Jill Conyers of the Lifespan Center facilitated two wonderful exercises to teach the class to listen and follow directions. Two groups had the same instructions, but came up with two very different drawings. Then the class brainstormed group business ideas. They followed the best practices of writing down their thoughts first, then sharing them with the group without criticism. Quite a few                                                                    great ideas were put on the board.

Jeremy Miller of Rural King Supply shared with the class valuable information about Rural King and their on-line stores and the different e-commerce options available to start-ups. When making our decision, we should research the platform, templates, customer service assistance and cost. We also need to decide how to drive our                                                          business to the site. Using other's sites to sell,                                                                such as Amazon and E-bay may be a good first                                                              step before a lot of capital is spent.

The class is moving through the process of coming up with ideas, researching those ideas and determining if their idea will make a feasible group business. Their goal is to pay for their start-up expenses for their individual businesses plus have enough of a profit to pay for a field trip to Chicago, so their profit needs to be high. We hope to roll out the idea soon.

Learning about the titans of industry - Vanderbilt, Morgan, and Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford, teach us about what traits are found in successful people. We should also learn through their failures and shortsightedness. This six part series is filled with lessons on ethics and promotes identifying the next big trend and capitalizing on it.