Jaxon Mills pulls out a business card from his suit pocket, which describes him as chief executive officer of Safe Technologies. The moment would be unremarkable, except it took place at Lake Forest High School, where Mills is completing his junior year.
That kind of attention to detail was common among four teams of students during the inaugural Business Incubator Pitch Night on May 28. Students covered everything from customers to competition, from surveys to sales projections, from product to patents to profit margins.
Bar graphs were projected above the heads of students standing on the theater stage while a board of directors and potential investors sat their left, taking notes and asking questions after each presentation. It resembled the TV show “Shark Tank,” except for the prom-age participants.
Perhaps more impressive than the students’ presentation was their responses to questions asked by a board of business people, bankers and investment advisors. After a pitch by students with a product called Bubble Buddies — a soap that changes colors to make handwashing fun for young children — a board member asked about whether they’d started the patent process yet.
“No,” said Jacqueline Turck. “It’s a lot of money even to get the patent pending.”
Turck went on to explain in detail how the patent process works and their timeline for applying once they found investors.
Pitch Night is the culmination of a school year-long honors business class that started in September. Business teacher Joe Pulio heard about a similar class at Barrington High School and adopted it for Lake Forest High School.
“It’s focused on real world experience versus book learning,” Pulio said. That includes bringing in professionals in all aspects of business during the school year and doing trial runs of proposed businesses in the real world.
For example, students who created a business called High School Hired — which connects employers and teens seeking jobs — successfully worked with businesses in Lake Forest to supply teen workers.
“We only pursued three (businesses),” said Luke Bauder. “The other (four businesses) came to us.”
Other businesses pitched included Real College, a social media aggregation website to save high school students a trip to potential colleges, and SafeU, a smart phoneapp with location detection that connects college students in danger of being sexually assaulted with campus security. The four teams were winnowed down from ten teams during a first round of presentations last week
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After a half hour of consulting backstage, the board of directors chose to invest in High School Hired. The Lake Forest High School Foundation invested $10,000 and private investors kicked in another $6,500. The winning team is composed of Luke Baudor, William Curtis, Grant Levin and Maikal Yamauchi.
“We’re going to meet with the investors and foundation over the summer and work over the next year on running the business,” said Baudor, after his team posed onstage for photos while holding a surfboard-sized check.