An innovative self-help program engineered by Marriott School graduate João Bueno recently reached the 10,000-person milestone as it aims to alleviate poverty and improve the quality of life in villages throughout Mozambique.

A graduate of BYU’s MPA program, Bueno works for the humanitarian group Care For Life. Although many aid organizations simply disburse supplies to the poor, Care For Life representatives believe the free handouts can increase dependence and perpetuate poverty. In 2005, Bueno spearheaded the development of Care For Life’s Family Preservation Program, which achieves sustainable development by empowering families and communities to overcome extreme poverty and become self-reliant.

“We do not look for short-term results,” Bueno says. “If we work with local leaders and the community as a whole to provide a solution, then it is sustainable, and families and villages will learn how to help themselves. Our aim is to be the last NGO in the lives of those families.”

The program works by educating the poorest families in one of the poorest areas of the world about how to overcome challenges and change habits. For thirty-nine months Care For Life volunteers meet with families and community leaders every other week to teach hygiene, sanitation, general health, financial responsibility, and more. Each family sets ten goals, such as building latrines, planting gardens, or vaccinating their children. Care For Life provides incentives for families to meet their goals—rewarding the villagers with things like aluminum for a new roof or seeds for a garden.

“As families perceive the benefits of achieving their goals, they become very motivated,” Bueno says. “When we leave, those families will have the power to change.”

Families are organized into groups who share responsibility for each other. Leaders are chosen from among the community to make village-wide decisions that address unexpected challenges and help the neediest families.

When Bueno began the Family Preservation Program in 2005, Care For Life assisted 754 Mozambicans. The success of the program swelled the ranks in excess of 10,000 beneficiaries in eight communities in 2008. And its return on investment makes it an even more attractive option for alleviating poverty. The thirty-nine-month program costs Care For Life only $25 per beneficiary each year. The organization is now poised to expand and adapt the program to other struggling communities in Africa and Central and South America.

Participating communities have seen dramatic improvements in living conditions and health. Care For Life’s statistics show that the first four participating villages experienced an 80 percent reduction in diarrhea, a 60 percent reduction in coughing, and a nearly 70 percent reduction in deaths in only the first year. Plus, half of the families were planting their own gardens, and literacy and school attendance were rapidly increasing. Bueno believes the progress is sustainable because the villagers themselves are driving the change.

Several faculty members from the BYU Economic Self-Reliance Center contribute to the Family Preservation Program as Care For Life board members. In addition, dozens of Marriott School students volunteer as interns in Mozambique, helping teach classes in microcredit, financial responsibility, and more.

“The Marriott School is an incubator—what we have here are students with brains, skills, energy, idealism, and values who want to go out and change the world,” says Warner Woodworth, BYU professor of organizational leadership and strategy. “They want to do more than write checks. There’s this passion and this drive to make a difference.”




Growing up, Kate Maloney started thinking about her Halloween costume a couple of hours before hitting the streets for Smarties and Fun Size Twix. As a kid, the event commanded little of her attention. But as an adult, she’s preparing for it all year.

Maloney has built a career around Halloween as president of CostumeCraze, an online retailer. The company’s lengthy prep work culminates in a frenetic October when employee numbers quintuple and hundreds of thousands of packages go out its doors.

Costuming wasn’t always her career plan, but that’s how things fell into place. In 2001, Maloney, a BYU entrepreneurship student, teamed up with her brother Matt to market a software program that helped online retailers generate more search engine hits. No one was buying the software—and they took out a second mortgage on their mom’s house. While the software wasn’t selling, their test web site, which sold monk robes, started to take off.

“Be flexible,” Maloney advises would-be entrepreneurs, a lesson she learned early. “Don’t keep wasting all of your money because one idea didn’t work. We had something else that was working very well and now the mortgage has been paid off.”

What once was limited to monk robes has expanded to a warehouse with thousands of options for children, adults, and even pets. In a matter of years, CostumeCraze has become one of the world’s largest online costume retailers. For Maloney, the hard work she has put into the company is well worth it.

“Nothing can compete with having your own business,” she says. “I’ve worked harder and more hours here than I have at anything else in my life, but you don’t realize it because you enjoy it so much. You get satisfaction seeing the idea from the beginning to the end.”

Maloney, who has twice been nominated as an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, says she doesn’t let being a woman—or her relative youth—dictate how she manages her company.

“The biggest thing that goes wrong is a woman remembering she is a woman and thinking it matters,” Maloney says. “It shouldn’t define the way you are going to run a business.”

A true entrepreneur, Maloney says she has another business idea every single day. When life’s routine nuisances bother her, she tries to think of ways to solve them instead of letting them go. But for now, she is committed to growing and improving CostumeCraze and trying to find a way to make the business stronger in the costuming off-season. Of course, Maloney, who says she enjoys the excitement of the unknown, keeps other options open too.

“If I had the opportunity to step back a little bit and pursue my other ideas, that would be great too,” she says.




You may not be actively looking for a job, but EnticeLabs is still looking for you. By providing companies sophisticated talent-seeking software, Marriott School alum Ryan Caldwell and EnticeLabs are targeting and recruiting the best candidates wherever they are on the web.

“Companies are frustrated because they can’t reach some of the best candidates,” Caldwell explains. “Seventy percent of the job market is passive; they never see job opportunities because they simply aren’t looking. EnticeLabs is changing that.”

