifty years of a downward slide in the economic outcomes of the city - the city went bankrupt when I was in college, and General Motors had gone bankrupt as well. Being able to see how important it was to have strong leadership, and the price of failed leadership, was something I talked about.
My essay was good, and I had a really strong resume in work experience.
Even in college I had said I want to be the CEO of General Motors someday - I want to be someone who leads a car company. That probably came through in my essay. Obviously I didn't write that explicitly, but you wanted to set yourself up on a path to do that, and an MBA was a big part of that. Going into a division like that, HBS and business schools in general like those types of departments from car companies. Some of my classmates who worked at Ford were in the engineering department, but they had to marshal all these forces together between engineering, finance, and marketing, which is exactly what you have to do at top leadership levels there. They look for people who are either coming from those departments or are looking to go into those departments after school.
What other schools did you apply to?
I only applied to two other schools in the first round - Michigan and Duke. One of the things I viewed as the weakest part of my background, if I wanted to go into portfolio planning, was product strategy. I had this idea that I want to target schools that have a really strong background in that. HBS was one where I always wanted to go there - you never think it's attainable, obviously - but the other schools were great schools that have good fundamentals in those programs. If I didn't get into any one of those schools, or if I wasn't happy with my application success in the first round, I was going to apply to a couple more schools after that.
What do you think made your application stand out?
When I was at GM in manufacturing finance, it was a time of restructuring and there was a lot in the news around GM's footprint going forward - how much they were building in America versus Mexico. President Trump at the time was calling Mary Barra to the White House to talk about it, and there was a UAW strike going on during my interview. Our department was thrust onto the national stage, and to be a part of that was a big part of it. I also had really strong letters of recommendation. I got a letter from my director, who was my boss's boss, and then from his boss, who was the Chief Financial Officer for the entire global manufacturing footprint at GM. They both wrote very nice things about me and spoke very highly of me. The combination of those two things - because I don't think it was my score or my grades.
At HBS, the interview is very stressful. It's a think-on-your-feet type thing. One of their favorite questions is, if you were in the shoes of the top executive at your company - in this case, Mary Barra - what would you do differently? We were in the process of negotiating with the UAW, so there were some questions around how do you think you can end this strike, what do you think it's going to take to break this, and if you were the CEO, what would you do differently in order to set yourself up for success for the next couple of years. A lot around that. They were also asking what my role was like on a day-to-day basis - was I stressed about it, did I like doing this type of thing? I wasn't directly involved on the negotiating team, but my colleagues were and I was supporting them on that, so I was able to talk to a lot of that stuff pretty well.
Give yourself plenty of time. I had this idea that I wanted to apply in the fall of 2019, and I was sitting there at the end of July thinking I've got to do the backwards math of when I've got to start - I should have started yesterday, basically.
You want to give yourself a couple of months to start thinking about who you're going to ask. My general advice on timing, especially if you're asking someone who's a little more senior than you, is to give them some time - they're very busy. The people I was asking were probably working 80- to 90-hour weeks. I wanted to give them enough time, and they were fine even with the timeline I gave them.
I wrote my essay in parallel with what the recommenders were doing. But it's helpful, if you want to do the recommendations first and they're going to share them with you, to then write your essay afterwards to make sure it jives - because you can control what the essay says versus the recommendations.
Did you prep your recommenders to keep a consistent narrative?
For sure - directing them to keep a consistent narrative, make you look good, and have concrete examples to draw from.
The essay was the hardest thing for me. When you're filling out the applications to all the schools, there's a lot to write. You want it to sound really good, and you're working full-time. It's similar to when you're writing your college essay, where you want to have this balance of aspirational versus concrete experience, and you're trying to put yourself in the shoes of what the admissions council is looking for.
The essay reckoning was the hardest thing, especially the HBS one where it's very open-ended. I forget the prompt exactly, but it's essentially "what else should we know?" - annoyingly vague. You could end up writing anything, so that was probably the hardest part for me.
I didn't stress too much about recommendations. Both of my recommenders would do a great job - they knew me really well. My director, who ended up writing one of them, sat right next to me and we worked really well together. He was also an HBS grad, which was helpful. When I asked him to do it, he said, "Are you sure you want me? I could ask the CFO, who was also an HBS grad, to write one." But she didn't know me, and that's the point - he did.
Once those are in motion, you're just trying to make sure they're on the right timeline. The mistake people sometimes make is thinking the recommender needs to be the most senior person you can get. It does not. It's got to be someone who can give specific, detailed examples of what you do. You can help them out by giving them a prep sheet - remember when I did this, remember when I delivered these results - but they need to be able to talk about that impact in their own voice. It cannot just be the most senior person.
A quick tip: if you do have more senior people who maybe aren't going to be your recommenders but went to the school you're applying to, they can send an informal letter of recommendation - an email along the lines of, "I've worked with this person and they're great. I'm a graduate. Consider them for the program." I wouldn't pepper HBS with eighteen of them, but you can do that as a way to have a more senior leader speak up on your behalf.
