FAYETTEVILLE -- Eli Jones isn't afraid of risk.
As dean of the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas, that fearlessness helps Jones support students, faculty and local businesses.
His extensive experience as a sales and marketing leader for three Fortune 100 companies has allowed him to leverage business connections to help build educational centers, form curricula and lead business colleges of two flagship universities.
"Most people have one career or another and are reasonable at their job," says Mike Martin, former Louisiana State University chancellor and current chancellor of the Colorado State University system. "To have had a very successful career in the private sector and make a midlife pivot to become an equally successful academic is impressive. Jones was capable and willing to work his way up in both instances, and succeed."
ONE SPOT AT A TIME
In Jones' family, owning a business was a shared responsibility. When they had a dry cleaning business, Jones worked on stains too. When they had a farm, he built fences. When they had a convenience store, he pumped gas.
It showed Jones firsthand that entrepreneurship meant doing tough jobs and taking chances.
"Watching my dad take calculated risks as a small-business owner, for me, means I'm not as risk averse," Jones says. "Taking calculated risks is very important ... being exposed to that at an early age and into my adulthood shaped some of my values."
Jones studied journalism at Texas A&M University and enjoyed weekends as a radio DJ. He longed to break into a major market radio station and spent years sending recordings of his work to a colleague for feedback. The improvement helped him land a job at KMJQ-FM, 102.1, in Houston, where he met Janet Jackson, Prince and Luther Vandross and was master of ceremonies at Houston Astrodome concerts.
It was at the radio station that Jones first met Fern Walker, a beautiful singer who did not like Jones' radio persona.
"Once he got out of character, he was being a regular person and I remember saying to him, 'Wow, this Eli Adams character thing I really don't like, but I think I can really grow to like Eli Jones,'" Fern Jones says. "The wall was let down."
They spent their first evening talking about music and singing until daybreak, and were married in 1983.
Jones continued developing his communications skills by selling want ads in The Eagle newspaper. When he became top salesman, he was placed on a team that handled display ads for retail businesses. It opened his eyes to other business opportunities, and he decided to apply to the business college.
COMPANY MAN
While getting a master's degree in business administration, Jones continued to work at the radio station. He also managed a dog breeding business and formed Music Man Productions, a DJ company that entertained at college parties.
The jobs supported his family while he grew in reputation and influence at Texas A&M.
Jones earned particular attention from professor Charles Futrell, who thought that he'd make an excellent professor and urged him to get a doctoral degree and teach. But with a young family to care for, Jones took a marketing job with Quaker Oats instead.
Those early days were spent calling individual supermarkets to ensure that Quaker Oats products were being distributed, shelved and displayed appropriately. Before long, he was in major accounts and took hold of key account selling.
From there, Jones moved into sales planning and was transferred to Florida to manage district managers and key accounts salesmen in Florida, North Carolina and South Carolina. Having recently been a key account salesman, Jones coached them on ways to manage their operations with supermarket chains Publix, Winn-Dixie and Food Lion.
Extending expertise tactfully often made him a liaison between brand managers and salesmen. He helped brand managers develop promotions to catch the attention of salesmen and coached Quaker Oats salesmen on presentation.
As a key account executive, Jones successfully navigated the landmines of the sales world, and for it was named among the top 20 salesmen to handle the top 25 Quaker Oats accounts, where he took on Bi-Lo and Harris Teeter supermarkets.
When Nabisco knocked on his door with a challenge, Jones was intrigued.
Nabisco had 86 sales teams ranked by sales volume. As a new sales manager, he would be responsible for turning around the team that placed last.
Within a year, Jones took sales underdogs and turned them into sales stars. The team placed second in sales volume, was moved to Houston by request and continued to be the Team of the Year for a couple of years running.
Jones realized what he enjoyed most -- training and leading -- had elements of teaching. Perhaps Futrell was right.
SALES SCHOLAR
Jones applied to the doctoral program at Texas A&M and became a zone sales manager at Frito-Lay Inc. He went about coordinating district managers, salesmen and distribution centers thinking there was no way he'd get into the doctoral program on the first try.
But program leaders were impressed.
"As soon as I met him, I could see he had a real spark of energy and enthusiasm and authenticity, a very special person," says Paul Busch, professor of marketing at Texas A&M and Jones' dissertation chairman. "The fact that he had as much industry experience made him an attractive candidate for pursuing a Ph.D. in business."
The rapport he'd established years earlier was intact, and he was welcomed back with open arms. Jones would earn teaching awards for campus and university levels, proving that reputation for excellence extended to students too.
He took a chance to stay involved with Frito-Lay by visiting with its president, Lloyd Ward, to let him know how the company could benefit from the research findings of his dissertation.
