Mrs. Slife – Originally, when we started the bistro many years ago, about 10 years ago, we were selling cookies from a table in the cafeteria, and it was a small scale thing. Then the school saw the interest that the students had and a lot of what we do is influenced by the market research that we do with the student body. After selling cookies, students showed interest in coffee and ice cream. It’s been a combination of surveying the general student trends and looking at the cost of bringing in different products. The school was generous enough to offer a space. It’s a shared space but when we bought our freezer we brought it in there.

Jennifer – I joined my freshman year and I’ve always had an interest in business. I wanted to learn more about it because business is something that I’m interested in majoring in for college. My parents own their own business so I’ve always been in a business setting. I hoped to learn more when I came to Magnificat and joined the entrepreneurship club.

Molly – I also joined the entrepreneurship club my freshman year. I joined because one of my teammates was the leader of the club. I got into it because a lot of my family members own their own businesses and I watched them a lot throughout my childhood run their businesses and go through their own ups and downs so I wanted to learn more about entrepreneurship. Selling the ice cream is definitely a good illustration of running your own business because when you’re selling you’re going to have your good days where a lot of people buy it and you’re going to have days where not as many people buy it.

Jennifer – We sell every Tuesday of the school year before it gets colder. That’s from the start of the school year until October, November or the start of December depending on the weather. We have members of our entrepreneurship club volunteer there for about a half hour each. It’s a good time because we get to see new faces and our friends. We also get to interact with so many people. It’s really fun.

Molly – We’re selling every Tuesday to so many people. It’s students coming for their athletics or staying after school for another activity and they buy ice cream. We get to meet a lot of people we wouldn’t normally get to see.

Jennifer – It’s mainly the behind the scenes of it. As a customer or consumer you may not see what goes on after you buy the product, or in this case the ice cream, and I’ve dealt a lot with the planning and the finance aspect of it. Like ordering how much of a tub or figuring out the pricing and profit. It’s a lot of math but it’s fun to see how much you profit when comparing first and second semester or year to year that we’ve sold.

Molly – My favorite part is analyzing after we sell something and figuring out if that will affect what we buy in the future or how much we buy and other factors that come along with that.

Mrs. Slife – I think it’s leadership that they gain from being in charge and taking ownership of the end result. It’s being able to see their ideas and generate plans for marketing and seeing that pay off. It’s good to teach them those skills and they’re also learning about accounting which is a bonus. It’s not the level of math that determines if you’re good at it, it’s just being precise and careful with your calculations and anticipating costs of running a business.

Jennifer – It’s a lot of communication and working behind the scenes with other club members or the club moderator and trying to figure everything out. It’s also a good experience.

Molly – I feel like you get to learn a lot about the opportunity cost of things and how buying and selling one thing versus the other has different advantages and disadvantages based on what your product is.

Mrs. Slife – When we sell the product, we want to make it affordable for our students but we’re also raising money to support our outreach programs that we do here at Magnificat and that charitable side is really important to us. Every speaker that we bring to talk to us, whether it’s an alumni or not, the focus is not only on the profit that a business makes but the good that it can do in the community. These two students, Jennifer and Molly, are a great example of students who have stuck with it all four years and have dedicated a lot of time to what we do. They’ve dedicated themselves to a lot of the research that we’ve done to help outreach. Whether it’s providing support, buying food to take to the domestic violence shelter, or buying socks for the West Side Catholic Center. They’re always promoting to the student body that this isn’t just an opportunity to sell ice cream and make money. It’s more about the community we’re serving as a school and giving back.

Mrs. Slife – Sometimes there are ups and downs of not being busy when you anticipated that you would be swamped so you have all these extra products and figuring out how to get the student body to buy and incentivize them. It’s important to pivot and to know when to change course if something isn’t going their way. They have also learned a lot about staffing because if no one is volunteering to work then it falls on the two of them to make sure they open the bistro.

