From gold coins to steak dinners, elevator pitches to corporate governance
Marty Kittrell brings student-focused support to the College of Business
By Janel Shoun-Smith |
Marty Kittrell, a Lipscomb accounting graduate from 1977 has spent a lot of time working for the benefit of Lipscomb as a 17-year member of the Board of Trustees. But he has also spent as much time, if not more, one-on-one with students, especially student entrepreneurs, whom he mentors and encourages in various ways.
Alumni of a certain age may remember winning a real half-ounce gold coin from Kittrell for an excellent job thinking outside of the box as he challenged them to a critical thinking skills test.
Today’s entrepreneurial students will have fond memories of an intimate, small group dinner with Kittrell at a local steakhouse, and one outstanding entrepreneurial student has enjoyed capital investment from the semi-retired business leader who enjoys investing in small, new ventures.
The Hickman County, Tennessee-native remembers retired Lipscomb accounting professor Charles Frasier as his most influential professor and mentor (he had eight classes with Frasier), and these days he spends a lot of time paying forward the guidance and instruction that Frasier gave him back when he roamed the halls of Lipscomb as a student.
Kittrell graduated from Lipscomb into a long career in accounting and corporate finance, serving as CFO for nine companies over 25 years and moving to 10 cities before moving back to Nashville in 2011 to live in semi-retirement. During his career, he had the opportunity to orchestrate mergers and acquisitions and did a lot of capital raising, he said. Throughout those years, he provided support to Lipscomb as he could from his cities of residence.
In the 1980s, he and his wife Jane Dennison Kittrell (’76), a third-generation Lipscomb Bison, set up a fund to specifically support College of Business students scholarships and support to faculty.
As conditions changed over the years, they later decided to use the funds to support the Kittrell Pitch Competition, designed to foster “Shark Tank-type creative ideas and business plans,” he said. The program holds two competitions a year and provides thousands of dollars in prizes for the winning students to pursue their entrepreneurial ventures. Kittrell strives to attend every year if possible.
“I really enjoy the interaction with those students,” Kittrell said. “I enjoy the entrepreneurial spirit that Lipscomb works to impart among them. Whether it is Jeff Cohu or Rob Touchstone, or Joseph Bamber, Joe Ivey or Perry Moore, I try to make sure those people know I support them, that I see them and that I appreciate the investment they are making in students today.”
In addition to personal encouragement to students who reach out to him, Kittrell’s other formal involvement has included guest lecturing on corporate governance and strategy. He provides firsthand insight for students on corporate mergers, the job of a corporate board member, hot topics in corporate governance and current compliance requirements.
“I try to put in layman’s terms, pretty high-level financial concepts,” he said. “I would like to plant the seed that this is a fascinating area, that you might want to consider studying, and I enjoy talking about it.”
This past school year he invited about 20 students and faculty for a dinner at Char. “I gotta tell you,” he chuckled. “Students love getting a free steak dinner!
“But more than that, I was able to get a couple of guest speakers in front of them,” he said. “Ernie Clevenger (’75) (DB), also a member of the Lipscomb Board of Trustees, and Parker Polidor (’99) are both proven entrepreneurs. I like for students to hear about not only me and my back story. It’s important for them to see what Christian businesspeople can accomplish.”
“Sometimes I’ll give students a critical skills thinking test where I give them a list of trivia questions. I don’t expect them to know the answers, but what I expect them to do is to use their brain to come up with their best guesses,” he said. “So I love fostering that sense of thinking outside of the box, and showing that if they do a good job, I’m also willing to reward them,” sometimes with that real gold coin, which he says is “always a big hit!”.
Kittrell is impressed with the growth of the College of Business over the past two decades, from the increase in graduate programs to the Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation, from the Center for Business as Mission to “making sure students come out of here, holistically, as a Christian businessperson who also has good employment prospects,” he said.
Today, Kittrell is on the board of a public company and is an active investor in small private companies. He’s also an investor with Tokens Media LLC, which produces the Tokens Show created by a Lipscomb Bible professor.
He will continue to serve on the Lipscomb Board of Trustees until 2024. He has two daughters, fourth-generation Bisons on Jane Kittrell’s side of the family, who are Lipscomb University alumna and four grandchildren at Lipscomb Academy (who are fifth-generation Lipscomb students).