Matt Steiner: Entrepreneurship Club at Watertown Boys & Girls Club offers business skills

Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg.

These are some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world. They have great stories of how they got to where they are today with an idea to either create something new or improve on something that already existed. They saw an opportunity or were given an opportunity to make a change, and we have benefited from that.

But none of the amazing products or concepts that they have created would have been possible if they had not had the resources or perhaps someone else to help push them to achieve that goal.

At the Boys & Girls Club, we strive to do that every day by offering unique opportunities for youth to find something they are passionate about or realize their full potential through different programs and activities. One of the programs that we are very excited about is our Entrepreneurship Club. This club is unique and unlike any other we have because this program is designed for members to learn what it takes to run a self-owned business by selling a product that they make themselves.

Through this concept, members are learning how to manage money and how to manage their time efficiently to get their projects done. An example of this is a project they did for the Snow Queen competition. They were asked to come up with a product that all of the Snow Queen competitors would receive for their participation. The members decided on a tumbler drinking cup and used the cricket in the club’s makerspace to create and print a decal they would place on the tumbler. Through this project, they had to research the cost of the cups, vinyl for printing and how long it would take to make the finished product. They would use this information to come up with a price that would cover both the cost of the cop and to get seed money to start their next project.

This Entrepreneurship Club is now working on designing shirts for our drumline group, the STIXX, having some unique items to sell to members and other club events to help raise funds for their program.

The Boys & Girls Club of Watertown offers many unique experiences and opportunities like this each day. Through these opportunities our youth are learning valuable life skills to better themselves.

Matt Steiner is the program director at the Boys & Girls Club of Watertown.

This article originally appeared on Watertown Public Opinion: Kids can learn business skills in the Entrepreneurship Club