Clayton Mathile, Aileron Consultants

Rebuilding America
Billionaire Teaches Others How To Get Rich
Steven Bertoni, 01.21.10, 12:20 PM EST
Forbes Magazine dated February 08, 2010
Mathile's $130 million bet on small business.


Clayton L. Mathile is an entrepreneur who built a billion-dollar fortune in pet food. He sold the Iams Co. to Procter & Gamble ( PG - news - people ) in 1999 for $2.3 billion. Like many of his ilk, he turned his energies to teaching others the craft of entrepreneurship. For the $130 million he's already spent on that goal, Mathile could have simply stuck his name on a new building at Harvard Business School or Wharton and called it a day. Instead, he started a new kind of school for the betterment of the small business owner.

Mathile's project is called Aileron, which started in 1996 offering management classes at community colleges. Some 1,500 businesses have taken its seminars. In April 2008 Mathile cut the ribbon on its permanent home, an airy 70,000-square-foot building of glass, wood and stone on a bucolic campus outside Dayton, Ohio.
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A Forbes 400 Profile on Clayton Mathile

The "clients," as the small business owners are called, are a different breed from what's usually found wandering the halls of Ivy League business schools. These are owners of roofing, landscaping and metal-stamping firms too wrapped up in the grind to focus on internal controls and long-term strategy.

"We're dealing with day-to-day, gut-wrenching problems, and the universities aren't really set up to deal with that," says Mathile, 69. He initially toyed with the idea of funding an entrepreneur school at a university, but after speaking to unhappy donors who had backed such programs, he decided to create Aileron with a chunk of his estimated $1.7 billion fortune.

Fewer than half of Aileron's clients have formal business training. "There's dirt under their fingernails, they probably don't use the best English or have the best table manners, but they have 10 to 20 employees," Mathile says. Aileron covers 95% of the costs; clients pay the rest so they have something invested in the courses. The Course for Presidents costs $800 for a two-day seminar. Similar offerings by the American Management Association run $2,450. The $800, moreover, includes a consultant, drawn from a pool of successful entrepreneurs and executives, for as long as you need one.

Great article. He's giving real entrepreneurs the structure taught at B-schools. That is so much more than setting up another school teaching students with no real entrepreneurial experience/intent....

Mathile wanted a nontraditional setting for learning and got it. Architect Lee H. Skolnick, who designed several children's museums, installed a floor-mounted video monitor in the building's "Risk Corridor" so that visitors could walk over images of a raging fire. Down another hall a touchscreen lets clients interact with a digital Mathile. The real Mathile is around a lot, too. After a guest lecture 30 clients cornered Mathile to get him to sign copies of his book Dream No Little Dreams, to talk strategy and to offer thanks.

Wesley Gipe, chief of technology services firm Agil it, is using Aileron consultants to switch to performance-based pay and shed customers to focus on the health care market. The consultants, he says, "can be brutal, and that's just what I need."

Eric Rich II, an Aileron client who heads Rich Roofing in Troy, Ohio, implemented more clearly defined roles and performance reviews. He suffered a staff turnover of 90% but enjoyed a sales bump in 2009 of 14% to $3.5 million despite the recession. Rich's quality of life improved, too: "I can take my family on vacation without spending the whole time on the phone."

Mathile wants to take his Dayton experiment national and branch out using social networking and the Web. "If every business adopts effective management and is successful, then you won't need this place," Mathile says. "We'll just rent it out as a bed-and-breakfast."