PORT ANGELES — Nearly 100 high school seniors presented their business ideas to regional business leaders, and for many of them, their graduation this spring rests on if they have enough business savvy to make the grade.
Divided into teams of two, the seniors created business plans, including restaurants and bakeries, custom dress shops, chain saw carvings, survival training, a boat maintenance shop, a trucking company and a local tour bus during Thursday’s after-school event.
“Overall, they were very creative,” said project evaluator Dan Gase, a real estate consultant from Coldwell Banker Uptown Realty.
“These kids put a lot of thought into this.”
‘Cutting-edge’
Evaluator Brian Kuh, a banking officer at Columbia Bank and Port Angeles Regional Chamber of Commerce president, found he was impressed most with a business plan that would create collaborative, open-source music.
“It’s very cutting-edge,” Kuh said.
Some students presented actual products they created, including formal gowns, chain saw carvings of bears and a custom baffle for a carburetor that increases gas mileage.
If the baffle works as claimed, the student may have a real business on his hands, said Chuck Lamb, a volunteer and evaluator.
The students are members of Dave Uranich’s contemporary issues class, a required class for seniors that deals with the real-life issues students will face after graduation from high school.
Student presentations served as a final exam for the course, which ended this week, and for 41 of the seniors, it serves as their senior culminating project, a state graduation requirement.
Gourmet salsas
Seniors Cole Uvila and Keenen Walker, both 18, who created a plan for a bottling company that would deliver gourmet salsas to local stores, said the course taught them the realities of how difficult business can be.
“Making money is the hardest part,” Walker said.
It was a lot more expensive to start a business than they expected, and operating budgets are larger, they said.
Emily Drake, whose mother runs a small business, noted that “customers are not going to just flow in once your business is open.”
Drake has already decided that going into business is probably not in her future, but Walker said he is considering a business major in college.
This year, there were more projects than in the past and of better quality, Uranich said.
“Their projects are exponentially better than last year’s,” he said.
Much of that is because of increased math skills, he said, which students learned from SCORE volunteers like Mark Hannah, a former paper mill engineer and manager who spent time in the schools helping students learn the realities of running a business.
SCORE is a national nonprofit association dedicated to educating entrepreneurs and helping small businesses.
“The whole purpose is for them to learn how to put a business together,” Hannah said.
It gives them a better awareness of how businesses operate, he said.
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Reporter Arwyn Rice can be reached at 360-417-3535 or at arwyn.rice@peninsuladailynews.com.
