Every autumn, I teach entrepreneurship. Every summer, I live it.
By June, most regular teaching has stopped. Summer programmes occasionally appear like popcorn, then disappear just as quickly, often for reasons nobody explains. But the business of being an adjunct professor continues, because this is when the next academic year is supposedly taking shape.
“Supposedly” is doing quite a lot of work in that sentence.
This summer, some of my teaching simply disappeared for next year. Courses were reorganised, tracks changed, and nobody called to explain the logic or ask what the people teaching them might have learned. I discovered that hours I had expected were gone, which is roughly equivalent to a regular customer quietly removing half its orders from your sales forecast and hoping you didn’t notice.
At another school, adjunct faculty were effectively asked to accept less money. After nearly ten years without a raise, that created a decision any entrepreneur would recognise. A major customer had become an important part of the portfolio, then asked for a substantial price reduction. Volume can be seductive, but volume is not loyalty, and dependence is not product market fit. Sometimes the most mature decision is to walk away, even when every spreadsheet is begging you to stay.
Business schools can woo adjuncts with hours one year and offer almost nothing the next. That makes putting all your eggs in one institutional basket extraordinarily dangerous, particularly when the basket belongs to somebody else. So I do what I would advise any founder to do: diversify the customer base, protect the value proposition, develop new channels, enter new markets, and keep adjusting the business model.
This autumn, I will teach in Germany at a place I am genuinely proud to join. The opportunity came through people who trusted my work enough to recommend me. I’m also still waiting, hoping, and probably refreshing my inbox too often about another possibility in Spain.
I am not raising capital, but I am constantly raising confidence: my own, my family’s, and the confidence of schools willing to trust me with their students. My wife is not officially my cofounder, but she has lived through enough pivots to deserve equity. My son is not an employee, although I occasionally worry about retention and whether the benefits package is competitive.
Few know this or even acknowledge it.
My business model has customer segments, channels, revenue streams, fixed costs, unpredictable demand, and the occasional client who wants more for less. In other words, it’s a Business Model Canvas with slightly more anxiety and considerably fewer sticky notes than the one’s I use in class.
I’ll be honest, after working in more than thirty startups as a founder, cofounder, or bizdev, I’ve started wondering whether adjunct teaching is not simply “startup number thirty one.”
Perhaps business schools should stop teaching uncertainty as an abstract case study and recognise that many of the people standing in front of the classroom already manage it for a living.
As I write this, I still do not know exactly what the year will look like.
What I do know is that the timetable starts in September. The entrepreneurship started in June.