Green River College students develop, launch businesses

Students in Green River College’s marketing and entrepreneurship bachelor’s degree program are gaining real-world experience.

For the past two quarters, 18 students in the Venture Launch capstone class have worked in groups to develop and start five businesses – a weightlifting apparel line, a resume review service, a retractable brow towel for kitchen workers, a consulting company for makeup artists and a Yelp-like app for dog owners.

This is the first cohort to complete the Venture Launch course. The program’s first graduates will be honored at Green River’s commencement ceremony June 10 at the ShoWare Center.

The marketing and entrepreneurship program, which started in January 2015, is structured so that most students with an associates degree can complete a bachelor’s degree in six full-time quarters. Jeff Perlot and Tim Broxholm, business instructors at Green River, designed the program, which combines online and face-to-face classes at the Kent Station campus.

Last quarter, students came up with the idea for the business and pitched it to the Gators in the Swamp – a panel of local business owners modeled after the television show “Shark Tank” – for feedback.

“Even coming into Venture Launch 2, they had already pivoted some of their businesses to make adjustments based on that feedback,” Perlot said.

Each group received $2,000 seed money, which came out of their program fees, for their business.

Any money made during the class will go back into the program to be used for scholarships or future Venture Launch projects, Perlot said.

“They will officially wind down what they are doing here but they have proven the concept,” he said. “They basically have a business-in-a-box. If the day after they graduate, they want to go register the URL, get a trademark and restart this thing they could totally hit the ground running.”

At the end of the quarter, the project teams will present to the Gators again, but this time with the opportunity to attract investors to fund their business outside of the class.

Mark Sims, chief executive officer of Fikes, a Kent-based janitorial supply company, is one of the Gators.

“I thought all of the ideas were very creative, in fact, just as much or more than any I’d seen or been pitched in recent years from start up rounds,” Sims said in an email.

Having local businesses involved is beneficial to the businesses and students alike, Sims said.

“This is where entrepreneurial enthusiasm and creativity meets business metrics and pragmatism,” he said. “I feel that in the first round the students and Gators posing questions and having a productive dialogue accomplished that.”

Sims plans to stay involved with the marketing and entrepreneurship program.

“I love business and entrepreneurialism, as well as giving back to the community, so I hope this is just the start,” he said.

Perlot looks forward to seeing the program grow.

“Maybe we create some sort of incubator or, at the very least, what we do is we create a really robust network of business owners or angel investors that becomes a huge resource to our students,” he said.

A main goal of the program, Perlot said, is to build relationships between students and the business community.

“I really hope our students have these relationships when they leave here where they can just pick up the phone and ask someone for advice about their career,” he said.

Dogs inspire business concept

Anita Ripley, of Auburn, and Ashleigh Ligon, of Federal Way, are part of a three-person team that developed Woofster, an app for dog owners.

“We were just sitting around talking about dog ownership,” Ripley said of the business concept. “We all have dogs and we all have challenges with our dogs. We were talking about how it would be nice to have a place where you could get information or have scheduling done, like a one-stop shop for health needs for your dog.”

The group originally planned to create a mobile app.

“We are using a website to manage most of it with hopes to build a mobile app in the future,” Ligon said. “We just couldn’t encompass as much as we wanted in a mobile app in the time period of the Venture Launch.”

Both women hope to continue Woofster after the class, selling subscriptions to the app to make a profit.

One of the biggest challenges the group faced was finding a name for their product.

“We had several other ideas we had hoped to use but they were trademarked or taken,” Ligon said.

One of the names they liked, Fit Fido, was already taken. They settled on Fit Pup, but the Gators told them the moniker was limiting.

“We are a one-stop shop” Ligon said. “We are fitness. We are health. We’re dog reminders, dog parks. Anything that had the name fit in it wasn’t encompassing.”

The project-based program has taught Ripley a lot.

“It’s nice to learn real-world applications while you are doing it,” she said. “We have worked with other companies. We’ve run digital marketing campaigns. We’ve developed marketing campaigns for a nonprofit in Auburn. For me, the program has changed everything.”

Real-world skills

Emily Fowler, of Auburn, spent two years as an engineering student at the University of Washington before changing her course of study.

“I stumbled upon this (marketing and entrepreneurship) program,” she said. “The people I nannied for at the time, she teaches guitar lessons at Green River and she knew about the program. She told me about it I was like, ‘This actually seems really cool.’ In a matter of weeks I was getting ready for the program.”

For her Venture Launch project, Fowler and three other students started Lifting Seattle, a clothing line for weightlifters.

The group designed and created T-shirts and tank tops that say “Gain Grit,” which are sold through a website.

Fowler said promoting the product has been a challenge.

“How do I get people to know about this – that has been our hardest thing,” she said. “How do we get people interested.”

She said the group is trying to overcome that obstacle by distributing flyers, social media campaigns and word of mouth.

The skills Fowler has learned in the marketing program will translate to her job with EZ Access, a company that provides solutions to commercial and home accessibility for people with disabilities.

“Gaining basic business knowledge is really valuable to bring to the company because I do marketing,” she said. “I’m very intertwined with the sales team.”