RIT Alums Brendan and Bianca Shah Deliver Saunders College 2023 Favatas Lecture

Brother and sister Brendan '15 (computer science and computational math) and Bianca Shah '15 (management), CEOs at International Tea Importers Inc., were featured speakers at Saunders College of Business 2023 Favatas Lecture Series, September 26, 2023. Their keynote speech was titled "From Daddy Issues to Boss Vibes: Turbulence in Transforming a Tea Legacy.” View a recording and event photos online!

Brendan and Bianca joined the family business when they were fresh out of college. Then, when their father died suddenly in 2016, they were thrust into the C-suite and took over managing the company. They found that their father ran the business idiosyncratically: for example, there was no formal inventory management tracking system—what there was, was in their father’s head.

So, the Shahs had to reorganize International Tea Importers Inc. from the ground up. There were lots of challenges as there was much they didn’t know about running a business. 

Their presentation covered the hard-earned lessons they’ve learned about entrepreneurship. By way of introduction, they offered the “Eisenhower matrix”: there are two kinds of problems, urgent ones and important ones; the urgent ones are never important, and the important ones are never urgent.

The key points and lessons:

Urgent challenges - learning a lot fast

• Didn’t know much about running a business
• Became go-to people for tea knowledge
• Tasting, matching blends, negotiating
• Accounting, bookkeeping, finance

Important challenges - problems needed fixing

• No inventory management system in place
• Managing a team of people older than they are
• Changing the minds of legacy employees
• Dealing with legacy customer and vendor balances

Fake it till you make it - developing skills (under pressure)

• Be honest about what you don’t know but learn eagerly
• Ask dumb questions (if you’re uncomfortable asking dumb questions, Google until you make it)
• Be confident in the things you do well
• Work with people that make you better

Taking initiative - be in charge

• Need to keep the legacy of leading the tea industry
• Need to learn as much about tea as we can; meet and communicate with experts
• Make hard decisions
• Resilience in times of distress (We have made so many mistakes!)

Lessons - entrepreneurship

• Figure out what you want in life and work
• Take care of yourself
• Find the right people
• Create a vision for what you want to accomplish
• Clearly communicate your ideas, expectations
• Build a world around you that allows you to do what you love

The Favatas Lecture Series was established by Louise Woerner and Don Kollmorgen, who named the annual event after their godson and Saunders graduate, Dionisios Favatas ’01 (international business), also a contributor to the endowment—which was established to promote a relationship between recent RIT-employed graduates who would discuss the real world of business to RIT students. Woerner is the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of HCR, Inc., and the 1989 winner of the Herbert W. Vanden Brul Entrepreneurial Award from the Saunders College of Business. Kollmorgen is a long-time consultant to the health insurance industry, and Favatas works as head of identity and marketing clouds at Tredence Inc. Learn more about upcoming events by visiting the Saunders events calendar.