Students get a look at entrepreneurship through Downtown Accelerator

The next generation of Windsor-Essex business leaders gathered Wednesday at an Entrepreneurial Summit to see first-hand how it’s done.

About 60 students from Assumption High School met for seminars at the Downtown Accelerator with half a dozen successful entrepreneurs, including keynote speaker Andrew Tepperman, president of Tepperman’s.

The success of the summit with high school students left Jeremy Bracken, department head for business at Assumption, optimistic about local entrepreneurship.

“This generation (has) a series of tools and resources that we never had,” Bracken said. “They can grab ideas and interact with people from around the world and find niches that never existed before.”

Some attendees already have businesses set up, even though still in their teens.

“We have multiple kids who are already business owners, who’ve got grants for a summer company,” Bracken said. “A couple of kids running incorporated non-profits for over a decade.”

The summit is to give young people with business spirit the information they need to nurture their ideas, Bracken said. And after years of holding the summit – which started in 2013 – there are success stories.

“A lot of the successes are kids that maybe have a small business as a side hustle where they have a core day job, but other ones have gone all in — they’re now at a scale where they have dozens of their own employees across multiple cities,” he said.

“Those are kids that were at the Entrepreneurship Summit eight, 10 years ago. And lessons and inspiration from that day a decade ago have directly led to their current levels of success.”

A survey of students perceptions in 2013 showed only 20 per cent in the entrepreneurial high school program thought positively about a start-up business as a career option, said Arthur Barbut, CEO of the Downtown Windsor Business Accelerator.

In 2019, the last summit held before the COVID-19 shutdowns, a similar survey showed 87 per per cent liked the prospect, he said.

“One of the reasons I’m passionate about the accelerator… (is) I don’t want my kids to have to leave their city to get a job,” he said. “If you want to create something, to build something, we should have the support systems, mentors to help you do that.”

Reni Babs-Olorunfemi, in the high school’s International Baccalaureate program, runs his own business providing 3D models of homes to real estate agents. It was an idea he got from TikTok. He plans to attend University of Toronto to study commerce next year.

The summit works to “motivate us to know there is an opportunity out there,” he said. “And to know we can achieve that.”

Maya Mikhael has run a non-profit raising money for the homeless for 10 years. He is heading to University of Windsor to study behaviour cognition and neuroscience.

“We heard form Andrew Tepperman today, walking us through the history of how Tepperman’s began,” Mikhael said. “It’s motivating to see his grandpa, who he said had nothing and how he opened this business. He did that by himself. So, who’s to say that my 17-year-old self can’t start anything like that?”

Barbut described it as “critically important” to nurture the next generation “It’s one of the biggest challenges as a city; you have massive brain drain,” he said of young people after they graduate.

The summit helps expose young people to others with an entrepreneurial spirit, Barbut said.

“It’s very lonely (running your own business),” he said. “The one thing is introducing them and opening their minds to what is possible, what different types of businesses they can pursue. The other thing is to introduce them to an ecosystem of other like-minded people where it’s the same culture.

“You have to surround yourself with people who believe in you.”