Jennifer – I would tell them to give the entrepreneurship club a shot because it may sound really intimidating at first and you may not know what you’re getting yourself into but I think it’s a good opportunity to meet with people you like or meet new people. You also learn a lot about general business. We have a lot of people in our club that are involved in different aspects of business and we try to cover that on a month to month basis when we have our monthly meetings. We try to show a topic of business that they like during our meetings. We really try to have our members have a voice in the club.

Molly – I would say to just give it a try because I agree that a business club can sound intimidating. When I was a freshman, I thought you joined and were just thrown into running a business but we really take the time in our meetings to have our members learn each aspect of running a business. Then if they want to they can work at the bistro and apply those skills in real life.

Mrs. Slife – I think the biggest thing is the amount of time that you may not realize is involved in supervising. You want the students to have the ownership of being involved themselves, so you have to delegate, supervise and be very precise in their record keeping and mentor them in how they do that.

Mrs. Slife – I think I would tell another educator to get involved with not only allowing the students to take ownership and leadership of the group with little supervision but to also get people involved that are interested in sharing what they know about their careers. While I’m an educator who has taken courses that have trained me how to teach business, there’s nothing like firsthand experience and being willing to hear it from someone who does it every day.

Jennifer – I have wanted to major in business and that’s something I’ve wanted to study. I want to go into accounting and that’s not directly what our club is doing but it’s related. I am also doing a pre-law track.

Molly – I want to major in finance in college and I want to minor in business. I want to become an investment banker and run my own business. I would like to learn how to do the investment and finance side and then take those skills to run my own business.

Mrs. Slife – A role model of mine is the teacher that started this program, she was a business educator and with helping her she showed me what procedures she already had in place. I also learned from programs that are out there for professional and business development. Learning from others helped me pivot and develop the entrepreneurship program in new ways. I think it’s really fun to see the innovation and ideas of business are playing out in areas of the school beyond our club and class. I think that’s because the girls are naturals at being creative, innovating, and learning new ideas. I feel like we’re starting to grow in a new direction with trends we see in their interests. From the time we had our first school based business and were selling cookies, to having our own space, to now looking at how we can sell honey and sell different things.

Mrs. Slife – We’ve always enjoyed going to field trips by the Veale Youth Entrepreneurship Forum, like Thinkfest at John Carroll University. The girls love Dr. Stamp. This year they were really excited about the use of AI and how it was incorporated into the activities and the program was changed up. We’ve also gone to Hackathon and the Junior Achievement Stock Market Challenge. In this club, there are girls interested in different aspects of business. Some of them want to be involved in the financial side of it. We also love the thinkBIG! Challenge and thinkBIG! Summit. We usually use that business competition in the curriculum to teach the girls about entrepreneurship by developing a business plan and writing an executive summary. We also use the prototyping kits from Veale and Upcycle Parts Shop. Those are invaluable, especially during the summer when we run our Lemonade Day Camp. Students say we need to use them for the girls who attend that camp so that they can experience developing their ideas and prototyping them with the kits. All of that has been a great experience. Also, just going to the thinkBIG! Summit itself has been so much fun for us. Our students have such a fun experience networking with other kids from other schools and taking part in the activities. There have been several years where we have been a part of the final four pitch and they got to see their peers give that pitch and support them.

Mrs. Slife – It involves a lot of collaboration with people outside of the school that want to be involved in educating students about business. I feel like our alumni network has been important in supporting us. If I need somebody to judge a business pitch competition, our alumni are willing to mentor and coach the girls to develop business ideas and executive summaries.

Mrs. Slife – Since this is my last year and Kate Ebert is taking on the Blue Streak Bistro and entrepreneurship program, I’m thinking she will take it in a new direction that is even better. I feel like there are all these ideas that she has that are fresh and really, I think that’s what you see in the real world in business. You see people coming in and having that openness to hearing other people’s ideas and the way they see the program evolving is exciting. I’m hopeful for what’s coming, and I think it’s going to be even better and continue to evolve over time. I have absolute faith in the ideas that I’ve heard.