They’re not ready for the prime time fluorescent lights of a noon Kiwanis meeting quite yet, but the sixteen youngsters participating in the eleventh year of the White County CEO program are well into the work that facilitator Tracy Orr says will transform their lives by the end of the school year. Orr was on hand to provide an update as the school year is underway and meetings with local business leaders are happening on the regular. This year’s class is made up of fifteen young ladies and a solitary young man drowning in the deep end of the estrogen pool.
Addison Funkhouser, Addy Lamont, Alexus Gates, Angel Jovanovic, Cadence Lewis, Chelsea Stamper, Danika McCombs-Horn, Emberlyn Waters, Emma Legg, Hadlea Buskirk, Johanna Zieren, Kami James, Katelyn Davis, Lacy Sanders, Kyle Brinkley, and Marley Stephens make up this year’s pool of entrepreneurs. As of now, their future plans are as wide ranging as nursing to computer science, education to psychology, and the medical field to IT/Cybersecurity.
Orr says she asked the class before providing an update to Kiwanis what she should tell the club about what they’ve learned in the first six weeks. They responded with the importance of making connections, not burning bridges, and that what you put into every interaction and project is what you’ll get out of it. One of the first projects for students is a challenge to turn $5 into $100 using their ingenuity, creativity, and resourcefulness and one of the byproduct early lessons many learn is how to scale.
It has been so much fun just to see the different things that they come up with. They’re allowed to use their $5 and then their resources. So if they already have flour and sugar, they could make whatever you can make with flour and sugar. So it’s just trying to get their brains kind of thinking on that entrepreneurial way and also slowing them down. I was talking to somebody a few days ago about how when they started, they said they wanted to just throw everything at their business and just take off.
But really it kind of needs to be slower.
You’ve got to pace yourself and realize I can’t get too far ahead or I’m going to be in the hole so far.
I don’t know what to do.
So it’s okay, you spend this $5. Now sell whatever you can, then reinvest back into your business and then you can buy more stuff and sell more stuff. And it’s a long, arduous process, but it is so good for them.
Aside from continuing to visit with business leaders, kids will get matched up individually with mentors, as a group they’ll be working the Farm to Table event on October 8th, and will also get their first taste of public speaking at the annual Carmi Chamber of Commerce dinner on October 5th.
Work on their group class fundraiser will begin shortly after they choose a class CEO and CFO at the end of October with the event most likely being held in February. Once that’s down, money will be split up and kids will start preparing to launch their individual businesses in advance of the late April trade show.
You can keep up with the goings on with this year’s crop of tomorrow’s leaders by following the White County CEO Program on facebook https://www.facebook.com/whitecountyceo and also on their website at https://www.whitecountyceo.com/.