About

Andrew Shinn bio image*The Craft of Entrepreneurship is no longer working with clients.  This bio page is being left up purely for historical purposes. Nothing published here represents the opinions or positions of the United States Government. 

TL;DR:
Andrew coaches entrepreneurs

Andrew Shinn is a consultant, professor, entrepreneur, researcher, and photographer. He teaches entrepreneurship at Fresno Pacific University, California State University, Fresno and Reedley College. Shinn earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration at Eastern Nazarene College in Boston and a Master’s Degree in Business Administration with a concentration in entrepreneurship from California State University, Fresno. He is working on a Doctorate in Business Administration at the Ecole de Management in Grenoble, France. His research focuses on business models in Social Entrepreneurship.

Shinn started his first business, a paper route, at the age of 10. His next business, at age 16, was a wholesale/retail firewood operation. Since then, he has worked in fast food, as a maid, as a forklift driver, as a journeyman crane rigger, as a handyman, as a military media relations specialist, as a photographer, as a business consultant and coach, as a photography teacher, and as an art dealer. As the owner of Shinn Photography, Inc., he has sold more than $2.5 million in photos. His current business, The Craft of Entrepreneurship, is a startup consultancy that advises business in industries ranging from organic egg farming to software development. He helps businesses with startup, growth, and change management.

Shinn’s interests include history, international relations, and technology. He once spent a summer in Hyderabad, India (where he hitchhiked alone across Andra Pradesh province); he taught English for a summer in Chengdu, China; he spent a summer in Central and Eastern Europe, and he has deployed with the US military on a diplomatic mission to Algeria, Tunisia, Cape Verde, Morocco, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Sao Tome, and Benin.

When Shinn teaches entrepreneurship, he helps students discover their passions and turn them into working businesses. He stresses to his students the role of hands-on and experiential learning, quick iteration, and market-based feasibility testing. He’s been a featured speaker for faculty at national conferences for entrepreneurship educators, and helped create a national curriculum-sharing web site for entrepreneurship educators.

Mr. Shinn is a reviewer for the academic journal Artivate (exploring arts and entrepreneurship), faculty member of the Collegiate Entrepreneurs’ Organization, a member of the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship, a member of the Community College Entrepreneurship Pathway at the Lyles Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and a Lifetime Member of Beta Gamma Sigma, the international business honors society.

He’s spoken to conferences of entrepreneurship educators and entrepreneurs about experimentation, lean startup practices, test businesses, and businesses in creativity and the arts.

You can find Andrew’s photography over at www.shinnphoto.com.