How this entrepreneur blended education with business smarts — Cliff Oxford

Cliff Oxford is a serial entrepreneur and educating pioneer with decades of experience in growing businesses and helping leaders build their plans for success. Today he joins host Lee Heisman, a x9 entrepreneur, renowned speaker, and elite business coach from Atlanta, Georgia, on the premier episode of ASBN’s The Roadmap, to tell his story and share insights into management and strategy.

Oxford started his first company, STI Knowledge, one of the first outsourcing and company support platforms, after working as the Regional Vice President of Technology at UPS for ten years. He led his new company for almost a decade, providing customer relationship management expertise, before deciding to sell his brand after seeing the beta version of Salesforce, which he knew his business couldn’t compete with.

After selling his company, Oxford worked as an educator at Emory. Finding it peculiar that the business school he taught at didn’t actually invite business leaders to educate their students, he was inspired to create his own version which did exactly that, leading him to found the Oxford Center for Entrepreneurs. The organization brought business leaders, subject matter experts and academics together to teach students principles for professional success. One of the key areas of study was how to create successful exit strategies that maximized returns for both staff and management. However, he decided to sell the center to Forbes after spending ten years at the helm, hoping the media company would be able to expand it to a much broader platform.

His next journey came from luxury car company Porsche. The famous automotive brand had been seeking his advice on how to work with entrepreneurs, a demographic which was a primary consumer for the company. Oxford was able to pull in business leaders from multiple industries for his employer through his network and knowledge of how successful people think.

Oxford’s current project is CliffCo, an international think tank which seeks to develop the professional careers of its members by focusing on their technical abilities, people skills and emotional regulation. However, he is happy to note that this new platform will be renamed to ThinkOxford, since many of his students and colleagues still reference the name of his original center. He hopes that his students, old and new, will continue learning how they can manage themselves, which, in turn, will help them manage their businesses.