SALISBURY — Beginning next semester, Catawba College’s entrepreneur-in-residence, Pabel Delgado, will be teaching a customer discovery course full time for students looking to break into the business world.

Delgado lives in Kobe, Japan, but will soon be moving to Salisbury to be closer to not only Catawba, but also to the businesses that he and his students are going to be partnering with next year.

“What I hope to lend to the school and to the students is a lot of the hands-on stuff, very practical things. The customer discovery course is a piece of that,” Delgado said.

Delgado was born in New York City to parents who emigrated from Puerto Rico. After working to get his younger brothers through school, Delgado began his higher education as a biology major at Hunter College. He soon conducted research at New York’s Rockefeller University, Weill-Cornell Medical College and University of California Irvine. Delgado later traveled to Japan on a technical transfer project for what was supposed to be two years, but eventually transformed into 20 and he has been there ever since.

As he got himself settled in Japan, Delgado worked in the pharmaceutical sector before he formed his own company, Asterism Healthcare.

“I started out really small, white labeling, so making products for third parties, finding a customer that might be interested in the product, working with them to create a formulation, and then sending it to my customer under their label, under their brand name,” Delgado said. 

While Imran Chowdhury, the current dean of Catawba College Ralph W. Ketner School of Business, was at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, he asked Delgado to help him build a social entrepreneurship program for the school. There, he became their social-entrepreneur-in-residence and professor of the practice of social entrepreneurship in the business and management faculty. 

When Chowdhury relocated to Salisbury, he asked Delgado to come with him and do for Catawba what he did for Wheaton. The course will initially have 12 students collaborating with local boutique Ruthie Darling and possibly a Kannapolis biotech company. 

In the case of Ruthie Darling, Delgado’s students are going to take their customers and “approximate them” in order to get a “persona” or average customer and attempt to find them in the market. They will then devise 6-10 specific questions “to find out what motivates this kind of persona, this customer, where their pain points are, what needs are not met, what they would like to see in the marketplace. You do all that without mentioning Ruthie Darling or their product line at all,” Delgado explains. 

In the end, the students will “achieve a product market fit” and give Ruthie Darling “clarity” on their customers and where they stand in the market. 

“It demystifies business, it gets students out of their comfort zone, it gets them out of the classrooms, starts talking to people, starts developing an entrepreneurial mindset, and critical mindset as well,” Delgado said. 

One of the aspects that Delgado wants his students to take away from the class is “how entrepreneurship enters a community” and to absorb the benefits and complexities of that symbiotic relationship. 

Delgado aspires to expand the class size and the number of businesses who get involved as he gets used to Salisbury and his position. As he transitions into his new, full-time job, Delgado feels as if Catawba has given him the right tools for him and his class to succeed.

“It’s experimental, it’s new. I’m deeply grateful to my faculty colleagues for working with me and expanding what they think and who can be an instructor and cooperating and including me in the work. It’s wonderful,” Delgado said.