Hamner time: a deal junkie with an academic pedigree, Clay Hamner is carving a slice of the gourmet-food business.

• Author: Ellis, Marion A.
• Position: Q&A - Interview

Almost 40 years after coming to North Carolina to teach at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, Clay Hamner isn't slowing down. An author of eight textbooks who also taught at Michigan State, Northwestern and UNC Chapel Hill, he's bought or managed more than 200 companies in partnerships with investors including former U.S. Sen. Terry Sanford and his son, Terry Sanford Jr., Atlanta entrepreneur J.B. Fuqua and Chapel Hill patriarch Frank Kenan. Now, Hamner, 70, is chairman of Chapel Hill-based Southern Season Inc., a specialty-food store chain and online gift business. Annual revenue will hit $80 million once an Atlanta store opens in 2016, he predicts.

What was your most costly mistake?

I've had a lot of those. The most costly mistake was when we sold The Pantry in 1994. [Actor] Wayne Rogers and I took a third of what we made and bought Tenneco Oil Company's retail convenience-store chain, then called E-Z Serve. We changed the name to Swifty Serve.

Almost all of the convenience stores except The Pantry had gone bankrupt in the early 80s. That was due to oil prices changing. Gasoline was starting to be sold by Wal-Mart and Kroger and they were discounting gasoline to get you in their stores. We bought 100 bad stores to get 200 good stores. The company, Swifty Serve, declared bankruptcy in 2002. I probably lost a million and a half to two million dollars.

Are MBA schools today worth it?

Not all of them. You judge how good an MBA program is by the jobs people get coming out of the program. Maybe 30 schools are worth it in terms of increase in market value of the graduate.

Most people who go for an MBA have taken a job and had it for two or three years but are not on the trajectory in their company or in a job that they see as their career. An MBA is very expensive, $120,000. You lose income for two years, but the idea is to make it back by moving from $75,000 a year to $130,000 and a faster upward mobile career path.

If you are a person who invents things or are in social media, such as Facebook, then it's probably not worth it. Many of those people don't ever finish college.

Going for an MBA depends upon the following: Are you unhappy in your job and want to change, or do you want to get better skills? For instance, do you want to move from marketing to finance?

A higher percentage of MBAs succeed from those 30 schools in the United States. Worldwide, I would add 10 more schools, so I think it is well worth it. But it depends upon the...