Story co-produced with Julian Vanderhoef.
For people that go onto “Shark Tank” to make a deal, most walk out empty-handed. That wasn’t the case for WCU graduate Garrett Ozar.
Ozar is a WCU entrepreneurship graduate and the CEO of Eterneva, a company that won $600,000 on “Shark Tank” in 2019, came to WCU to discuss his successes and failures and advised entrepreneurship students on Nov. 21.
Ozar graduated from WCU in 2009 and had many business ups and downs in his career but persevered to start and develop multiple successful businesses.
Watch the video to hear about Ozar and what he talked about at his presentation.
Dr. Lane Perry, an associate professor in the College of Business, heard about Ozar and found his story interesting. As an entrepreneurship professor, Perry was interested in the creation of Eterneva and other companies.
“I was a student here at Western in 2018, doing my master’s degree in entrepreneurship. There had been a couple of stories about him whenever he was on Shark Tank,” Perry said. “I’d heard a lot of good things about him and looked at his company and was like, this seems like a really interesting guy.”
Perry reached out to Ozar and started to talk with him after hearing more about him.
“Building social capital and generating wealth with your relationships in your network is absolutely free,” said Perry.
Perry built up his social capital with Ozar, talking to him for months. Perry first reached out just to get to know Ozar, sending articles to each other. Then, one day, Perry had the idea to bring Ozar to WCU. They planned out the presentation and the date in July.
“We scheduled this date well into the future, and the rest is history,” said Perry.
The UC theater was almost filled with students and faculty. Most of them were business major students, but there were multiple other majors there to listen to Ozar talk.
“It was really inspiring,” said junior Caroline Roddy. “It’s cool to see someone who graduated from here be super successful.”
Roddy is a Communication major but went to the presentation for a leadership class.
Perry brought Ozar to help reinforce what he was teaching in his entrepreneurship classes, bringing up the 50-mile radius expert theory.
“It’s a theory that says that when you get someone who comes in from 50 miles away of where learning is happening, and they make comments, and they endorse the learning as ideas, it validates the teaching in a way that could just never be validated locally alone,” Perry explained.
But just because Perry brought Ozar in to validate his teachings doesn’t mean he didn’t learn anything else from him.
“Something I’ve learned from him is how entrepreneurship is a microcosm of life, and the energy, the grit, the mindset, the effort to go all in is some sort of thing that you need to invest in life,” said Perry.
