An entrepreneur goes back to business school

Philipp Buhr was not the classic masters in management student, who arrives hot from an undergraduate degree, often headed for a corporate career. By the time he reached Università Bocconi in Milan for his MiM, Buhr had started work, was already determined to be an entrepreneur, and had launched a business.

His first taste of success — and failure — as an entrepreneur came while studying a bachelors degree in international business administration at WHU-Otto Beisheim School of Management in western Germany. Buhr, who is German, had co-founded a business with his brother, selling jewellery from China and eastern Europe using an early form of social media influencer marketing.

It did not last. “I found myself at the end of my studies not having a business any more, but having learnt that this is amazing fun and I still have a lot to learn,” he says. “ . . . I didn’t want to make these costly mistakes again, building up the company just to ruin it over a couple of bad decisions.”

The business was early to use social media and influencer marketing in the space but margins were eroded when bigger brands moved in.

He began looking for “a job that would teach me how to run a company” and landed a role at Bertelsmann, the German conglomerate, as management associate to the then chief executive of financial services company Riverty, Frank Kebsch. The experience — including working with boards, helping to invest in start-ups and bidding for government contracts — was invaluable, he says.

But Buhr soon realised he was “sitting on the wrong side of the table” and wanted a business of his own. By 2018, he was at a crossroads: be unemployed and start researching and developing business opportunities, or study again while thinking about his next move.

Choosing the right next step was important to Buhr because, he says, being an entrepreneur is like driving on a “highway without any exits”. While it is fun, he says, if you feel like you are going in the wrong direction, it can make you feel “breathless” because “you’re on this road and you have just got to keep on driving at maximum speed”.

He opted to study while considering his next entrepreneurial opportunity. “You do learn by doing,” he says. “But I also love studying. I’m super-interested in the theories of business.”

Buhr was looking for “freedom” in his masters, both in his choice of topics — he was keen to study law and behavioural economics — and with his time, so he could work on his next move. “I wanted this balance of great people and still having a good environment where I could focus on thinking [about] what I would want to do after my masters degree and figure out what would truly fulfil me and bring me on a mission,” he says.

Università Bocconi in Milan fitted the bill. It was a competitive programme that gave him flexibility to focus on law and behavioural economics. It was selective, too, so Buhr knew he would be with “people who wanted the most out of it”. Milan was also more affordable than some cities, for example London, and the course was over two years.

That is not to say Buhr dallied: he finished all his courses in the first year, and used the second to focus on his masters thesis and look for business opportunities. By the time he had graduated in July 2020, Marta — a social care business he co-founded with his WHU roommate, Jan Hoffmann — was up and running.

The problem and opportunity had been in front of him all along. Buhr had seen his mother struggle to care for grandparents on both sides of the family, giving up work to meet their needs. He had already started looking into the problem as a possible business opportunity when the Covid pandemic hit in 2020 and he was spurred on by the troubles his family faced in securing live-in care.

“Seeing this made me realise, ‘Hey, all this time you had this problem right in front of your nose and you didn’t realise this could also be a business, and a business you could spend the next 20 years with and do something good,’” he says.

Marta recruits carers from Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, Croatia and the Czech Republic and matches them to families who want live-in care for their relatives in Germany. It is a matching platform — the carers share information about their skills and capabilities, while an algorithm matches them to a family’s requirements.

Buhr says that 2mn live-in caregivers move from east to west every year to work in private households.

Alongside finding carers, the team advises families on the benefits and downsides of live-in care and the subsidies available. Carers are vetted — for example, for their language and caring skills — and, besides helping them find work, Marta assists with tasks such as registering with local authorities and accessing insurance. Carers are self-employed and Marta takes a 25 per cent cut of their salary.

The knowledge and skills learnt on the MiM have helped while building the business. Bocconi’s economics courses “are among the most useful when becoming an entrepreneur”, according to Buhr. The finance courses — especially those related to mergers and acquisitions — proved “extremely useful”. And learning about behavioural economics “and realising that people are predictably irrational” was very important, he adds.

Buhr has applied lessons about bonus and incentive schemes to the business. He tries to set tangible incentives that are easy to understand and align the interests of the business and the worker.

The masters also brought a change in outlook for Buhr, who is now firmly locked into the “highway” of entrepreneurship. Milan showed him “how to enjoy life while working”, he says, noting that he enjoyed studying at a slower pace compared with his bachelors degree. “When you have a much slower pace, you can enjoy life more and you have more time to reflect on what you want to do and realise that all of this is a marathon, not a sprint.”