YEA!, the Young Entrepreneurs Academy (http://yeausa.org) is a national program designed to transform local middle and high school students (grades 6-12) into confident entrepreneurs. It was founded in 2004 at Rochester University with the help of a grant from the Kaufman Foundation.
Loudoun County youth participate with the help of the Loudoun County Chamber of Commerce, it’s program coordinator Faith Shoup, and volunteer instructors like Eric Byrd, manager of the Small Business Development Center of George Mason University; Kristine Jacobson, Founder and Chief Marketing Strategist of Conveyance Marketing Group; Kindra Dionne, President and CEO of Purpose WorX LLC, and Chris Ricci, NVA Career Coaching LLC. Each instructor then recruits additional mentors to help the 24 students selected each year bring their ideas to life.
Through a rigorous, year-long curriculum, kids generate business ideas, do market research, write business plans, pitch to a panel of investors, and launch their companies. Just 30 students from around the world then compete for the top prize of a $30,000 scholarship to the Rochester Institute of Technology. This year, Abhinav Sheth made the cut. (For winners, watch: https://bit.ly/YEA2021winners.)
Abhinav Sheth, Out of the Box Costumes
Like many entrepreneurial ideas, Abhinav Sheth’s is deceptively simple. The Eagle Ridge Middle-Schooler's business idea was to create unique and memorable “Out of the Box” costume kits that families could assemble in less than an hour. Giving each costume a Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math or STEAM theme, would add an extra hook for parents who would likely be buying the costumes, he reasoned.
Local YEA! Instructors paired him with a mentor from StageCoach Theatre who knows something about costumes. Each of the kits comes with colorfully pre-printed foam boards with Velcro strips strategically attached to adjust to the right size for each kid. Among his current designs are a Rubik's Cube, a popcorn box, and a washing machine, each field-proven to generate plenty of candy Trick-or-Treating! There is already a website (https://www.outoftheboxcostumes.com/) and a plan to break even this year.
Ishaan Verma, OnTrack
Ishaan Verma’s business OnTrack was inspired by his transition to high school at Broad Run. A student athlete, he soon found himself overloaded with academics, basketball practice and college prep work. “I just couldn't process the workload, and people were trying to talk to me about college applications when I hadn't even started thinking about college.” Joining clubs to build his resume all combined to make it very difficult to manage his time, and he knew from comments from his friends that he wasn’t the only one feeling stressed.
So, he designed OnTrack as a collaborative app that uses four key features to help rising high school students cope with the transition from middle school. The first feature is mentoring section that allows underclassmen to tap the advice of seniors, who are repaid with trackable service hours. A second feature is a personalized work-out plan, helpful even to students who aren’t athletes to stay in shape with diet and exercise. A third section helps students keep track of all their extracurricular activities, college testing scores and essays as well as their GPA so they can find the right college. And, finally there’s a schedule that will help the student manage all his or her goals each day.
Aryaa Agarwal, Bubblery
Aryaa Agarwal’s introduction to business was selling bath bombs at a yard sale when she was 7 or 8. So, essentially, the 15-year-old Broad Run / Academies of Loudoun student has been in business literally half of her life. Bath bombs, a combination of ingredients designed to help people relax in the bath, were popular back when she was “really little,” she explains, and they sold like hotcakes. Her current interests in both chemistry and cosmetics have combined to inspire her to develop her own custom skincare brand.
After brainstorming with the program advisors, she decided that custom face masks would be easier to scale than bath bombs and body butters. As a second-place winner in YEA!’s local pitch to investors, she is using her $1000 award to design her website and work on product formulation and materials sourcing. Next, she’ll be looking into packaging and brand design. Once that’s done, she’ll move on to product photography and marketing. She hopes to work with local retail outlets providing samples so consumers can get a feel for the product before they buy.
The science of beauty is a really dynamic field and is the subject of much research, she says. With respect to ingredients, she’s already a bit biased. “People get the image in their mind that chemicals are bad, but in fact only a specific set of chemicals are bad. Others are really beneficial for you.” She adds, “Business is about challenges – but you just keep pushing forward.”
Angela Rutta, Ender
Angela Rutta, a rising Junior at Riverside High School, fell in love with the idea of selling used clothing with animal prints to help preserve the animals that the prints represent. Animal prints like cheetah, or tiger or leopard, “never go out of style,” she asserted; it just makes sense that consumers would want to find something at a good price that also helps the environment.
She was well familiar with stores like Plato’s Closet, a popular consignment chain store. But online stores like Etsy are more likely to attract her own generation. A donation drive at school helped her collect more than 50 items, which she’ll have posted to Etsy and Instagram soon. See: https://www.etsy.com/shop/AngelasPrintShopUS.
She says she is an entrepreneur because, “I like being able to know that I can solve a problem by creating something of my own.” She calls her store Ender as a contraction for endangered and “also because it sounds cool.”
Oliver Shigley, StockSwap
Oliver Shigley’s business, StockSwap, is a marketplace like eBay or Mercado Libre that allows you to sell items, but instead of the proceeds going into your bank account, they are allowed to be transferred into the financial markets to buy stocks, bonds or ETFs. “It’s primarily for people who don't have the money to get your portfolio started. It’s also a way for kids to learn about how investing works.”
The 16-year-old junior at Briar Woods High School devised his business plan during the pandemic when he was looking for a way to help people who were losing their jobs or unable to go to work. “Even though it’s a for-profit business, it’s also a way to help people by teaching them about the financial markets.” This year, he says he’s learned everything from how to start and run a business to how to get his idea patented.
Yuvraj Chauhan, Zbot
Yuvraj Chauhan, a 10th grader at John Champe High School, also devised a software-based business, but his invention Zbot is designed to relieve workers of monotonous and repetitive tasks. He learned by interning at small law firms that such businesses process hundreds of invoices using a staff of 5-10 people, when a virtual robot could be trained to perform the same function – dropping dollar amounts into the right field in Excel sheets – for much less time and money.
Essentially the bot uses Optical Character Recognition to capture information and turn it into useful data, Yuvraj explains. He hastens to point out that his target market isn’t the giant corporations or tech companies who have IT departments to manage these tasks, but smaller companies like a mid-sized law firm who don't. He has already gotten the system up and running for a client. “I just came up with a way to make it really simplified and transparent to the client. It’s not complicated, but it gets the job done.”
Just don’t call him a developer. “I would be better as a leader of the company," he says.