Professor Norm Nemrow is a self-made multimillionaire, philanthropist, and instructor honored by the President of the United States. He's been highlighted in the New York Times and Wired. But to nearly everyone, he is simply Norm.

At the beginning of each semester, he would tell his students that although he did not have a PhD, he did have a master’s degree in accounting, so “Master Nemrow” was also acceptable. Plenty of students took him up on the joke, and to this day he answers to both.

In 1979, after earning his Master of Accountancy from BYU, Norm began his career with Arthur Andersen & Company in Orange County, California, practicing as a CPA for three years before leaving to join a start-up real estate investment company. As its Chief Financial Officer and later its President, he helped manage its nationwide growth to more than 11,000 apartment units before negotiating the sale of the business in 1985 for nearly a third of a billion dollars. He retired at the age of 30. During those years he also taught as an Associate Professor at the Pepperdine University Graduate School of Management.

In 1991, Norm and his family moved back to Utah, where he took a full-time teaching position at BYU's School of Accountancy on a volunteer basis, donating his salary.

He was not a traditional academic, and that turned out to be the point. He taught accounting the way someone who had actually used it to build a company, allocate capital, and make real decisions would teach it, tying every concept back to a real business and a real decision. Accounting, as he tells his students, exists for exactly one reason: to give business decision makers the information they need. Learn it that way and it stops being bean counting.

Students responded. Norm received numerous teaching awards and was voted "The Overall Best Teacher at BYU" every year the award was offered. He helped propel BYU's accounting program to number one in the United States. Clayton Christensen, the late Harvard Business School professor and author of The Innovator's Dilemma, called Norm's teaching extraordinary, and directed Harvard MBA students who hadn't taken accounting to learn it from his course. More than 100,000 students have now learned accounting from this course.

He was also a founding board member of Habitat for Humanity of Utah County, and received the Governor's Points of Light Service Award as well as the National Points of Light Service Award from President George W. Bush.

Norm lives in Provo, Utah with his wife Cindy. They are the parents of five children and grandparents many times over. He devotes most of his time to community service and philanthropic endeavors.