The end state was always the goal of an MBA. I got in - it was December 10th or something like that, 2019 - and the time to accept the decision was in February. I went to admitted students weekend and COVID was kind of in the news; it was still something that was happening over in China at that point. I made the decision and I was like, okay, this is something I'm going to do.
Mentally, you've already told people at work that you're going to do it. When we got sent home before COVID, I was like, this stinks - I'm locked in my office all day. I never had a hesitation. The quicker I can go to business school and get to the other side, where I have the skill set and the ability to make more money and have more influence at whatever job I choose - that's what I was racing toward. Maybe naively at the time, I thought the experience by the fall would be a lot different than what we were experiencing then. Obviously it got a little more prolonged than everybody hoped.
I'm not one of those people who's like, "Oh man, the experience and going on the trips is going to be so impactful." I wanted to go there to learn what they have to provide, and on the other side I want to be able to reference that and do better in my job.
We had a lot of fun. I've got a lot of great friends and memories from business school. Despite the first year being a little different - the first semester was way different - the second semester things started to open up a little bit. We were still able to travel, and it was a more small, intimate experience: going skiing with a group of 10 friends versus with 200 classmates over to the Alps or something like that. By the second year everything was relatively straightforward and normal, and Boston was back open in full swing. We probably got about 75% of the full experience in a normal spot.
One of my favorite memories was from my second year. I grew up a Red Sox fan despite living in Detroit. The Red Sox and Yankees were playing a one-game wild card game to get into the playoffs - this was in the fall of 2021 - and it was at Fenway. The day of, the tickets got released and they were $300, which is way over the top for a student without any income, but we said we had to do it. We went, and the game was awesome. Afterwards we went out, and it was a Thursday night - we had class at 8:00 in the morning. We were on our feet the entire game, with our classmates. It was the best sporting event I've ever been to. The Red Sox ended up winning. It was just a lot of fun. That was a highlight of the experience, and it had nothing to do with school - it had to do with the friends.
I started thinking about it as soon as I opened the letter and got into HBS. It's one of those things where you write about staying in your current path, but then you get into a school like that and you're like, well, what could be? You're picturing yourself thinking, what is the craziest, coolest thing I could do? So I think it was as soon as I got in - well, what would my path look like if I came back to GM? What would it look like if I did something different? Because GM's always going to be there and I can always choose to go back there, probably.
I started hearing about this entrepreneurship through acquisition thing, where you raise money from a group of investors to buy a small business and then run it. You're an owner plus a CEO right out of business school. I'd heard about that during my interview process. I wasn't sure it was something I'd be able to pursue, but I was like, that's really interesting, because I'd always had this entrepreneurial thing in the back of my head but never had the gumption to go out there and start something on my own. So that was something that very early on I was like, well, if I get in, I'll look into it.
When I did get in, in the summer leading into business school, I started doing some LinkedIn research on people who had done this. I started talking to some people - the same way you would network with folks if you wanted to work at Goldman Sachs after school and you'd reach out to an HBS grad who works there. We did the same thing, reaching out to people asking how you best set yourself up to have the path through school where you can take advantage of this.
I probably decided on it in the spring going into the break in between first and second year, because you have to pick your internship. There was nothing really speaking to me on the corporate side - there was nothing I was going to do where I'd be like, "Oh man, I'm super excited about going to work for a consulting company or something like that." I decided to go work for a family friend of ours who runs an automotive forging business - about 200 employees. They stamp hot metal parts for cars; they make tow hooks and things like that. Dirty, hot, sweaty business, making no money working for him. I was like, if I like this, if this is something I can see myself doing, then I think this is the right path. The internship was really interesting, and I could see myself in that guy's shoes. The decisions that he's making every day, I could make, and it'd be a really cool experience to run something like this.
I went back to school in the fall committed mentally that I was going to do that. In the second year at HBS you choose your classes in the elective curriculum, and I'd already chosen to do the main search fund class, which is in the fall with the two professors that run that whole path. In the spring there are two more classes you can take that expand on that fall course load. The fall really gets you thinking - they bring in all the success stories, they bring in the failures, and you're like, "Man, this could be me someday." At HBS, and at a lot of business schools now, you have investors that hang around and try to network with students. If you raise your hand on LinkedIn or to your classmates that you're going to want to raise a search fund, investors will find you and you can start networking and talking about that. The path becomes a little more illuminated - in the same way that if you were wanting to start a startup, you would take startup classes and start networking with people that have worked at venture capital funds. It's kind of insane to think of investors coming and hanging around and waiting for students to show interest. That truly would not have happened if you were continuing to work at General Motors. That's truly the benefit of a place like HBS.
During the fall, everyone is evaluating it individually - you have to decide that this is something you want to do in general versus committing to a partner, and then going from there. By the time my partner and I had both been having individual conversations with investors to figure out, okay, do you want to do this? Who's the right fit from an investor background to partner with for their fund? - I was exchanging notes with this guy, and we were like, okay, where are you going to search from? Who are you talking to, investor-wise? What kind of businesses do you want to buy? It was more just an exchanging-notes thing, in the same way that a cohort of people prepping to go work for a consulting company might be doing mock cases with one another. And then eventually it got to the point where it's like, there's a lot of overlap here - have you ever considered wanting to do a partner thing? I think I was the one to ask, because, knowing myself, for the same reason I didn't start my own company, it's very hard to commit and hold yourself accountable on something like that. I always felt like if you had someone else, two plus two equals five, but it's also that you're able to have someone who's your accountability partner.
