the
LEADERSHIP
GENE
It’s not just budding entrepreneurs benefitting
from early exposure to the world of business.
Lois Lang, a partner with Evolve Partner Group
in Stockton, has coached family companies on
planning a successful and profitable future for
25-plus years. In the last decade, she’s added
a new tier of mostly teenage clientele. Lang
introduced new sessions for students ages
12–22 after realizing that even the best-run
family businesses lack solid plans to bring the
next generation into the fold.
“Some kids will say they heard about the busi-
ness a lot around the table, but they have no
idea what it actually means and what the ca-
reers are, other than what their parents did,”
she explains. “[And] a lot of parents have a
hard time telling their children that they would
like them to work some other place first.”
Lang helps facilitate conversations on every-
thing, including org charts and leadership
skills. Sometimes the outcomes are practical
— one client signed up for a new college elec-
tive that could apply to his parents’ business.
But the biggest benefit is the act of thinking
about a future career path and the skills they’ll
need. “The family business is like any other
business and they need to not treat it like its
a safety net to fall back on,” Lang says. “It’s
something to prepare for, not to catch them if
they fall.”
~ Torey Van Oot
nior Achievement Sacramento, the local arm of the
national entrepreneurship, financial literacy and
work-readiness organization, sets out to give kids
a “real understanding of what it means to be a real
entrepreneur” as early as kindergarten, President
Susan Nelson says. By third grade, participants
are putting together a business plan. The benefit of
starting at that point is that younger children see
no limits. “Right away, they self-identify with the
entrepreneur; you can see all those light bulbs go
off, and that’s fantastic,” Nelson says.
That exposure can be life-changing for the
young people who participate in Junior Achieve-
ment’s programming. “That baseline of under-
standing what entrepreneurship is is critical for
all students to be aware of and integrate into the
choices they make, whether they become entrepre-
neurs or not,” Nelson says.
To meet that goal, and increasing demand, the
nonprofit has focused on expanding its offerings
to include a wider variety of programs for youth at
different age levels. It now serves just under 13,000
K-12 students across the region — up from about
8,900 five years ago — and offers 12-week after-
school programs, lesson plans intended to be in-
tegrated into the classroom, and one-time school
visits from local startup owners who can provide a
brief “intro to entrepreneurship,” Nelson says.
At the high school level, ongoing programming
focused on entrepreneurship can help shape stu-
dents’ career pathways and college decisions. Da
Vinci Charter Academy in Davis has made creat-
ing a business proposal a graduation requirement.
As part of their senior project, students collabo-
rate to pitch an idea to a panel of judges. (Like Sac
State’s summer academy, the idea was inspired by
ABC’s “Shark Tank,” a show where founders pitch
their businesses to a panel of big-name investors.)
Principal Tyler Millsap says the goal is to expose
students to “skills that are applicable and rele-
vant across all kinds of business or entrepreneur-
ial experiences,” including communication and
project management.
Millsap has seen the excitement that comes
from students realizing they already have the
makings of a viable business, or when judges ex-
press genuine interest in exploring final proposals
as actual business concepts. Even when the busi-
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