By Todd Feathers, News Staff

From their executive offices at prominent multi-million dollar companies, Richard D’Amore and Alan McKim have kept keen eyes on Northeastern’s meteoric rise.

They have had good reason to watch the university closely, considering their positions on the Board of Trustees, and they have an even better reason going forward, after making a historic $60 million donation to the College of Business Administration this month.

D’Amore and McKim said they see the donation as a vote of confidence in the future of Northeastern, a school whose humble Boston roots are reminiscent of their own past.

“To be perfectly honest, the school, almost 20 years later, has transformed to be something almost unidentifiable compared to when I went there: the campus, the facilities, the housing – that enables so many more students to be there and to enjoy the campus rather than spending so much more time commuting,” McKim, founder and executive of the environmental services company Clean Harbors, said.

McKim and his five sisters grew up in a working-class family in Braintree. He began studying criminal justice at Northeastern in 1974 before dropping out to work.

“[My father] raised us on a very modest income and certainly none of my sisters went to college. I was the first in my extended family to go to college,” he said.

McKim returned to Northeastern nearly a decade later and graduated with a master’s degree in business administration in 1988. While pursuing his degree he fathered four children.

“It was a fun time in my life but also a very demanding time, as you can guess, having four little kids,” he said.

D’Amore, the son of a firefighter, grew up in Everett on the north side of Boston and started his own family at the age of 18. Despite dropping out at one point, he credited Northeastern’s co-op program for helping him complete his degree while raising a child. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business in 1976.

“[Co-op] was invaluable to me because I supported my family doing it. And in my field of accounting, which was my major at the time, it was great, great learning experience,” D’Amore, co-founder of the venture capitalist firm North Bridge Venture Partners, said.

When D’Amore and McKim began attending Northeastern, the university was a small, community school catering primarily to part-time commuters. During the ‘70s and ‘80s Northeastern underwent a period of rapid expansion, building new dormitories, Snell Library and landscaping the campus.

D’Amore said Northeastern’s business school is much more focused now on inspiring the kind of entrepreneurship that helped him build North Bridge than it was when he attended the university.

“While the school didn’t talk about entrepreneurship at the time … I think we always attracted aggressive entrepreneurial students,” D’Amore said. “We were a co-op school where people had a real focus on the real world, a real focus on going out and getting an education that was going to make a difference, and we’ve had so many successful entrepreneurs.”

When McKim founded Clean Harbors in 1980 it was a tiny four-person waste disposal operation. While pursuing his degree at Northeastern, and in the years after he graduated, McKim developed Clean Harbors into what is now the largest hazardous waste disposal company in North America, according to the company’s website.

“It’s never a straight line up, and it’s never without good times and bad,” McKim said. “I think in both our cases, through the good times and bad, we were able to keep good teams of people together and keep driving our businesses forward. Certainly in my experience some of the most difficult times were the best learning experiences for us and it made us such a better company that even 15 years later it’s embedded in our culture here.”

D’Amore, whose own company is highly successful in the venture capital field, said his accomplishments paled beside McKim’s.

After graduating Northeastern, D’Amore worked as an accountant and financial consultant for several companies before founding North Bridge. He said the key to making it through hard times is strong character.

“You’ve got to have those basic, fundamental skills of learning, but that only takes you so far. After that, it comes down to your own personal make-up,” he said. “You can have two people who have the same intelligence or technical skills, but in the end the person who has the most character or the work ethic is usually the one that over time ends up visibly more successful.”

McKim said Clean Harbors looks for personal characteristics like work ethic and personality when hiring co-ops.

The truth of D’Amore’s and McKim’s success is evident in their history of donating to Northeastern.

D’Amore and McKim met in 2004 when they donated a combined $1.5 million to create the McKim – D’Amore Distinguished Professorship of Global Management and Innovation in honor of their former professor Daniel McCarthy.

In 2010 D’Amore donated $5 million to Northeastern to establish the Center for Research Innovation. In 2011 McKim donated $5 million in support of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative and in May of this year he donated another $5 million to the Center for Entrepreneurship Education.

“We’ve always found that, because our values are so similar, that [donating] together has a double impact,” McKim said.

D’Amore was elected to the Board of Trustees in 2008 and McKim was elected to the Board in 2010. They said their insider’s access has given them confidence in the university’s long-range plan.

“We believe that the deans and faculty have a view for where the university and the business school should go. This donation is just to accelerate that vision,” D’Amore said.

The College of Business Administration will be officially renamed the D’Amore – McKim Business School at a ceremony Friday.

“We were certainly honored with the suggestion and ultimately the naming, but early on and as we talked to [president] Joseph [Aoun] along the way, that wasn’t our motivation by any stretch,” McKim said.

D’Amore said they hope their most recent donation will help the university expand its online learning services, expand satellite campuses and fund the hiring of prominent professors in the business school.

“We love the business school, we have confidence in the business school, but I don’t think either of us would have made this investment if we didn’t believe in Northeastern and weren’t impressed by the trajectory of success,” he said. “I view this as an investment in Northeastern. To me, when you invest in the business school you’re making an investment that’s designed to help the whole university.”