Budding entrepreneurs share tips over web

BY RAFFY BOUDJIKANIAN

raffy.boudjikanian@transcontinental.ca

Riverdale High School led a group of six other schools across the province on Friday, with former celebrities such as ex-MusiquePlus video personality Malik Shaheed and ex-World Heavyweight pro boxer Otis Grant lecturing children on entrepreneurship.

"We want to show kids that may be good with their hands, and kids that are marginal in the classroom how to be successful," said Otis Grant, who is also a community coordinator at Riverdale High School.

Malik Shaheed, who also runs his own record company, Versatile Communications, the room acted as a link between the seven schools conversing with each other live through a giant screen that showed webcam views from classrooms in places as far away as Pontiac High School in Shawville.

Shaheed also highlighted the importance of hands-on entrepreneurial experience for teenagers. "When I was a teenager, nobody was talking to me about entrepreneurship," he said. "It was always go get a job, work for this guy," he said.

A self-taught businessman, Shaheed gave the grade 11 students examples of what he had done at their age, like making cookies at school that "put the cafeteria out of business," or offering haircuts in his basement that began to worry local barbers.

The teenagers were not missing ideas themselves. Suggestions to raise money for sports included a crazy hair day, bake sales, as well as a "no uniform" day for any schools with uniforms.

Two Riverdale graduates, Kevin Ward and Nathaniel Tajada, each briefed current graduating students from the other schools on their own end of term business projects.

Ward, now a business student at John Abbott College, made a flag sales project, saying that it allowed them to appeal to the multicultural student body at Riverdale.

Tajada, in business at Dawson College, also looked at appealing to his customer base for his products. "Our core product was T-shirts, but we also had USB sticks for the techies and lotion and make-up for the girls," he said.

Both students praised their business class at Riverdale for preparing them for the challenges of CEGEP.

That is the point of it, according to Riverdale's business and economics teacher, Michael Gabe. Gabe said that he designed the first two months of his elective classes as very intensive on purpose, in order to give his commerce and business-bound finishing students a head start the following year in CEGEP.

The interactive conference was part of the second, province-wide National Entrepreneurship Day, with complete French and English school board participation all across Quebec.

Otis Grant said that the interactive workshop format would likely be used for students in other classes too.