CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) — Over 60 teenagers from across Central Virginia gathered at Piedmont Virginia Community College last month to learn valuable lessons about entrepreneurship and hear from local entrepreneurs about how they started their businesses.

The event was the Boys & Girls Clubs of Central Virginia’s annual Teen Summit, which is held every year as part of the clubs’ Life & Workforce Readiness programming.

The summit focuses on a different theme each year, with entrepreneurship beginning selected for this year.

BGCCVA Director of Life & Workforce Readiness James Miller told Cville Right Now the idea to do the summit on entrepreneurship came from the clubs’ weekly Career Chats, another part of the Life & Workforce Readiness program in which teens visit local businesses and hear from professionals.

“A common theme that we’ve heard from the teens is like, ‘Well, I want to start my own business,'” he said. “They don’t necessarily want to work for somebody else. They see people, influencers saying that they work for themselves, et cetera. So, we wanted to kind of give them a foundation of what that might look like, how you can get there, and some of the hurdles you might face, and then just give them a little bit of experience of like building their own brand.”

This year’s summit began with a panel featuring three local business owners — Kate Chirico of Central Virginia Swim School, Scott Hamler of 4Z Digital and Troy Robinson of Order Up Mobile Catering — facilitated by Markiana Smith of United Way.

Chirico told Cville Right Now she joined the panel due to her joint love of volunteering as well as entrepreneurship, as she believes entrepreneurship is an important skill that should be taught more.

“It’s not something you have to do full-time, you don’t have to go full-time into a business,” she said. “But if you have something on the side, it’s a way to support yourself through college or just gain some financial independence. And you can learn a lot and be creative, and it just takes an idea.”

The panelists shared their experiences and took questions from the teens, like what their first jobs were and how they got their businesses started.

“A lot of the questions had to do (with), and it makes sense, ‘How did you start?’ Because I think that’s the scariest thing and the most confusing thing,” Hamler told Cville Right Now.

Hamler added his advice is always to “start something. Don’t think about it for forever and ever. Just take a step, even if it’s small, and then take it from there.”

After the panel, the teens got the opportunity to put that in practice in an activity where they separated into groups and came up with business ideas.

These ideas included a fashion line, BBQ restaurants, pet grooming, healthy snack machines at Club sites, sports training and equipment and a food truck.

“It was amazing just some of the business concepts that they came up with,” BGCCVA Chief Operating Officer Michael Gulley told Cville Right Now. “And even down to logo and branding, and some of them had spot advertisements for their products. It was just amazing what they came up with in less than an hour.”

Gulley said they were so impressed by some of the business concepts, him and Miller discussed creating a program out of the concept, perhaps even ending in a competition where BGCCVA could award money to help turn these concepts into reality.

“We’re already talking about how we can expand this into a regular program that we do at Boys & Girls Club,” he said. “And really help these teen members get these organizations off the ground, whether it’s an LLC, whether it’s a nonprofit they want to start, but also providing seed money for it.”