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Publication Date: Friday, February 02, 2001
Blake Downing models a jeans bag made by his daughter Elizabeth's company Blue Haze for Entrepreneurial Night. Seema Bhangar, who teaches math and science at Girls' Middle School, said the students learn business math entirely through the entrepreneurial studies program.
@vcredit:Dick Waters
Girls' Middle School's Entrepreneurial Night has seventh graders start and manage their own businesses
Girls' Middle School's Entrepreneurial Night has seventh graders start and manage their own businesses
(February 02, 2001)
By Justin Scheck
Seventh graders at Mountain View's Girls' Middle School are learning business the Silicon Valley way: start with an idea, make a pitch for venture capital, and work overtime until you turn a profit. Last year, the school established an entrepreneurial studies program in which the seventh graders work with women business executives, and real money, to create, promote, and manage their own companies.
The students formulate comprehensive marketing and financial plans for their companies, and package and distribute their own products. They run their businesses through April, when they tally their profits, pay back the investors, and, hopefully, have a little bit of money left over.
These profits are split three ways: 60 percent gets split among the member of each student company, and a charity of their choice gets 20 percent. The remaining 20 percent goes to fund next year's entrepreneurial studies program.
On Jan. 25 at the Hyatt Rickeys in Palo Alto, each company presented its business plan to a panel of venture capitalists, complete with sample sales items and Power Point presentations outlining profit and expense projections.
At the event, each of the 10 companies came up with estimated profits, and requested an amount of capital based on their projected expenditures. Requests this year ranged from $100 to $250.
According to Meredith McClintock, the school's director of entrepreneurial studies, every group last year made a profit.
Lana Guernsey, who founded the entrepreneurial studies program, said the year-long project follows the school's philosophy of experience-based learning, in which the students apply classroom concepts to real-world ventures.
"The kids really have fun and understand why they're at school," Guernsey said.
"Middle school is the time and the age when the gap grows between boys and girls in their interests... What's different about this (from other teaching devices) is that each of the teams is coached by women executives from Silicon Valley, and they use real money," Guernsey continued.
The coaches help each team learn what it takes to convert an idea into capital.
"This is my second year, and the greatest part of coaching is working with this age group, and getting them involved on a realistic level," said Kathy Giori, CEO of WorkSpot, a Palo Alto software development company.
Giori said that the Girls' Middle School students are learning skills that she did not learn until college.
"I hope a program like this helps them think about their own economic viability," said Giori.
Student Elizabeth Gist said her company, Funky Body Splash, was marketing its product to a specific demographic group: middle-school girls.
"A lot of girls our age like bath products, so we figured that would be an easy market," Gist said. She and partners Leslie Cervantes and Brittany Williams make and sell specialty soaps, bubble bath, and other bath products.
Cervantes said that the company's low prices--it has nothing over $4--and "colorful, creative, and flashy" image would appeal to middle school girls.
Moreover, Williams said, "We all work together team. We're all strong in our own ways."
Elizabeth Downing, Hannah Friedman, Ashlie Hiller, and Zoe McCarthy took a different route toward finding a high profit margin: making a creative product out of free raw materials.
Their company, Blue Haze, makes bags out of used blue jeans and men's ties, and fills them with candles, fuzzy pencils, and decorated diaries.
"A lot of companies are making really run-of-the-mill stuff, but no one has anything like us," said Downing. "The jean bags are different, cheap, and interesting."
"I donated some of my old jeans and ties," said Blake Downing, Elizabeth's father, who sees the entrepreneurial studies program as a challenge to students that teaches them to apply the skills they learn in school.
"This is a way of learning a whole bunch of new concepts at once," he said.
Seema Bhangar, a sixth-grade math and science teacher at the school, said that the math department has been able to eliminate its business unit, because the students learn business math in the course of entrepreneurial studies.
And, she said, the students enjoy the program tremendously, as evidenced by their hard work.
"A parent of a seventh grader came to school and complained about how the students got too much homework, sometimes three or four hours a night," Bhangar said. "But when we had a meeting to figure out which teacher was giving out so much work, we found that the kids were actually just doing entrepreneurial studies because they loved it."
McClintock said that, in her mind, the most valuable lesson the students learn is the process of building a business as a team. "Most of what the students do is individual, and even most of the things they do as a team come down to individual accomplishments... But here they have to deal with conflict resolution in a situation when it really matters," she said.
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