The Georgia Institute of Technology – Scheller College of Business recently profiled business leader Bobby Henebry, ME 2003, MBA 2006, whose successful career began with a guest lecture in an MBA class at Scheller.
Henebry is a native Atlantan whose hard work in secondary school earned him a high rank in his graduating class. After high school, he enrolled at the Georgia Institute of Technology, working towards an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering. Still unsure of his career path after graduation, Henebry chose to pursue a full-time MBA. “…I thought enrolling in the business school was a good idea because I was still in an academic mode,” Henebry said. “I also thought that an MBA would give me more degrees of freedom in my career.”
Henebry began working towards an MBA with an entrepreneurship focus, working in the meantime as a graduate research assistant for the Georgia Tech Research Corporation’s Office of Technology Licensing.
Right before graduation in 2006, a guest lecturer spoke in one of Henebry’s MBA classes: Garnett Keith, IE 1957, who is today the chair and CEO of SeaBridge Investment Advisors in Summit, New Jersey. After receiving an undergraduate degree from Georgia Tech, Keith earned an MBA at Harvard Business school and served as chief investment officer at Prudential for several years. During his lecture, Keith presented the opportunity for a current student to join his small investment firm, which Henebry was happy to pursue.
Although Henebry took the job initially to “get some personal mentoring from a…top-notch executive”, the opportunity turned into something greater- now nine years since Keith’s lecture, Henebry serves as the vice president of research at the expanding Atlanta office of SeaBridge.
Henebry’s background in entrepreneurship prepared him well for his duties, which today include monitoring private equities and hedge funds, asset location and business development. “SeaBridge has turned out to be a wonderful learning experience as well as a platform for me to apply some entrepreneurial lessons in growing a business that serves our clients well- the building blocks of which I learned through the MBA program at Tech,” Henebry commented.