Saratoga entrepreneurs get a head start

For most students in teacher Mike Davey’s economics class, the business proposal simulation on Oct. 24 was just another class project, but a group of seniors decided to take the project one step further and try to make their proposed business plan a reality.

This group, composed of seniors Mark Van Aken, Robert Belpasso, Penny Burgess, Claire Couch, Sean Walsh, Marshall Westall and Michael Zuccarino, developed a project creating a company that would make portable and louder sub-woofers, —speakers that produce very low frequencies—than are currently on the market.

According to Van Aken, the sub-woofers they are planning to create “would produce sound levels of 136 decibels, which is really loud—louder than a rock concert.”

Van Aken and Zuccarino developed a similar idea last year for a physics project and decided to continue working on it.

“People loved it last year,” Van Aken said. “We thought it would make a good subject for the business proposal, so we expanded on it.”

On the day of the simulation, Davey invited Rusty Dehorn, a sales executive at Network Appliance, TS Ramakrishnan, one of the founders of Facebook and Greg Spirakis, a former Vice President of Inte, to judge the students.

According to Van Aken, these judges greatly appreciated their group’s promotional video that they showed along with their presentation.

“They thought it was effective,” Van Aken said. “They actually noted how we dressed, how we presented, how well we knew our information and that we showed passion for our information.”

Burgess felt that presenting to the professionals was challenging, but in hindsight was a good learning experience.

“Presenting for the judges was very difficult, because they were a pretty intimidating group and asked very good questions,” Burgess said. “But their feedback gave us all a reality check on how difficult it really is to start up a business, and how little we had actually considered in our proposals.”’

Although the presentation was challenging, Burgess enjoyed the entire process of building her own business.

“I really enjoyed sitting together at the table and making plans for different sizes, prices, and costs of different parts,” Burgess said. “It felt like we were actually planning a business, which was very cool.”

The Wumbles Corp. group has decided to continue working on their project proposals even though the in-class simulation project has already ended because they hope to actually sell their product.

“We have a group on Facebook where we talk about possible routes for buying things such as how we might get a quantity discount or make a good quality product,” Van Aken said. “Then we will start building the products and marketing them somehow.”

According to Burgess, Van Aken was the driving force behind the idea of continuing to work on the project.

“He’s pretty determined to make the Wumbles Corp. into an actual business,” Burgess said. “Sound engineering seems to be something that he enjoys and is passionate about.”

The entire experience of creating a product proposal for a business, according to Burgess, was extremely educational and rewarding.

“I think it taught us all that if we want to start up our own business, it’s not going to be easy, and it’s not going to be cheap,” Burgess said.