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Local Students Get Real World Small Business Experience through New Class Offering
Do you love watching Shark Tank? It’s so exciting seeing the new products and businesses that these creative individuals have come up with! Will they get a deal and be on the road to success or will their product fail to impress the judges and they’ll be sent home disappointed? This school year, Boerne ISD has created its very own version of Shark Tank with its high school Business Incubator class! In this class, talented and creative students from Boerne High School, Champion High School and the BISD Virtual Campus all come together to participate in this fun environment that gives them the tools to both create a product and launch a business! Coach Jennifer Breuer teaches the Business Incubator class and guides the students along their journey of becoming young entrepreneurs. “The students are broken into small groups and challenged with the task of finding a problem and then coming up with a solution to that problem. The result is that each group will then create a business out of this process,” said Breuer.
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Each group has two mentors from the local community that guide them along the way. In addition to the mentors, there are also coaches, such as CPAs, attorneys and other professionals with specialties that come in and help the students with topics they need to know to successfully start and run a business. “The community has been so helpful to these students,” added Breuer. “From all of the help we have received from the mentors and the coaches and Jefferson Bank was so generous as to give each of the four groups $500 that they could use for things they needed to get their businesses started like website domain names, hosting packages and email marketing services to be able to get their products online and in front of real customers!” This is the first year for the Business Incubator class, but Breuer hopes that as the program grows there will be an expansion of the class to also include a Business Accelerator class that would follow Incubator where the students could continue to grow and develop their businesses. Currently there are four groups in the class and the
PITCH N IGHT IS THURSDAY, APRIL 29TH, 2021 @ 6PM CHAM PION H IGH SCHOOL AUDITORIUM B oerne B usiness M onthly | April 2021
