Reid Tileston, an adjunct professor at the BYU Marriott School of Business, first became a business owner at age 16 when he took over his brother’s small airport-shuttle business. The experience helped Tileston begin developing an appreciation for entrepreneurship through acquisition that has directed his career ever since.
Despite having experience running a business, Tileston didn’t immediately pursue a career in entrepreneurship. Instead, he earned his bachelors’ degree in economics from the University of California, Berkely—following in the footsteps of his grandmother, who studied economics at the same university and taught him the subject as a child—and started work in the finance industry.
After a short time in the field, Tileston felt there was more he could do to maximize his career. A conversation he had with two private equity investors reminded Tileston of the opportunity he’d had to take over his brother’s business, sparking his decision to pursue business ownership. “I learned at the tender age of 16 that it’s a lot easier to take something that already works and apply the entrepreneurial mindset than it is to build something from scratch,” he shares. Tileston decided to focus his entrepreneurial career on buying existing companies and improving their business models to increase profits and efficiency.
During his work in entrepreneurship and small business, Tileston has owned and invested in several companies and served on the board of several others in a range of industries. Regardless of the business sector, Tileston loves his work because he feels it allows him to serve others.
Once, during his time leading an industrial services company, Tileston mentored an employee who, though he had valuable leadership skills and extensive technical experience, had lost his driver’s license for operating while intoxicated. Tileston values the chance he had to mentor this individual through the recovery process, helping him not only regain his driver’s license but also go a step further to earn his commercial driver’s license (which, Tileston explains, would significantly impact this individual’s opportunities for career advancement).
Tileston has also found that entrepreneurship brings him personal fulfillment because it allows him to build an environment that’s tailored to his personal values. “Running businesses allows people to answer to what is most important to them, what is most intrinsic to them, and to what they think has the biggest impact on the world around them,” he says. “That’s why being a business owner is so powerful.”
Tileston’s decision to pursue a PhD came several years into his career, when he was earning his MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and working as a teaching assistant for the school's first entrepreneurship through acquisition class. “From an academic standpoint, I saw a gap in the literature that I could add to, given my practitioner experience and my network that I’d developed over the years,” he explains. After earning his MBA, Tileston began his PhD in management with an emphasis in entrepreneurship through acquisition at Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management; he will complete the program in 2026.
While Tileston teaches courses at the Weatherhead School and gives guest lectures at Chicago Booth, he is excited to be an instructor at BYU Marriott’s Rollins Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology because of what he sees in his students. “They have a unique entrepreneurial mindset and they’re action oriented,” Tileston explains. “They are willing to go out there and just do hard work.” He looks forward to teaching a section of Entrepreneurship 490: Topics in Entrepreneurial Management about entrepreneurship through acquisition in the winter 2025 semester.
Tileston believes that his central responsibility as a professor isn’t just to lecture but to create a classroom environment where students can form meaningful relationships. “I’m here to teach people how to open franchises, how to buy main street business, and see where that takes them. With that platform, the sky is the limit,” he says, adding, “It’s important for students to realize, at least in my class, that they’re going to get the most benefit from their classmates. So, I encourage people to look next to them, not always in front of them, for the utility in class.”
This classroom focus is meant to help Tileston’s students invest in what he believes brings happiness—relationships. After all, that’s why Tileston loves small business. Whether he’s investing in a new company, teaching a class, or taking the time to mentor an employee, he feels it all ties back to people. He says, “At the end of the day, having a mindset of service and of helping other people is what [life’s] all about.”
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Written by Katie Brimhall