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William W. Reynolds Jr. ’61 believes in “angels,” down-to-earth capital investors willing to put their money in fledgling incubation businesses in the Camden and southern New Jersey region.
As director of the William G. Rohrer Center for Management and Entrepreneurship at Rutgers University Camden, this is one of many projects that Reynolds oversees in a fusion of academic and real-world expertise.
Describing himself as “a doer more than a researcher,” Reynolds had been a teacher and educational administrator prior to a more than 20-year career as founder and senior partner in a Haddonfield, N.J.-based management consulting firm. In 1997, just as he was easing away from his consulting work, Reynolds says he was offered the job of a lifetime in being asked to direct the new Center for Management and Entrepreneurship (CME), the outreach arm to the region’s business community on behalf of the School of Business in Camden.
Responsible for the overall mission and administration of the CME, Reynolds says, “My job is to coordinate outreach programs that link local businesses in an eight-county area with the services of the university. We provide all sorts of corporate training and seminars to businesses all the way up to Fortune 500 corporations. We have established small-business councils and assistance and training for small businesses. We oversee a small business development center. Right now we are seeking financial benefactors, or ‘angels,’ to help underwrite our incubation program for firms just starting out.
“Generally speaking, we try to tap the resources of Rutgers for the economic development for the region as whole. As a statewide university, Rutgers has dozens, hundreds of experts on every imaginable topic if you were setting up a business. It’s our job to link that refined learning with the raw energy of entrepreneurs trying to make a go of it in today’s tough economic climate.
“There I was, ready to sell the consulting business,” says Reynolds, “and now I am working harder than ever, with shorter vacations! It’s just been a lot of fun. The challenge is to identify a business with potential, and then coalesce teams of people with intelligence, drive, and goodwill. We’re facilitators, helping create teams that can bring business dreams to life.”
Aspiring after and obtaining dreams, thanks to solid work and guidance, is a lesson Reynolds says he learned at Lafayette as an English major.
“People would ask me what the devil I was going to do with an English degree. Well, I spent my entire career in the communication business. I couldn’t have a better degree for that than the English degree I earned at Lafayette. The professors didn’t care so much what you said, they cared how you communicated it. They wanted to know how well you could intellectually present and defend your ideas.
“The pace of change is continually escalating. Either you stay ahead of the power curve or you perish. Lafayette gave me the tools to survive in a world where many people have anywhere from five to seven careers.”
Reynolds says he has fond memories of many professors, including Cleveland E. Jauch in English and Lewis T. Stableford in biology (“they taught me to march to Thoreau’s different drummer”), but his life was most dramatically influenced by an education professor, Fred W. Roeder.
“There I was, a second-year, ‘C’ student and Fred Roeder pulled me into his office one day. He told me about this new graduate program at Harvard, a master of arts in teaching. He challenged me that if I made dean’s list every semester from that point on, he would nominate me for that program,” says Reynolds.
“Dr. Roeder saw a spark, a light in me that I never knew was there. He inspired me to find within myself the power to grow. I made the dean’s list and I went on to get my master’s and doctorate. Like so much of my Lafayette education, he empowered me. It’s a lesson that I tried to carry with me in teaching and in consulting, and now with the CME.”
Lafayette’s ability to empower students stretches back, says Reynolds, to his father, William Reynolds Sr. ’24.
“My father grew up across the river in Phillipsburg, N.J.,” says Reynolds. “He grew up in a poor family. His father was a baggage master for the Pennsylvania Railroad. My father worked for a tailor on South Main Street in Phillipsburg, who helped get my father into Lafayette because he saw my father’s potential. Every day my father would work at the dry cleaning shop, cross the bridge, and walk up to College Hill for his education.”
Reynolds’ son, William Reynolds III ’88, continues the family tradition with a degree in English. Working toward his Ph.D. in social work at Bryn Mawr College, William III recently received a two-year grant to study issues revolving about informed consent for minors.
“Lafayette offers close interaction between faculty and students,” says Reynolds. “There are innumerable opportunities for students and faculty to work together, to grow together. You share an intimate education that you just can’t find in a large university. Lafayette has always been about seeing and nourishing potential. I’ve tried to build my career on what I learned at Lafayette.”