Framing it as an investment opportunity helped Jones secure a grant and relevant industry data, two things that made his work relevant to be published.
"He had a lot of talent for building relationships and building bridges between the university and the business community," Busch says. "Eli was able to go out and get substantial funding for his research, which is not all that common in the business college. Often there's no external funding for a dissertation and he did that on his own."
As a doctoral student and father of four, Jones didn't waste time. He broke the program's record for least amount of time to complete a doctorate -- three years and nine months, with some help along the way.
"He could not have accomplished the thing he was able to accomplish without the support of me and the children," Fern Jones says. "Everyone had to be on the same page. To move at such a pace and become successful so quickly would be impossible without the support of the team."
Graduation brought many offers, but the University of Houston remained appealing. Aside from it being home, the offer seemed made for him -- the school needed someone to build a center for sales.
BRIDGE TO BUSINESS
In 1997, Jones joined the University of Houston as an assistant professor and co-director of the Program for Excellence in Selling. Teaching was second nature by now. Research was his learning curve, but it didn't take long for him to excel there, either.
In the first decade of his teaching experience, Jones wrote two books and was published 27 times, including in the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Business Research, Biz Ed and Selling Power.
Obtaining that gold standard of scholarly achievement was just the start.
Jones created a curriculum of six courses in professional sales management that could be taken by students of all majors, secured donations to add a behavioral laboratory, a customer relationship management laboratory and permanent staff. Jones managed a self-generated budget, but his efforts resulted in the equivalent of a $10 million endowment.
His dedication to constant improvement of the program for more than a decade made him executive director of the center and founding director of the Sales Excellence Institute, a program within it. It also led to an appointment as associate dean for executive education programs in the C.T. Bauer College of Business, where in his final year at Houston he partnered with companies to provide corporate education.
Associate deans often get offers from other universities. When Louisiana State University came calling, the timing was right. The Jones children were grown and Eli Jones was looking for something new.
As dean and the E.J. Ourso Distinguished Professor of Business, Jones continued to make time for students, especially through leading dissertation committees.
"His teaching style is nice because it's also personal," says Stephanie Mingus, an LSU doctoral student. "Everything is a teaching moment ... when I'm 60, he'll still be teaching me."
Along with mentoring, a re-accreditation process, growing programs and reworking the college budget, Jones raised $52 million to build a Business Education Complex during the most difficult economic period in recent history.
"Eli was the primary salesman," says Martin, then the LSU chancellor. "It got done because he was relentlessly committed to building bridges with people who could finance it.
"During the recession, there was skepticism, but he worked hard because he knew that the institution needed it. He left a big legacy."
TWO MORE RELEASES
Research and development remained constant in Jones' years as dean, which have seen consistent publication and two more book releases.
"Being a dean at a major flagship university, that job in itself is extremely demanding," Busch of Texas A&M says. "To perform it as well as he has as dean and stay close as he has to scholarship and professorial role is, I think, an amazing accomplishment."
That sort of balance is rare, and valued.
"Some academics get a bad rap for researching and not staying relevant to the business world," Mingus says. "But he's very involved ... with boards of multiple businesses. When he taught a master's course, students were riveted [because] he was giving real-life examples."
While he was moving faculty into the complex at LSU, University of Arkansas leaders called Jones on the search for a new Walton dean. Initially he was too overwhelmed to consider it, but one visit changed his mind.
"I agreed to come and take a look at the campus and speak to the faculty ... and I was wowed," Jones says. "It's amazing, the companies that surround this university ... and all the supplier companies .... When I wrapped my mind around what's here, it came together for me."
That it was in the top 30 of U.S. business colleges, had a top 10 accounting school, a highly ranked supply chain department and the foremost information systems researcher in the world was nice, but he was impressed that the number of volunteers outnumbered hired faculty.
Jones knew he could do great things here.
As dean of the Walton College of Business since 2012, Jones has added an associate dean for executive education and formed a faculty leadership team and a number of committees to elevate the school's priorities of curriculum and educational offerings, international partnerships, fundraising, outreach centers and business partnerships.
The shift Jones put in place has been instrumental in forming partnerships with universities in Brazil, China and Russia, managing a $37 million annual operating budget and $127 million endowment and exceeding a fundraising campaign goal by more than $4 million.
The latest addition, an online general business degree, begins this fall. A School of Global Retail Operations and Innovations will arrive soon.
For the man who bridges industry and academia, Northwest Arkansas turned out to be just right.
"I can empathize with the folks who are selling to Wal-Mart, Tyson, J.B. Hunt, from a vendor or manufacturer perspective," he says. "I was a part of that whole supply chain ... I feel like this is home in that way."
High Profile on 08/10/2014