Education/training
Career Moves - graduate success stories MBA Tour comes to TorontoInvestigate MBA optionsSean Neville describes himself as an A type, and it's hard not to agree with him. A singles figure skater who was once ranked 13th in the country in his event, Neville was licensed to trade stocks on Bay Street while he was still attending York University. And although he admits to a "passion" for finance, what he really wanted to do was run his own company. DAVID CHILTON |
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 [ 2006-10-25 ] |
Sean Neville took his family with him while he worked on getting his MBA at Cornell and in Barcelona.
"I very much enjoyed trading, but as opposed to trading stocks I actually wanted to run a company behind a stock. But I felt my skill set was not there. I thought a top-ranked MBA would give me the tools and the skills to be able to make that happen."
Neville began to investigate his MBA options in 1998, knowing always that whatever school he attended would be Ivy League, that group of eight universities in the U.S. northeast that includes Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Cornell. In 2000, Neville chose to attend Cornell in Ithaca, N.Y., whose most famous Canadian alumnus is probably Ken Dryden, Montreal Canadiens great and would-be Liberal Party Leader.
Cornell is one of the many universities on the MBA Tour that is coming to Toronto Nov. 1 at the Metro Convention Centre, 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. (There are other stops in Vancouver and Montreal.) As well as Cornell, there's Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, Boston College and Boston University, Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., UCLA, University of California at Berkeley and the University of Tampa.
Canadian schools include the University of Toronto, York University, Montreal's Concordia University, McMaster University in Hamilton, the University of British Columbia and the University of Alberta. Internationally, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Melbourne Business School in Australia and Spain's IESE Business School will be on hand, among others.
Neville says he financed his entire two years at Cornell from personal savings, pegging the entire cost of his MBA between $150,000 and $200,000 (Canadian). He could have done it less expensively, but unlike almost every student who heads off to a university far from home, Neville, 33, took his wife and baby daughter with him. In fact, he even took them with him when he spent four months at IESE's campus in Barcelona as an exchange student. "I wanted to make it an immersive trip for the whole family," Neville says.
"DIFFERENT EXPERIENCE"
He chose both places, Cornell and Barcelona, for different reasons: Cornell because it was Ivy League and offered an intimate environment with just 200 people in his class, nine of them Canadian; and Barcelona because "I wanted a very different business experience."
Following graduation in 2002, Neville set out to buy his own company, focusing on those owned by baby boomers whose children didn't want to take over the business or who didn't have a transition strategy for when they retired. He settled on a plastics company, taking a position there to learn the ropes, but left in June 2003 to start his own company, Simply Audio Books, with Sanjay Singhal, another Cornell MBA grad in school about a decade ahead of Neville.
Simply Audio Books is the largest company in its field in the world, says Neville from his Oakville headquarters. For a flat monthly fee subscribers can receive audio books on CD in the mail -- which comprises most of his business -- or they can download their favourites from the Internet or take them home from one of Simply Audio Books' two stores. In fact, in a neat bit of symmetry, one of those outlets is the same Bay Street space Neville rented his own audio books from back in his pre-Cornell MBA days.
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