Hospitality Entrepreneurship—Undergraduate Concentration
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About the Hospitality Entrepreneurship Concentration
The hospitality entrepreneurship concentration aims to empower students with the foundational leadership and assessing skills to create economic and social value either for a startup or as part of an entrepreneurial team within a hospitality organization. Throughout the concentration, students will develop skills of idea generation and opportunity recognition. They will learn to think like an entrepreneur to recognize innovative opportunities, appraise financial feasibility, and understand the business planning process. The concentration includes a set of required and elective courses pointing to an interdisciplinary approach while advancing students’ entrepreneurial leadership.
Perfect if you like: Business, Creativity, Problem-Solving, Reading, Research, Writing
Learning Outcomes
Upon the completion of the accounting and finance concentration, students will achieve competencies in:
- understand the concepts of entrepreneurship, innovation, intrapreneurship, and various business management
- generate ideas, recognize opportunities, assess financial implications, and develop entrepreneurial leadership skills.
- develop creativity and innovation as applied to entrepreneurial problems/opportunities
- develop practical communication attributes as an entrepreneurial attribute-including, written, formal and informal presentation
- utilize various business disciplines to be used in qualitative, quantitative, analysis in entrepreneurial ventures, and decision-making.
Required Courses
HF307: Hospitality Entrepreneurship—(4 Credit Hours)
Offered: Fall
Prerequisites: SHA HF 220, SHA HF 260, SHA HF 310
This course is intended to be a capstone experience for students seeking to understand hospitality entrepreneurship and innovation as a professional business system. Student teams will create, develop and design a concise Pro Forma Business Plan for a start-up non-profit or profit-driven hospitality enterprise. At the end of the semester teams will make a competitive presentation integrating the principles and skills mastered in previous coursework to a panel of successful hospitality entrepreneurs.
HF479: Financial Reporting and Analysis—(4 Credit Hours)
Offered: Spring
Prerequisites:
This course will teach students the process of examining a company’s performance in the context of its industry and economic environment in order to arrive at a decision or recommendation. The central focus of financial analysis is financial statement analysis and interpretation of financial disclosures on evaluating the company’s performance to improve risk assessment and decision-making. Students will be able to understand company’s future risk performance by analyzing the financial statements.
Additional Required Courses
Pick any four credits of available concentration electives:
QST SI444: Entrepreneurship: Solving Problems in a Dynamic World—(4 Credit Hours)
Offered: Spring & Fall
Prerequisites: SMG FE 323; SMG MK 323; SMG OM 323.
Addresses the specifics of planning a business startup or expanding and altering an existing small business, including the feasibility of ideas, market definition, management, and operations and financing requirements. This is a hands-on, experiential learning course requiring integration of previous coursework into a coherent, realistic business plan. Helps students assess and develop their own particular idea and to consider the appropriateness for them of entrepreneurship as a career choice.
QST SI456: Social Entrepreneurship and Sustainable Impact—(4 Credit Hours)
Offered: Spring & Fall
Prerequisites: QST FE323, MK323, OM323, and QM323; or SI480.
This course is designed to expose students to the business tools and key foundational learnings (social, environmental and cultural) around social enterprise, scaling and innovation in today’s conscious business environment. Students will learn how to operate in a shared economy through the principles of social enterprise, conscious capitalism, and cultural and societal shifts that have led to the rise in social consciousness, corporate social responsibility and the modern enterprise; models of impact that are supporting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), how Shared Value systems are engaging business leaders today; hybrid models that are occurring in today’s business landscape that are blurring the lines between nonprofit and for-profit organizations; social scalers that are changing the dynamic in business today; risk models that are being developed to manage towards the triple bottom line; the rise of benefit corps, BCorps and flexible purpose corporations that are redefining the landscape of organizations; and impact investing as a catalyst for supporting social enterprise efforts and leading towards heightened social consciousness in our society both from the individual investor and institutional markets.
HF313: Advanced Hospitality Accounting and Finance—(2 Credit Hours)
Offered: Fall
Prerequisites: SHA HF 210 and SHA HF 310
Focused on the accounting operational duties faced by accountants in the Hospitality industry. This course covers day-to-day duties that typical hotel accountants encounter such as transactional accounting and internal controls including capital expenditure (CapEx) budgeting and property improvement program (PIP) analysis. In addition, the course will cover financial analysis that accountants typically encounter in the Hospitality industry. Other areas covered will include accounting processes, regulatory requirement, and non-accounting duties.
HF314: Hospitality Market Feasibility and Valuation—(2 Credit Hours)
Offered: Spring
Prerequisites: SHA HF 210, SHA HF 220, SHA HF 260, and SHA HF 270
This course provides an introduction to and detailed instruction regarding the hotel market and feasibility research process including hands-on preparation of a feasibility analysis for a proposed hotel development. The course will consist of a series of lectures and possible guest lectures regarding the fundamental aspects of hotel feasibility analysis. Students will learn about and then put into the practice the analytical techniques presented, building to completion of a full feasibility analysis in a team fashion which will be presented at the end of the semester both in written and oral form.
HF315: Fundamentals of a Hotel Real Estate Deal—(2 Credit Hours)
Offered: Spring
Prerequisites: SHA HF 210, SHA HF 220, SHA HF 260, and SHA HF 270
The purpose of this course is to introduce the students to the various aspects of a Hotel Real Estate Deal. The target audience is any student who aspires to have a career involving the ownership, development and/or financing of lodging assets.
HF416: Hospitality Franchising—(2 Credit Hours)
Offered: Fall
Prerequisites: SHA HF 220 and SHA HF 270
This course deals with both the legal and practical applications of franchise systems including the startup, development, operation and management of franchises from the perspective of both the franchisor and the franchisee. Particular emphasis will be placed on the franchisor- franchisee relationship, as well as organizational development for building and operating multi-unit franchised systems. The course will focus on both the restaurant and hotel industries.
