The Market Day Challenge

 

Every fall semester a new round of profit seeking students form partnerships and sole proprietorships with a plan to sell goods and services to students and staff during school lunch.  It’s a project called Market Day. This micro loan program is the first chance Youth Entrepreneurs students have to experiment with entrepreneurship and it’s an opportunity to put real profit into their pockets.

Tantalizing, isn’t it? When you were in high school, wouldn’t you have jumped at the chance to make money leveraged by start-up capital from one of your teachers? Of COURSE you would have!

Over the years, we have seen this project become more and more successful for the students and their teachers with record breaking profits and educational experiences that spur students on to the next phase of the YE program. Nothing compares to the feeling of being validated by the market place. When you have satisfied customers AND put some cash in your pocket, you start to understand the reason why entrepreneurship is so vital to our quality of life and the prosperity we enjoy every day.

Last year, the staff at YE noticed a need that could be filled entrepreneurially. Perhaps, with all of this amazing success, it was time to create a new opportunity.  Maybe it was time to allow those enterprising students the chance to broaden their reach, put a bit more cash on the line, and compete among the other 28 high schools participating in Market Day in Kansas & Missouri. It was time to create a “next level” for the project:  The Market Day Challenge.

It works like this:

Teams across the entire program can elect to submit a video about their Market Day business by Thursday Oct 13, 4pm CST (THAT’S THIS THURSDAY!!!). From those submissions YE will select the top 12 based on their plan of action for Market Day, their creativity and level of team work during the planning process. Those 12 teams selected will be announced via the Youth Entrepreneurs’ Facebook the following day. From there, the team who makes the most profit and has the video with the most “likes” at the end wins $200!

Last year was a great success with the winning video getting 306 “likes” for the Wichita East High team of Stick Yo’Chicken. They received an additional $200 above and beyond their Market Day profits.  You can see how the entire process went by visiting our last years’ Market Day Challenge page on Facebook.

20 years of success and healthy competition and, as always, the process of innovation continues.  We are all looking forward to see what this year’s Market Day Challenge will create. So students:  get those cameras rolling! The rest of us want to see the process and be inspired by your ability to be creative and entrepreneurial.