Kelli Galentine
LV Life Editor
Six-foot long cell phone chargers and wrist pedometers are two products buzzing around campus, as the integrated business program students work to maintain donation profits in their business endeavors.
XBand and ConnecTech are the two businesses created this year by students participating in the business practicum, where students are teamed in groups to write a business plan and execute the sale of a product.
“It is stressful because it is half of your grade and it is a real job and a real business so you have to take that much effort and you have to do it,” said Priya Patel, junior accounting major and chief financial officer for ConnecTech. “It isn’t an assignment you can just forget about, you have to constantly be doing something,”
In the integrated business program students take finance, management, marketing and the business practicum classes with the same group for an entire semester. Within the group, students are broken off into teams of more than 10 which develop their business plans.
“Other than very general guidelines, the students run the business everyday,” Paul Abbondante, associate professor of finance and adviser for the practicum, said.
“We observe them and we answer questions but when it comes to their business one of the comments they hear from me regularly is, ‘It’s your business you decide,’ and sometimes they don’t like that.”
ConnecTech is selling six-foot long cell phone chargers and donating their profits to the Breast Cancer Research foundation while XBand’s wrist pedometers will benefit the American Diabetes Association. So far, ConnecTech has sold more than 415 chargers and XBand has sold more than 48 pedometers. Both are on track for their sales projections.
The pedometers are available in four different colors and cost $28 each. Six-foot cell phone chargers for iPhone 4, iPhone 5 and Android each in three different colors are available one for $15 and two for $25.
In the beginning of the semester students write their business plan and then present to Wells Fargo bankers who loan them money to start their business. Then students order products and work to sell to as many markets as possible.
“Working with real money adds pressure. It isn’t like a homework assignment where you pull numbers out of the blue, it is real numbers that have to account for every penny,” Patel said.
Wells Fargo donates money to the program after students present their business plan to bankers who decide on the terms of the loans that kick-start the businesses. The money is later donated to the charity of the students’ choice.
“The experience of starting your own business with real money is the main benefit of the program,” Abbondante said.
Throughout the process of selling, students face real-world problems like not getting products in on time — a trouble that XBand faced earlier this semester.
“Our first two weeks we went without selling because of a Chinese holiday; we were not able to place our order,” said Candi Gomez, junior business major and chief executive officer of XBand.
To make up for the lost time, XBand began taking pre-sale orders so that they could still meet profit projections before their pedometers even came in.
“There are certain kinds of problems that can not be taught in a classroom,” Abbondante said.
For more information about XBand visit ulvxbands.wix.com/xband and for more information about ConnecTech visit sites.google.com/a/laverne.edu/connectech/.
Kellie Galentine can be reached at kellie.galentine@laverne.edu.
