Michele Masterfano

Michele Masterfano is a Associate Clinical Professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She teaches strategy and entrepreneurship to both undergraduate and MBA students. She also teaches online for Saint Leo University, where her courses cover marketing topics such as social media marketing and consumer behavior. Many of the online students at Saint Leo are active or retired military.

Her early career found her at AT&T, where she managed organizations in marketing, sales, and strategy and business planning. She also worked in the consulting division, where she worked on projects for United Airlines, and several other large corporations; she began her tenure in what was then called the Bell System within Bell Laboratories as a Member of Technical Staff in a systems engineering organization. After leaving AT&T in 1998, she began consulting independently, working with Fortune 500 companies until she began focusing on entrepreneurial start-ups. She started working with these firms in developing marketing plans, but soon shifted her focus to business planning. She was responsible for writing or refining dozens of business plans for startup companies, virtually all of which were focused on raising outside financing, both debt and equity.

Michele had started teaching part-time at some of the universities in the greater Philadelphia area in 1999 and quickly fell in love with it. This prompted her to obtain her doctorate so she could teach full-time, and thus began her career at Drexel University.

She holds a Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA) from Argosy University Sarasota, an M.S. in Management Science from Lehigh University, and a B.A. in Liberal Arts from Pennsylvania State University. She blogs at www.masterfano.com/blog.