EnticeLabs’ unique software targets that 70 percent with ads on reference sites and blogs. Attempting to reach this untapped segment is what EnticeLabs calls the next step in the evolution of recruiting.

“Job boards mainly attract very active and mostly desperate job seekers. Headhunters can only reach a tiny percentage of quality candidates and have staggering costs,” he says. “EnticeLabs has the perfect solution—the best candidates and at very low costs. We are well positioned to quickly become a leader in the space.”

Caldwell joined the EnticeLabs team in September 2007, long before the company’s 2008 launch. He started by giving strategic advice and was eventually asked to join the founding team and come onboard full-time as president and CEO.

While still attending the Marriott School, Caldwell had an entrepreneurial spirit. He started his own company supplying high-speed internet access to townhomes and condos near BYU’s campus. The internet service was less expensive for residents and functioned two to three times as fast as the competition—leading to its acquisition before Caldwell graduated in 2005. He then went on to work with companies ranging from small start-ups to Fortune 500 companies both domestically and internationally.

“Ever since I was little I always loved the idea of starting companies, because there are so many ways you can build and contribute,” says Caldwell, who studied business management with an information systems emphasis. “You get the thrill of building something while helping to contribute to society by making better products, creating high-value jobs, increasing the world’s efficiency, and so forth.”

Caldwell says he enjoys building and designing just about anything, not just businesses. He has been busy expanding his Provo home and has done the design work for most of the home’s unique aspects. Caldwell also enjoys mentoring other entrepreneurs and coaching them through the hard spots.




In a handful of years, Collective Brands has promoted five BYU alums to become vice presidents—a position where there previously were none.

The Collective Brands vice presidents from BYU, Darren Haddock, Neil Hansen, Todd Averett, Gary Madsen, and Dave Nielsen, represent the evolution of a consistent pipeline between Collective Brands, which includes Payless ShoeSource and The Stride Rite Corporation, and the Marriott School. During the last decade Payless has hired one or two Marriott grads every year.

“What attracted me then and keeps me here now is that we’re big enough to have all of the functions of a large company, but we are small enough to have the opportunity to do many things,” says Madsen, VP, treasury, who joined Payless in 1995 after earning an MBA from the Marriott School.

It’s a place one employee can make a difference, yet large enough to matter in the business world with $3.5 billion in annual revenue. Collective also provides employees opportunities to move around and grow into a career—and all five vice presidents have done just that. Haddock, VP, real estate strategy and analysis, graduated from the Marriott School with an MBA in 1996 and joined Payless when the company had just gone public.

Haddock says Payless, based in Topeka, Kansas, has a climate conducive to parlaying a BYU education into corporate success and that BYU alums have built a strong reputation for themselves.

“It’s a well-grounded company with Midwestern values and a Midwestern work ethic, and that fits us well,” Haddock says.

Hansen, VP, business planning and analysis, MBA class of ’96, adds that he has enjoyed the family-friendly nature of the community and company, saying he felt comfortable joining Payless and adapting to a culture that understood the importance of work-life balance.

The group says that Collective Brands has a relatively flat structure; they not only regularly join forces on projects—they are close friends outside the workplace. And while all five have moved around within the organization and carved their own niches, Madsen says each has a similar foundation.

“What you see in my fellow graduates is a strong work ethic and a good education. The values that these individuals hold and how they carry themselves manifest to others that they can take more responsibility,” Madsen says. “People know they are going to give a straight answer, and in a crunch they will help get things done.”




Wal-Mart wants to help the planet?

The retail giant may not have seemed like the likeliest corporation to make a push for sustainability, but Marriott School alum Greg Chandler is working to help customers and suppliers see the short- and long-term benefits of going green.

As Wal-Mart’s director of marketing, wellness, and sustainability, Chandler works with vendors to reduce waste, while fostering a vision to penetrate the company’s culture. Wal-Mart’s size and scope have put it in a unique position to make sustainability both enormously impactful on the environment and cost-efficient.

“This is one of the coolest things anyone can do in marketing,” Chandler says with a smile. The sustainability initiative, officially launched in April 2008, is a broad approach to overall health—for the planet and the consumer—which includes programs such as Wal-Mart’s inexpensive prescription drugs.

“To be sustainable means to drive out waste and costs to save people money,” says Chandler, who has been thinking outside the box, finding ways to reduce unnecessary product packaging and to save costs in the process. Stripping the cardboard box of one brand of baby seats meant that more could be shipped in the same space, and it was easier to sell—the consumer could get a better sense of how the product really looks.

Presenting to a marketing class of Marriott School MBA students in October 2008, Chandler, who was the director of marketing at Frito-Lay before coming to Wal-Mart, explained that people are seeing themselves as an integral part of the green movement.

“People were telling us they wanted to peacefully coexist,” he says. This influenced their marketing strategy, which consistently places the Wal-Mart customer in the environment—not detached from it.

Chandler earned his BA in public relations from BYU in 1994 and an MBA from the Marriott School in 1996. He says his BYU education has been essential to this latest opportunity. “It was invaluable,” he says. “The values taught here are that business can be used for a higher purpose—BYU was central to my preparation for this.”

Published by the Marriott School at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. Copyright 2012 by Brigham Young University. All rights reserved. All communications should be sent to Marriott Alumni Magazine, 490 Tanner Building, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah 84602. Email: marriottmag@byu.edu. Telephone: (801) 422-5083. Fax: (801) 422-0501. The views expressed are those of the various authors and not necessarily the Marriott School. Change your mailing address here.