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“The only job I ever had, and I got fired,” he said. “At that point I decided that I wasn’t going to give someone the opportunity to fire me again.” After that experience, he said, he started his first company, Dakota Resources, which focused on oil exploration. He has started a total of 23 companies, and Dieterich said they range in focus from general oil acquisitions, natural gas measurement, ranching and hunting and are located in different states. “The best advice I can give anybody is to get into a job that has recurring revenue,” he said. “Once you build it, you’ll have the income to continue.” Dieterich has operated as many as eight companies at a time, he said,
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The university as a whole is starting to foster the culture of entrepreneurship.
and he is currently only running four. The freedom of being self-employed is a freedom Dieterich said he would not give up, but there are struggles to overcome when starting a business. “The biggest negative to being selfemployed is the stress associated with it,” he said. “Until you reach the point where your business is highly profitable, there are always hard times. You just have to learn that you have to be dedicated to what you do.” Dieterich developed a list of “Ten Battle Tested Rules for Survival in the Entrepreneurial World,” and he said they are designed to help entrepreneurs avoid the mistakes he has made over the years. The rules encourage entrepreneurs to surround themselves with smart people, look for hidden opportunities, learn how to structure financial information and build long-term relationships with vendors and suppliers. “To be able to control your own destiny, to be able to decide when you go to work and when you don’t, what you want to do, what you don’t want to do,” Dieterich said, “that’s something you’ll never have until you own your own business.” Businesses are built from dreams Robertson said he grew up in an entrepreneurial family for the majority of his life, and both of his parents were involved in the family health care business. “My dad has been involved in 20 plus companies, and they have all been in health care,” he said. “I always thought I would be a part of a family business of some kind.” In 1998, Robertson said, his family started having financial problems, and the entire family had to help run its assisted living business. Robertson started at Tech as a pre-med major because he had grown up around health care, but he said he changed his major to business during his freshman year.
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exas Tech offers a wide variety of majors to its students, and some students choose to use their degrees to start their own businesses. Many alumni go on to have success in their respective fields, and Tech has been the start for multiple successful business owners in the 90 years it has existed. Dirk Dieterich, a Tech alumnus who graduated in 1978 with a bachelor’s degree in finance, said he has successfully started 23 companies. Josh Robertson, a Tech alumnus who graduated in 2006 with a bachelor ’s degree in management and marketing and with a master’s degree in 2011, successfully started a hospice medical equipment company in 2005. Craig Crowell, a Tech alumnus with a bachelor’s degree in economics who is currently pursuing his master’s degree, said he recently developed a self-contained beer dispenser, which he is in the process of marketing on a larger scale. These three alumni showcase the history Tech has with producing entrepreneurs, and Robertson said he thinks the university is starting to foster entrepreneurship even more. “I’m very pleased with the direction (Dean) Lance Nail is going with the business school,” he said. “The university as a whole is starting to foster the culture of entrepreneurship. The (Innovation Hub and Research Park) right outside of campus is a great investment. I hope Tech continues to go in that direction.” Entrepreneurship gives job freedom Dieterich grew up around entrepreneurship, and he said his father was self-employed. “My dad was a veterinarian and always had his own business,” he said. “He was the first veterinary orthopedic surgeon in the United States. I started out pre-vet/pre-med, and then
I did like 300 hours of surgery with (my dad), and I decided that wasn’t for me.” He then decided to switch to a business-oriented major, and he said he chose to major in finance because he could not see himself being an accountant for the rest of his life. Dieterich said he went to work for Hunt Energy right after he graduated, and he worked in North Dakota for a year before coming back to Texas to run the Midland office. During his time with Hunt Energy, Dieterich said, he developed an interest in oil exploration, but he was eventually fired from the company.
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