Biz Kids : High School Students Learn How to Succeed in Business

The group of aspiring young entrepreneurs checked their balance sheets, then gave each other high fives and beamed as the impact of making a huge quarterly profit sunk in.

“That’s a nice increase, kids,” said Chuck Smith, an advisor for California Business Week, a program running this week to teach local high school students how to survive in the corporate world.

“You should have seen them at the beginning. They were miserable,” added Smith, who usually handles retail and restaurant business for the K.B. Roberts Co. in Ventura. “It was just a page of numbers.”

Tuesday, Smith’s group of 15 students was able to translate each gray page of cryptic-looking statistics into production costs, funds for plant investment, marketing expenditures and a host of other concepts that would frost the eyeballs of most first-year business majors in college.

After that, students running such hypothetical companies as Video Inc., Snailbait Technologies and Digital Education Enterprise hammered out business strategies intended to sink their competition, who were busy hatching similar plans in other rooms at Cal Lutheran University.

For some of these teens living on campus at Cal Lutheran since Sunday, it’s too bad the whole business operation is just a computer simulation. Otherwise they’d be going home with a fortune on Friday.

Others, however, were already almost broke.

“How come we didn’t produce, even though we put money into machinery, as well as research and development?” asked 16-year-old Chris Kunke, a junior at Adolfo Camarillo High School who spent the afternoon doing some soul searching.

Kunke and his group had led the program’s more than 80 students in profits and growth until Tuesday, when bad loans and worse math left them verging on a shutdown because they lost about $9,000 and couldn’t pay the bills.

“You just have to make sure you don’t lose all your money, but it’s not so hard,” said Melissa Vega, a member of the struggling group and a 16-year-old junior at Fillmore High School. “We’re determined that we’ll be the best again.”

In addition to waging corporate battles on computers--where electronic fortunes were being made and lost in a matter of hours--students attending California Business Week were also getting an in-depth look at some of Ventura County’s biggest and most influential corporations.

An Amgen executive, Mark Olbert, stopped by Tuesday to discuss the biotech firm’s latest efforts in the drug market. Heather Wicka, an import/export consultant, told the students about the impact of international trade on California’s economy.

Participants in the program--sponsored by the Ventura County Economic Development Assn., the Ventura County superintendent of schools, and a number of corporations--have also toured local industries and will produce a 30-second television commercial at the end of this week.

Brynne Chappell, a 15-year-old junior at Camarillo High, said she knew little about running a business until she came to the program.

“There isn’t a single class that I’ve taken that gets anywhere near this,” Brynne said. “I had no idea what R & D was until I got here.”

Darcy Jones, a 17-year-old from Westlake Village and a senior at Agoura High, also said she had gotten a lot out of the program.

“It will help me find my way in what I want to do and open windows,” Darcy said, adding that she had been trying to decide between majoring in business or English after she graduates from high school. “It’s kind of a step-up in learning, too, because it’s an experience most people don’t get before college.”