He didn’t anticipate that help coming from college students, but Davis was delighted at his association with Montreat College MBA candidates Michael DeAngelo Hardimon, Liz Griffith, and Tracey McCrain. “It was very obvious from the outset,” said Davis of the Montreat trio, “that the team had a very firm grasp of marketing best practices and used their knowledge to very precisely identify the weakness in my business.” Montreat College partners with the North Carolina Small Business and Technology Development Center, a service that provides comprehensive support to business owners and entrepreneurs, to match student teams with businesses ready to tap into new markets for growth; the SBTDC introduced Davis to the Montreat students. The team from Montreat, Davis said, “presented not only great solutions to the problems that [we] identified but did so in a logical way that allows one step to build on the progress of the previous step.” The projects which the Montreat Graduate program and the SBTDC arrange provide the students, who are also often working professionals, with valuable experience to apply the business principles they have learned in the classroom. As their final project in the two-year curriculum, the students completed three months of in-depth market analysis and provided specific marketing plans to help Davis reach his goals. Davis enjoyed the process as well as the results: “It was very mentally stimulating for me to be able to discuss in such detail what has been a personal dream of mine.”