Who We Are

The CEBE in GGC’s School of Business was founded in 2016 by Dr. Phillip Hartley, Dr. Jason Gordon, and Dr. Brett Young to help provide student entrepreneurs with necessary and practical knowledge and skills as well as to build their awareness of external resources for small businesses and start-ups.

The CEBE was the recipient of a $4000 seed funds grant from the VPASA in 2016 and has just received the good news we have been awarded a continuing $4000 grant for 2017.  Through the use of these funds, the CEBE continues to work to acquire additional computer resources to effectively serve aspiring student entrepreneurs and to promote itself to the campus community in order to solicit student participants.  That being said, coaching provided through the CEBE has already shown considerable results.

As an example, a team of GGC student entrepreneurs took part in a well-regarded market development training program hosted out of Georgia Tech.  The team received glowing reviews from the program administrators and has been accepted to a “business pitch” competition held at the University of Georgia.

Beyond these student outcomes, the support of the seed funds program led the CEBE faculty to take a more comprehensive, scientific approach to providing students with training and guidance.  These efforts generated a conceptual paper that was accepted at a premier entrepreneurship conference, the 2017 USASBE annual conference and another at the 2018 USASBE annual conference.  As a result of the exposure gained through the conference, the paper has since been invited for submission to a number of academic journals and is currently under revision in preparation for submission.

Lastly, in collaboration with the Office of Advancement and the School of Business, the CEBE faculty have conducted meetings with a number of patrons of the college to build awareness of the CEBE and to solicit input with regard to program design.  These patrons have, in most cases, agreed to be available for speaking engagements that the CEBE will orchestrate in the future to foster student learning and motivation.