Local entrepreneur spreading business knowledge to youth | Business | Berkeley Independent

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Local entrepreneur spreading business knowledge to youth

Published Tuesday, August 31, 2010 12:11 PM

By Jim Tatum
Berkeley Independent

Chad Vail is young, but no newcomer to the business world. A successful entrepreneur, he now is in a different line of work – dedicated to training a new generation of entrepreneurs.

Vail, who is president of Junior Achievement’s South Carolina Coastal Region, recently spent a few minutes with the Goose Creek Rotary talking about his organization’s mission and goals and how he got involved.

Vail was still a senior at The Citadel when he opened his first business. With the help of his parents, the Summerville native started a hot pretzel franchise, “The Pretzel Twister.” Within a few years, the business had prospered, ultimately opening in several locations around the tri-county area.

But early on, Vail found the old saw, “Good help is hard to find,” to be true, he said.

It wasn’t that there were no candidates; on the contrary, he said he never had a shortage of applicants at all. Because of the business model, Vail’s labor pool was mostly teenagers – students looking for work after school.

The problem was, they not only had no work skills but they had no sense of what it means to be responsible for a job, and no idea how to approach something as simply but as vital as a job interview. “Eight out of ten were simply unemployable,” Vail said.

The problems were largely soft skills – how to speak politely, how to dress for a job interview, how to conduct oneself. He would ask an applicant how she planned to get to work the next day, for example, and be met with a blank stare – that applicant simply had not thought that far ahead.

Vail said his concerns became so great he decided to volunteer in schools to try to teach these vital – and seemingly non-existent – skills. He actually put together his own curriculum, and did his best to identify with the students.

Eventually, Vail found out about Junior Achievement Worldwide, which is the world’s largest organization dedicated to educating students about workforce readiness, entrepreneurship and financial literacy through experiential, hands-on programs, he said. The program recruits volunteers to help empower students with the knowledge they need to become productive workers, good citizens, and informed consumers, and more important, how they can achieve their dreams.

Vail said he was so impressed with what he found out that he went to work for Junior Achievement – as president of the organization’s coastal region of South Carolina.

“They have a curriculum in place, a tried and true, turnkey situation,” he said. “It’s so well thought out, step by step, that if you just follow the steps, you can’t help but succeed.

“It’s a credible, targeted, proven financial literacy curriculum and it’s broken down for all ages – elementary, middle, and high schools.”

In fact, evidence based research has shown that students in Kindergarten through 12th grade are more likely to be successful in life with proper understanding of real work economics, he said.

Vail also noted that Junior Achievement has been in place in this country for nearly a century; the coastal region program since 1966.

This year, Vail said one of his goals for the region is to establish 500 Junior Achievement programs with 10,000-12,500 participants. To that end, his region will be partnering with three South Carolina Regional Education Centers for a joint venture that will deliver JA’s “Success Skills” and “Careers with a Purpose” curriculums to high school freshmen throughout the service area.

“We are also working with various Rotary Clubs and other service organizations throughout the region to identify volunteers and funding support,” he said.

For more information visit www.JACOASTALSC.org.

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