Faculty & Staff

Kenneth Hamner

Adjunct Professor
Vita

Ken Hamner serves the University of South Florida’s Muma College of Business and Nault Center for Entrepreneurship as an adjunct professor, where he teaches graduate courses in business plan development, mergers and acquisitions and intellectual property.  These courses are offered to both masters and doctoral students in a wide variety of programs in entrepreneurship, business, engineering, global sustainability, and medicine. As a faculty member, he also helps plan and judge business plan competitions and serves as a guest lecturer in other courses in venture capital, private equity and exit planning. 

Over the course of 30 years, Hamner has accumulated a wide variety of experience in finance, accounting, consulting, and law. He has significant experience in structuring international and domestic transactions, equity and debt relationships, and negotiating contracts. He manages and directs all primary practice areas of the Entrepreneur Law Center, P.L., a boutique law firm with focused practice areas of business planning, international and domestic transactions, general counsel services, tax, due diligence, angel investor and venture capital services.  The Entrepreneur Law Center, P.L. has received more than two dozen internationally recognized awards from a variety of trade publications and serves an international client base.  Hamner is also the managing member of Encompass Advisory Group, an investment banking and consulting firm that offers services in corporate strategy and exit planning, mergers & acquisitions, forensic accounting, fraud investigations, due diligence, outsourced CFO services, valuation, and real estate brokerage services.

Hamner also serves as a partner and in a general counsel capacity for several ventures, including NEST Ventures, LLC, a seed-stage venture capital firm focused on technology and life science ventures, International Entrepreneurship Innovation Institute, LLC, a firm developing innovative virtual entrepreneurship education programs and publishing related education books and articles, and Fountain Technologies International, LLC, a firm that develops and licenses nanotechnology patents. 

Previously, Hamner was the managing partner and Director of Corporate, International & Tax Services for a law firm with partners in Orlando and West Palm Beach, Florida.  He has also served as the Chief Financial Officer for three international companies, where he structured equity and debt financing, and international transactions with suppliers, customers, and distributors.  He has also served as a co-founder for MyVentureResource, a startup IT platform company connecting entrepreneurs with the resources they need to launch and grow their ventures, and as general counsel for Authentek IOM, a service-disabled veteran owned small business intraoperative neuromonitoring firm.  Hamner began his career with Arthur Andersen & Co., where he served as an audit senior in the audit and advisory services practice. He subsequently served as a senior consultant in Ernst & Young’s real estate and financial services consulting practice.

Hamner was the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Florida State University Business Review, an academic journal focusing on business and legal issues that is currently a successful publication in its 20th year, housed at the Florida State University College of Law. 

Academically, Hamner earned a Juris Doctor and MBA from Florida State University, a Master of Science in Entrepreneurship in Applied Technologies from the University of South Florida, an Executive Master of Accounting in Forensic Accounting from Florida Atlantic University, and both a Bachelor of Science in Accounting and a Bachelor of Science in Finance from George Mason University.  While studying in Beijing, China at the China University of Political Science and Law he earned a Certificate in Chinese Law.  Additionally, while studying at Humboldt Universidad in Berlin, Germany, he earned a Certificate in Dispute Resolution and a Certificate in Mediation.  He has also studied foreign investment law at the University of the West Indies in Barbados. 

Hamner has also earned several academic and professional certificates, including from the University of Oxford in its Artificial Intelligence Programme and the Oxford Entrepreneurship: Venture Finance Programme, the MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab’s Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Business Strategy certificate program, the MIT Sloan School of Management Entrepreneurship Development Program, and MIT’s Certificate in Digital Transformation: From AI and IoT to cloud, blockchain, and cybersecurity.  He has also studied and completed a professional executive education programs at the University of Chicago focused on exit planning and at Loyola University Chicago in mergers and acquisitions.

Hamner is licensed to practice law as a Member of the Bar of the Court and Officer of the Court of the Supreme Court of the United States, a Member of the United States District Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit, the United States District Courts in both the Middle District and Southern District of Florida, the United States Tax Court, the United States Court of International Trade, and as a Member of the Florida Bar.  He is also a Certified Exit Planning Advisor, a Certified Merger & Acquisition Advisor, a Master Analyst in Financial Forensics, a Certified Fraud Examiner, a Certified Business Intermediary, and is licensed as a Real Estate Broker in Florida.  Hamner also holds securities licenses (inactive status), the Series 82 Limited Representative – Private Securities Offering Representative and Series 63 securities agent licenses.