Unique Approaches to Giving
At Beloit College, Matt Laszlo’92 has turned his business acumen into a teaching legacy, mentoring students to tackle real-world challenges. From marketing classes to athletics broadcasts, he’s redefining what it means to give back as an alumnus.
Matt Laszlo’92 teaches two of the most popular classes on campus. Marketing Principles and Strategy is a new class created for the School of Business’s new marketing minor, which he is teaching for only the second time this fall. Navigating Your Career, which he pivoted online mid-semester the first time he taught it in spring 2020, has been on rotation every semester since.
Laszlo became the college’s first Executive-in-Residence four years ago, and his generosity and optimism for the college’s future have been making an impact on students and campus culture ever since. He gets alumni off the sidelines, engaged, and committed to the road ahead.
Reaching Out
Before returning to Beloit as a professor, Laszlo was The Clorox Company’s senior vice president and chief customer officer for 14 years. But he started to feel a calling to do something different.
“I realized two things,” says Laszlo. “One: I felt a strong desire to make more of a personal impact with more individuals in a one-on-one way. As an executive committee member of a big publicly-traded company, it’s hard to experience that consistently. Two: If I was telling a story to inspire a group, or remembering things that inspired me, usually it was experiences from my time as a student at Beloit that were my most compelling stories.”
Those college experiences included playing on the football and baseball teams, broadcasting men’s and women’s basketball games on WBCR, and holding leadership positions as an orientation leader and a resident assistant.
“You definitely experience stuff that teaches you how to deal with conflict, how to lead, and how to meet people where they are and support them,” he says. “Anytime you’re on a team, you deal with a lot of different situations, and all of those experiences were foundational in shaping my leadership style.”
Laszlo took a leap by reaching out to the college’s Advancement team, first returning as a business management class guest lecturer and later offering to help Beloit students land competitive Clorox internships. After he left the company in 2019 to work as a consultant and executive coach for companies like Adidas and Duluth Trading Company, he still felt something was missing. When a team of faculty and Advancement staff, along with former trustee Chuck McQuaid, came up with the idea for a new residency in the economics department, they asked him if he would like to teach a class.
“I said to them, ‘That would be an incredible challenge because I haven’t done anything like that,’” Laszlo says. “How in the world can I be interesting and insightful, and maintain that throughout a semester? What would I want to talk about? That was an interesting challenge to tackle, and that’s what made me do it.”
Empowering Students
Credit: Benjamin SuterAs it turns out, Laszlo was a natural. His marketing class, taught in one of the largest classrooms in the Sanger Center for the Sciences, has an enrollment of 35 students from a wide range of majors, countries, and classes. His engaging lessons encourage frequent participation and small-group work, and students participate with enthusiasm in his classes. He encourages those who don’t talk as much, sometimes creating goofy slides with a photo of the quiet student’s face, accompanied by a correct answer or a question for them to pose to the class. Not only is his classroom joyful, with unexpected twists and his deadpan humor, but you can sense the importance he places on including everyone’s opinions.
Deepakshi Bhardwaj’22, an economics and international relations major, took one of Laszlo’s classes her senior year. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in data and AI policy at the India Institute of Technology in Delhi.
“He has a way of making people feel heard and comfortable in his presence,” Bhardwaj says. “He did that when my parents were visiting for graduation. I had a friend whose parents didn’t speak English, and my dad didn’t speak English, but Matt had a conversation with them. He’s kind and makes sure everyone is included. You feel encouraged to speak up and [know] you’ll be heard. I learned from him that inclusion is a practice; it’s a deliberate choice you make, and he made it every day.”
Laszlo’s encouragement extended beyond the classroom, Bhardwaj says. His door was always open, and he made the time to give advice on class projects or internships. He empowered her to believe in her own abilities. His mentorship continued after graduation and her move back home two years ago.
“Matt took the time to understand what was going on and he reassured me of myself,” she says. “That didn’t end when I graduated. He still found time to talk and to make sure that what he taught was being used in real life.”
Credit: Nicholas Mischler’14
Katie Arnold’25, a transfer student in the economics department, has taken as many classes as she can with Laszlo. She echoes that his support has extended outside of class, including help with her internship at Kerry Ingredients & Flavours in Beloit.
“He’s helped me with so many different things, [but] especially with work presentations,” Arnold says. “I’ve called on him for help when I’ve had two heavy-stakes presentations at work, since he’s a master at giving them. He gave me tips and tricks and even called me outside of class to take the time to walk through it with me. He genuinely cares about each and every one of his students, and he is an amazing asset to the college.”
