Westlock’s young entrepreneurs have wrapped up their eight-week tutorial on what is involved in running their own businesses.
On June 16, the BizKids Youth Entrepreneurship Program — run by Community Futures — held its last session at R.F. Staples.
The last day was to feature a Dragons’ Den-style business pitch, but none of the businesses the students had been angling to start were in need of start-up funds.
Community Futures’ business analyst and project co-ordinator Benita Pedersen led the course, which started with 10 students on the first day, but saw diminishing returns as the weeks wore on.
On the last day on June 16, only aspiring jewelry designer Chance Moon was in attendance.
Moon got the jewelry-designing bug when a friend introduced him to it several years ago. At that time, Moon designed a ring for his mom, and was hooked.
“It was fulfilling, and I would be happy to do it as a career,” Moon said.
His interest dwindled in the intervening years, but came right back when he got a job at John’s Jewellers this past January. It’s a job he looks forward to every day.
Moon said he joined the course because he was interested in how to run a business.
He already has a plan in mind about where he wants to take his jewelry designing, but the course definitely filled in some of the gaps in his knowledge about what it would take to run a successful business.
“It’s taught me a lot about what I need to run a business,” he said.
“It’s a career path I could see myself going down, and this gives me insight into that business life.”
Ultimately, Moon would like to run his own jewelry store, and is currently looking at taking over John’s Jewellers once he has completed his education in goldsmithing and gemology at Vancouver Community College.
What he would like to do is change the stock at the store, and bring in a 3-D printer to allow for quicker turnaround for ring designs, which would also reduce costs if a ring as designed by a client doesn’t actually work as well as the client had hoped and has to be remade.
Having a 3-D printer would allow the design to be tweaked cheaply before being manufactured, he explained.
In the interim, Moon has started his own design business, Designs by Chance, where he consults with people about what they want from a piece of jewelry.
“If you can dream it, we can do it,” Moon said.
Once the design has been approved, Moon will take it to his manufacturing contacts and get the estimated cost of the piece.
The cost of the consultations will be factored into the price of the piece, he said.
Pedersen said the overall point of the course was to take young people with business ideas and give them the skills they need to help them set up and run a successful business.
This includes telling them about such things as bookkeeping, marketing, the advantages and perils of credit, and how to overcome obstacles they’ll likely encounter along the way.
“I feel if we can reach the youth and set them up to think in a business manner, we’ll set them up for future success,” Pedersen concluded.
