Every year Portland State’s business school students volunteer to help local small business owners create or improve their existing business strategies.

In 2024, we worked with more than 60 businesses and at the end of the semester a handful of those collaborations were celebrated at a showcase event.

Dr. Thomas A. Khoury guided our team, and we volunteered with Matt Jacobson and his business associate Heather. Matt and Heather were in the earliest stage of building a business, so this was an extensive project.

Our business owners envisioned a new kind of pet accessory, and we provided research and guidance over the course of a couple months.

At the end, we presented Heather and Matt with a detailed business plan that contained an analysis of their competitors’ strengths and weaknesses as well as our perspective on the overall pet accessory market (pretty strong!).

We also created five years of budgets for their business, within a variety of scenarios, by calculating the costs associated with manufacture, marketing, and delivery of their product.

Matt and Heather were thrilled with the end result and say they plan to rely on our insights going forward.

Also, our work was selected as one of the year’s key collaborations! As the team’s leader, I was invited to the event as a featured guest and presented the project on behalf of my team.