Five questions with the Colangelo College of Business' Paul Waterman

EDITOR'S NOTE: The following article was originally published in the April issue of GCU Magazine, available in the purple bins on campus or digitally.

Paul Waterman’s discipline in strategic management might be an understatement. The Wisconsin native, an entrepreneur who has been involved in everything from real estate to restaurants to finance, traveled far and wide as a youth before earning his pilot’s license. He was in the same high school Spanish class as comedian Chris Farley, and his bilingual skills helped him in business and to meet his wife, a Colombian native. He helped the Project Management Club establish TEDxGCU and leads GCU’s relationship with the Project Management Institute.

1 What was your most memorable flight?

I was flying with a friend in a Piper Cub, a tail-dragger, and one of the lightest of planes that weighs probably 1,500 pounds. They’re hard to control on the ground because they’re squirrely. The guy I was flying with was trying to show me his technique for landing them on short strips. They fly slow and take off fast. We got cattywampus on a dilapidated runway at an abandoned Air Force base south of Chandler. He tries to pull out, but a tree caught our landing gear, the engine stopped and we flipped upside down on top of this big mesquite tree. We climbed out, climbed down without a scratch. We hitchhiked back to where the guy lives, got his trailer, went back, cut the tree down, took the plane apart, put it on the trailer.

2 What’s special about TEDxGCU?

TEDx is just a project. It’s a time-constrained event with a unique outcome or goal. A wedding is a project, starting a business is a project. And my saying is, “If you understand what a project is, everything is a project.” TEDx was a cool opportunity to create something that students would like the vibe of. … They are curating speakers with messages that have gravity with the students. There’s a lot of business-aligned things that happen when you actually execute on a TEDx.

3 How does a Wisconsinite get so plugged in to world travel?

Starting at a young age, 5 or 6, I used to spend summers with my grandfather. He lived in Connecticut and worked in the New York City area, which is an interesting contrast for someone so young. My mom was always a traveler, hitchhiking all over the world with her friends when she was in college. I grew up in a family where travel is just what you do.

4 How much Spanish did you learn (at Edgewood High School of the Sacred Heart in Madison, Wisconsin) with Chris Farley?

He was the same as he was on “Saturday Night Live.” And he was a tremendous athlete. He was on the hockey team and the football team. And if you know some of his “Saturday Night Live” skits, you have seen where he was skating, a ballerina or dancing. He was a funny dude. That was just who he was. … He was in my class taught by the nuns, and we didn’t learn much Spanish.

5 How beneficial was it to learn about computers?

I had a compact portable computer that probably cost $8,000 that looked like an industrial sewing machine … I could translate all this finance that I learned in school into spreadsheets of formulas. I was in a zone for two or three weeks, and I came up with all these financial pro formas to improve the speed of decision making in the business. That two- to three- week period changed the trajectory of my life, because when I took it back to the company that just hired a kid to do leasing at commercial shopping centers, I had come up with some tools that were a strategic advantage for that company, and they recognized it right away.

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