Hi, I’m Sydney Wayman, the Adjunct Lecturer

For nearly 20 years I’ve taught undergraduate business management, marketing, and financial management classes at the City University of New York’s Medgar Evers College School of Business. But I’m not an academician. I don’t have a Ph.D. and I’m not on a tenure track at the college, though I’ve often considered that as a career move.

No, I’m not an academician, I’m a practitioner. I earned an MBA with a concentration in marketing and finance to complement my undergraduate degree in accounting and set forth in the world to gain as much practical business experience possible. My goal was to learn business and how to successfully operate one, to become a better manager by learning how to apply the theories the academicians created to explain the world.

Before teaching, as a banker at a money-center bank in New York, I financed LBOs of companies that entrepreneurs or management teams were acquiring or taking private. You learn a lot about business analyzing and monitoring these highly leveraged transactions.

A few years later, at a much smaller bank in Harlem, I financed entrepreneurs and small business owners just trying to survive. You learn even more about business looking for ways to offer lifelines to companies that started out under-capitalized. For many of them, despite achieving breakeven sales, survival was not likely.

And then I co-founder of a fully integrated coffee roasting company, building its annual sales to a $1 million in just under 4 years. Talk about learning business; managing through the day-to-day challenges of starting and growing a venture financed on a shoestring taught me a helluva lot about business. It’s hard to pass the buck when the buck stops with you. You have no choice but to make the decision, and right or wrong, you have to live with it.

Lastly, as a business consultant I learned even more about starting, growing, and managing a business by helping scores of entrepreneurs and small business owners grow their companies by developing and implementing solid marketing plans, and helping others write strong financial plans with strong operating projections they used to raise much needed capital.

Sadly, there were some businesses I could only watch die a slow death, the businesses being too far gone to help, with their owners unwilling to pull the plug or unwilling to change.

Getting back to my point, I’m a practitioner, and after years of working with entrepreneurs and business owners, preparing business and financing plans, analyzing their operations and financial condition, and developing and implementing growth strategies, I’ve learned that knowing some basic and fundamental accounting principles can help them more effectively manage their businesses.