The MBA definitely helped in that regard. The journey has been pretty incredible, but where the MBA comes in - especially a school like HBS where it's the case method - it teaches you to think on your feet. You're a very well-rounded athlete; the analogy would be like a five-tool player in baseball, where you can do everything well, or you've got background in basically everything, so much so that you can at least chime in with something intelligent to say or ask a good question. In a typical day, in my role as CEO and CFO, I'll bounce from marketing to sales to HR to finance to operations, and that's just in one morning. If I had gone from General Motors and somehow raised money and done the same thing, I would only have maybe one of those things. HBS doesn't teach you everything you need to know about marketing or operations, but it gives you a fundamental background so that you can take something - like what we bought in the business - and improve it. The business was set up by people that didn't go to HBS and had organically grown into something, but there was a lot that could be improved upon. Coming in with an MBA, you're able to at least understand where the opportunities are and work on some of those things.
Are there any shocking or surprising stories from running the business - things that wouldn't have happened if you'd taken an investment banking job?
There are a lot of stories I probably shouldn't share. Stuff on the personnel front is always the most interesting thing, and I think that's actually where business schools do the worst job. It's hard to prepare you for some of the personnel challenges. You focus a lot on theory - strategy, finance - and the interpersonal stuff, especially in a small business, is hard to prepare for. You kind of have to rely on other personal experience and how you'd manage that. On the wins side, we've been able to grow the business by bringing on new customers that the old business, before we bought it, probably wouldn't have had a chance of doing, because it's a slightly different business model. Business school really prepared us well to have those conversations with senior executives at some of these big companies that use our services - it's a CDL training school. The old business probably wouldn't have been able to do that with us in the driver's seat. Understanding where those companies are coming from, having taken a negotiating class, being able to effectively negotiate against them was something that really paid off. I can directly point to the MBA and say it was worth that much in terms of revenue, which is interesting.
We didn't really use the HBS thing when we were buying the business, because in a lot of cases, the businesses we were looking to buy, it was a turnoff rather than something they were explicitly looking for.
When we came into the business, in order to build credibility with our employees - because we're young guys, and they're like, "Okay, who are these young guys who just bought the business? Why should we trust them?" - we mentioned it to the employees, but it's not something where it's the ultimate trump card. "You have to listen to me because I went to Harvard Business School." That wouldn't work. Our employees care about our ability to make decisions. They care about our ability to make sure that they have job security and that we're leading the business in a way that allows it to grow and succeed. If going to Harvard Business School helps with that, then great - Harvard Business School is the best place on earth. But it really comes down to: are we making the right decisions? Do they feel like they can come to us with challenges? Do they feel confident in our ability to lead and that our vision is the right thing for the company? It really comes down to track record and whether we're able to show - not tell, but show - that we're the right people to lead the company. My brother-in-law is in a similar situation, and it really is about showing that you care, but then being able to make decisions that are for the greater good.
It's hard to say, because I think we're still very much in the early chapters of the story of our business and our journey. Eventually I'd love to get back to the auto industry. That doesn't necessarily have to be at an OEM, at one of the big companies - that could be in a multitude of different ways. The way that I'd view our initial success with the search fund, and to the extent that we have a great outcome with our current business, I view that as the safety net and security. Throughout my career and life so far, I've wanted to give myself a floor of outcomes. HBS is a big part of that, where it's like, once you go to HBS, your earning potential floor has been raised. I think a lot of people talk about an MBA that way. The same way, if we have a great outcome with our current business, you've got financial security, and you also have opportunity security, where you've led a business and so you could always use that to run something else.
At a certain point, if I wanted to choose where I want to go, I would love to do something related to cars and the auto industry. Ours is related to that right now, but it's definitely a different beast. I don't know what that looks like. I'm not one of those people that says I have to stick around in the search fund ecosystem forever. It's something I'll end up knowing really well, but it is also one of those things - once you work for yourself, it would probably be pretty hard to go back and have a boss again.
It's always hard for me to give advice because everyone's MBA experience is so different - the reason why someone pursues an MBA is different, and what the right time is for them is different, because you have people who are doing it in their mid-30s and people who are doing it right out of college.
With anything in life, it's keeping your antenna up and keeping your ears open for different opportunities. The MBA is a great opportunity for a lot of people who are in the early part of their career to learn about a lot of different paths. You're giving yourself the opportunity to learn about different ways that your life could unfold in a way that, if you're working in investment banking or marketing or something like that and you choose not to do an MBA, you're more likely than not going to end up in a path that's similar to that. But if you go to business school, you don't know what your life is going to look like - and it could be something that's really interesting and fun. You're exposed to a lot of people like that. So keep your antenna open and be open to the possibility of new paths.