Sounding Board
Laszlo uses his industry experiences to connect his courses to the real world. He assigns small groups to market campus events, performances, and athletics, teaching them how to increase their perceived value. In Navigating Your Career, he asks students to help market the college to prospective students by showing them how to develop detailed strategic plans that may attract athletes and transfer students.
Afterward, his students develop professional presentations to give to senior staff, including President Eric Boynton. Laszlo’s work with students has led to the college creating a campus group of faculty and staff members who plan and promote events, and enhancing the way personas are being used in college marketing strategies.
He also serves as a marketing consultant and executive coach and as a mentor for Impact Beloit Fellows, students who have year-long internships with local companies.
“I get a project that I know the students live [and breathe], and on top of that, something where the college can essentially learn from itself,” says Laszlo. “We’ve had nice support from faculty and staff to see some of the presentations and get ideas. It becomes in some ways a focus group. [Students] go from listening and taking notes to being actively invested and passionate because the project is real.”
He is also advising Beloit’s new Marketing Club. Laszlo ran into another alum — Ken Muth’91 — during halftime at the Homecoming game, which led to a discussion about one of Muth’s companies, Juiced!, a cold-pressed juice company. Within a week, Muth and Laszlo identified some unique business challenges Juiced! is facing and enlisted the Marketing Club to help.
“Matt’s guidance has been key,” says Taman Azad’27, a data science and business economics major in the club. “His years of industry experience have pointed us in the right direction, and he’s open to all our ideas, however bad they are, which makes the whole process even more exciting. We’re really looking forward to potentially visiting Ken and the Juiced! team’s manufacturing plants and partner retail stores to conduct some in-person market research.”
“Ken’s enthusiasm for the direction the college is heading led us to cook up the idea of a project that can help his team while also providing real-world experience for students,” Laszlo explains. “Ken was immediately all in, and has been an exceptional alumni partner in scoping work for the students. His support is a great example of how more of us alumni can experience Beloit College in deeply satisfying ways.”
Broadcasting Community
Credit: Scott Zibell
Laszlo’s gift of gab and play-by-play experiences as an undergraduate have been tapped since he returned to Beloit. As the unofficial livestream broadcaster of home football and baseball games, he’s found a way to reach a broader audience — mainly athletes’ families — to bring humor to games and highlight the college in new and exciting ways. (His live broadcasts and an archive of recent recordings can be found on the athletics website.)
“I know the student-athletes and their families [who often] can’t be here would love to see [the game], so I want it to be an entertaining, happy experience for them, no matter what the result on the field is,” he says. “The other thing that I’m trying to do is an infomercial for the college. I really push myself to have a wide variety of guests on the air while we’re calling the game.”
The already long list is growing, from President Boynton to Athletic Director Dave DeGeorge’89 to student body presidents and athletes from other sports. One of his recent favorites was a baseball game with religious studies and critical identity studies professor Sonya Maria Johnson, who didn’t know much about the sport. They discussed religion in Cuba, one of Johnson’s scholarly interests, and the students on the team who were in her classes. Laszlo found the conversation to be “funny, insightful, and absolutely delightful.”
While on air, he gets to know faculty and staff he doesn’t otherwise interact with often. He also supports his own students. He joked at the Homecoming game that it would be easier to point out which Bucs weren’t in one of his classes. Although his knowledge of the game takes center stage during his broadcasts, so does his affinity for his students, whom he has gotten to know on and off the field.
Investments with Impact
Credit: Benjamin SuterOne such student is José Guillen’24, who took Laszlo’s marketing class last semester and decided to encourage teammates to join him on the cast of the spring play. When Laszlo heard that football coach Ted Soenksen wanted to purchase tickets for the entire team to attend and support their teammates, but didn’t have enough money in the football budget, Laszlo stepped in, purchasing more than enough for the team, allowing many players to see the play multiple times.
That’s just one example of how Laszlo has given to the college financially while also investing in specific experiences that brighten the futures of students. Although he believes performing is “developmental and rewarding,” he says he benefited most from his contribution to the theatre department.
“José reaching out to the theatre folks to hang out and work out — I get choked up because that’s beautiful and it’s what this place is about and should be about: coming together, learning from one another, enjoying each other’s passions, and building mutual respect.”
Laszlo’s myriad ways of giving back to the college have already seen exponential growth, but his work is far from over. He hopes to inspire other alumni to step up to the plate, find areas of the college they cherish, contribute their expertise, time, and, passion, and watch the benefits ripple throughout campus.
