i3 Talk

Isabelle Rogner grew up in the small town of Lewisburg, West Virginia. In 2016, she was about to graduate from Marshall University with a degree in international business and happened to attend a small meeting with a couple student leaders and Brad Smith, who at the time was the CEO of Intuit. The meeting ended early and as people filtered out she noticed that Smith wasn’t in a rush to leave and was “kinda standing around”. Not really knowing Smith, or the size of the company he ran in Silicon Valley, Rogner asked him if he needed any directions or help. He said since their meeting ended early, he was just killing time until his next meeting.  In Isabelle’s words, “So being the hungry college student I was, I told him I was going to go get a burger in the dining hall and asked if he wanted to come along. He said sure.”  Before lunch was over, Smith asked Isabelle to come work for him at Intuit. The company’s recruiters called for an interview a few days later, and after graduating in May, the girl from small-town West Virginia started at one of Silicon Valley’s most respected and successful companies.

 

Today, Isabelle is one of five product managers for Intuit’s QuickBooks Self Employed products.  She recently did a Zoom video-conference with fifteen StandWatch Academy students.  This is what she had to say.

 

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Matt Griffin’s company, Combat Flip Flops is a small business that has taken him and his team of former Army Rangers into the public’s eye more often than most businesses of similar size. Going by his preferred nickname, Griff, he’s been featured in multiple business publications, did a TED Talk about his experiences in Afghanistan, and even appeared on NBC’s Shark Tank where he ultimately received funding from Mark Cuban. He’s done all of this without buying-in to the go big or go home mentality that a lot of successful small business owners dream about; he still runs his company out of his house in Seattle, Washington and outsources nearly all his key business functions to trusted third party service providers. Griff believes in keeping his business as successful, profitable, and as flat as possible. A good lesson for any new start-up.  He’s learned a lot of things that every new entrepreneur, or “innovation builder”, should consider as they launch a new business. Honestly, some of them are profound enough to write down on a sticky note to remember each day.

The Music From This Episode:

These days, I think it’s safe to say that the American diet has changed.  With sit-down restaurants closed due to COVID-19 pandemic, for better or worse, carry-out venues and drive-thru windows have probably become mainstays in many people’s daily eating habits.  But traditional brick and mortar locations are hurting. The revenue models that restaurants’ are built around can’t support the new carry-out only way of doing business.  Buildings, rent, electricity, and wait staff cost money – a huge amount of money – and a handful of brown-bag orders going out the door every hour just won’t keep a once thriving sit-down establishment in business.

David Bailey knows this.  As the co-founder of two very successful restaurant chains that were originally started in Fayetteville, West Virginia, the Secret Sandwich Society and Pies& Pints, David has years of experience starting and growing food establishments that redefine the culinary tastes of towns and cities around the eastern part of the United States.  After selling most of his share in the Pies & Pints chain, he and his wife moved to Richmond, Virginia and started their second Secret Sandwich Society downtown in the heart of the city. Together with investors, they built out a beautiful brick and mortar space that, before the pandemic hit, was doing more than $2,000,000 in business and was projected to hit close to $3 million in 2020. But the Richmond Secret Sandwich Society wasn’t built to be a take-out restaurant.  And David had to make the decision to temporarily close his doors and wait things out.

This past Monday, David spoke with our students about his history in the business, the current challenges he and his employees are facing, and has some great recommendations for those innovation builders who want to start their own restaurants businesses.

Here’s what he had to say…

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A lot has happened since the last episode of 50 Pages. When the latest class of StandWatch Academy’s entrepreneurship program started in August of 2019, I was introduced to 75 students from four different schools who expressed interest in joining what we are now calling our i3 Entrepreneurship Program – by the way the i’s standing for ideas, invest, and impact.

So starting out, I had 75 students interested in learning the basics of entrepreneurship.  After giving an orientation brief, by September, 52 students decided to attend our kick-off design-thinking workshop and began working on developing their own business ideas.  By the end of December, we were down to 43.  By the end of January 2020, our class had reached 21. It was about that time period,  when we were floating around 50 active students when I came up with the idea for a podcast series called… you guessed it, The 50 Pages Project.

Today, eight months after that first brief in August, we’ve got 13 of the best student entrepreneurs in the state still working. These young men and women are smart, their ideas are awesome, and they are self-motivated. How do I know this?  Well, first I have spent over 70 sessions at their schools working with each of them on their ideas, coaching them, and teaching them how to present to customers and investors. So I not only know them by name, I know their personal stories, their backgrounds, and their strengths and weaknesses. Things were going really well.

But then the COVID-19 pandemic hit and students were sent home… basically, for the rest of the semester.  All of those school visits where I interacted with students, driving around 700 miles each week. All of that stopped in one day.  The backbone of StandWatch Academy’s i3 entrepreneurship program was shattered, and I’ll admit, I was at a loss at how to proceed.

Within a few days, though, I decided to try and continue with the weekly sessions using LinkedIn as a messaging platform, and Zoom for the face to face contact.  Now to be perfectly honest, given everything that’s been going on, after scheduling the first call, at best I was expecting five or six students to call in.

But here’s the amazing part; even though none of these students receive a grade for participating in StandWatch Academy, when I launched the Zoom meeting, 13 students and all their teachers logged into new remote classroom. I was amazed and humbled, but it made me think back about the initial interview.

Before the course began back in August, I interviewed each student and asked them one simple question: “If I walked out the door today and never came back, would you still want to start your own business?”  If they answered yes, I knew they would have the proper motivation to make it through what some teachers have characterized as a college-level course. These kids are the brightest part of West Virginia’s future. And now that the economy has been so devastated by COVID-19 – current projections are putting the state’s unemployment rate at somewhere around 19% – they are still logging in, practicing their presentations, meeting with guest speakers and looking forward to the time when we can move on to Level Three of the course.

Now, the stimulus package that Congress passed and the president signed is huge.  As a historian, I liken it to a modern day version of the Great Depression’s WPA program that employed millions of Americans through some of the nation’s hardest times in the 1930s.  And we should not be deluding ourselves, the hit the U.S. economy has taken is just as bad as the economic devastation that my grandparents, and generation Z’s great grandparents lived through.  It’s huge but the stimulus will save thousands of businesses.  But here’s the truth, we will see thousands more small businesses that will never come back.  It will take years to recover from this pandemic. Years. And that leads me to the most important thing we have to remember,

Episode 3: Strength & Wounds When I first developed the concept for this episode, I was in something of a funk.  I had just returned from a meeting where the discussion centered on some of the issues that young people in West Virginia face after they leave school each day.  It’s no secret that [...]

Episode Two: Kin Ship Davis Davis is one of those guys whose life is made for storytelling.  He and his wife, Hillary founded Kin Ship Goods in 2010 and have taken what started as an art gallery in Louisville, Kentucky, to a fast-growing quality of life retailer that sells merchandise around the country.  In [...]

50 Pages: Introduction West Virginia is at something of a crossroads.  For years, various nonprofits and state agencies have been working on building an entrepreneurial culture from the ground up in West Virginia schools. The motivation for this is simple:  West Virginia has lagged behind the rest of the country in nearly every category [...]