Success Stories

When Scott Baradell (Executive MBA '00) was promoted to director of corporate communications for PageNet in 1998, he felt the need for perspective. A liberal arts major and journalist before joining PageNet in 1994, Baradell lacked the formal business education that many of his peers possessed. "I thought an MBA would give me the 10,000-foot view of the business landscape I needed," he recollected, "as well as a better understanding of how all the parts of a business work together to make it tick. Furthermore, I believed this knowledge would give me a broader range of career options — whether that meant senior management at a Fortune 1000 company or starting my own business."

When Baradell surveyed the local landscape for MBA options, the decision was crystal clear. "Cox is the only business school in Dallas-Fort Worth with a national reputation," he observed, "so it was kind of a no-brainer." Baradell applied to the school's Executive MBA (EMBA) program and started class in the fall of 1998.

First-year accounting proved to be a formative experience for Baradell with real-world application. "I took two intense courses that gave me a much stronger command over the numbers behind a business," he noted. "And I found myself immediately applying what I had learned in class on the job. That's when I realized just how valuable the Cox EMBA program was."

In Jerry White's entrepreneurship class, Baradell had the unique opportunity to write a business plan that he later launched as a real business. In the summer of 2000, three friends and he created Brightpod, a wireless application service provider. They raised more than $3 million in venture capital from Ericsson and several East Coast VC firms before being acquired by InPhonic, a Washington, D.C.-based company that builds and manages virtual private wireless networks (VPWNs) for enterprises, affinity groups, and e-businesses.

Even after graduating from the EMBA program, Baradell has continued to derive value from the Cox network, working closely with fellow EMBAs on a number of business endeavors. He has hired people he met in the program to do consulting work for him, and others have hired him in the same capacity.

"I learned a lot from my experiences in the Cox EMBA program," he said, "and I've been able to apply that breadth of knowledge in important business situations. I no longer feel that certain parts of the business aren't my area. I feel like I can always contribute a useful idea — whether the subject is IT or accounting or HR. That's rewarding for me and for my employer."

As vice president of corporate communications at Belo — a Fortune 1000 company with $1.4 billion in revenues — Baradell relishes the opportunities and challenges that come with his new assignment. "People are familiar with Belo's individual newspapers and TV stations; however, the Belo corporate brand is not well known outside Dallas-Fort Worth," he remarked. "With the deregulation and consolidation now occurring in the media industry, it is important for us to build our corporate brand identity. We have a tremendous opportunity to heighten the profile of the company with key audiences, including investors, potential strategic partners, advertisers, and ultimately viewers, readers, and online users."