Executive Insider: Dan Bumblauskas

While the career of Dan Bumblauskas has taken him to multiple states in the U.S. and teaching opportunities in China and Ireland, his latest role landed him in Springfield, where he leads the Breech School of Business at Drury University.

Most recently serving as executive director for workforce and economic development and associate dean of the College of Business and Professional Studies at Missouri Western State University, Bumblauskas came to Drury in June. He succeeded SRC Holdings Corp. CEO Jack Stack, who was appointed to a six-month term as interim dean of the Breech school.

Prior to his arrival on campus, Bumblauskas says he was closing out several projects at MWSU in St. Joseph, including its new 20,000-square-foot workforce development building, dubbed the Houlne Center for Convergent Technology. The building features multiple bays dedicated to areas such as manufacturing technology, construction, information technology and cyberscience.

“I was kind of in a very, very hectic transitory period in June and July, getting into Drury over the summer months,” Bumblauskas says, noting he moved with his wife, Kendra, and their four children, ages 10-16.

Prior to serving roughly one year at MWSU, he worked a decade at the University of Northern Iowa, where his roles included MBA coordinator and associate professor of management. He has also been a visiting or adjunct professor at the University of Missouri, University of Washington and Sichuan University in China, and has led study abroad programs at Sant’Anna Institute in Italy and Trinity College Dublin. His resume also includes work in private industry, he says, noting he currently serves as senior vice president of PFC Services Inc., a Marietta, Georgia-based consultancy owned by his father, Paul.

“I have a lot of experience in industry and working with business partners on consulting projects, student-led experiential projects, so a lot of client projects,” Bumblauskas says. “I do a lot of work in the area of operations and supply chain management and specifically Six Sigma certifications.”

Six Sigma is a quality control certification that attempts to educate people on analyzing processes and outcomes to reduce waste and decrease defects, according to Investopedia. Bumblauskas says he plans to bring Six Sigma certification training to Drury in the spring.

“It gives the students those skillsets to be able to make a difference and an impact in their organizations, whether for-profit or not-for-profit,” he says. “And then obviously it benefits the businesses as well with those skills.”

In 2003, Bumblauskas received a bachelor’s in industrial engineering and economics from Iowa State University.

“I bring a lot of that industry engineering, business management to the table,” he says, noting he also earned a master’s degree and doctorate at ISU. “It’s not uncommon for industrial engineers to find their way to the business school because that’s one of those engineering management types of disciplines where we look at operations and process improvement.”

Another newcomer to Drury’s campus is its 19th president, Jeff Frederick, who also began his new job in June. While Frederick wasn’t directly involved in the hiring of Bumblauskas, he said the new Breech school dean understands the relationship between a great university and the local business community.

“Dan gets that we need to be involved in the community and not just for the relationship for internships and helping students get their first job, but to make sure that we have a pulse on the business community so that everything we’re doing in the classroom is indicative of what’s really happening out in the real world,” Frederick says.

Frederick says he isn’t tasking Bumblauskas with goals so early in his new position, noting as a fellow newcomer, time is needed “to get our feet wet.”

“He needs to continue to spend time with our students, needs to continue to connect with the faculty,” Frederick says. “We’ll figure out what’s going to happen next in terms of some specific assignments. But I think his goals right now are to be community engaged, to pursue innovation in every way that it can be.”

Mandy Albrecht, director with Brailsford & Dunlavey, a Washington, D.C.-based development advisory and program management firm, worked with Bumblauskas at MWSU, where she served as dean of the College of Business & Professional Studies.

She says Bumblauskas wore multiple hats at the university and frequently connected with various stakeholders involved in the convergent technology building project.

“His really big strength is that he’s great at building relationships,” Albrecht says, noting his skill at connecting with people in a variety of environments, such as city hall, a country club or a manufacturing facility. “He really was able to make connections quickly and not just connections about his work, but personal connections. He made friends easily and he would use that to help his work.”

Bumblauskas leads a staff of 15 at the business school, which was established in 1957 and has roughly 360 undergraduate students – an enrollment number he says has been stable. Drury started the semester with an estimated 1,390 undergraduate students enrolled on campus, according to past reporting.

“Of all the schools I’ve been at, it’s been pretty stable to moderate growth just because it tends to be a little bit more recession proof of disciplines in terms of job market and labor force,” he says of business school enrollment, adding Drury is his first private school employer.

Bumblauskas made a shift from private industry to higher education employment, starting in 2010, when he became an assistant teaching professor at MU. Today, he sees it was an opportunity that moved him forward professionally.

“I think that was one of those risks you talk about with students. You read all these articles and stories about people taking risks in their careers and these decisions to start companies entrepreneurially,” he says. “For me, that was a big leap of faith. As I talked to headhunters and exec recruiters over the years later, they say, ‘Oh yeah, it’s really tough to get people to come back to industry once they have that autonomy and academic freedom of being a faculty member at a university.’”

While Bumblauskas was involved in hiring three new faculty members shortly after starting his new job, he’s also been active in the Breech school’s reaccreditation process with the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.

“We have a report due Jan. 1 and a site visit in March,” he says. “We’ll have a peer review team on-site in March, essentially picking apart our business school to give us recommendations for how to improve. So, it’s kind of an intense process for this academic year to go through. That’s been kind of on the forefront of all of what I’ve been doing since the semester started.”