91ÊÓƵÍøÕ¾ÎÛ

I grew up in rural Wisconsin. I had the minibike, the snowmobile and the three-wheeler and I enjoyed tinkering. So, in school, I naturally enjoyed hands-on courses and found myself taking machining, welding, automotive, all that stuff.

When I was career planning, I decided I should be a tech ed teacher. I could teach and I could be around all the stuff I like.

Shops can kind of be the dumping ground of the school. The expectations are low and the budgets are low. That was the case at the first shop I inherited.

After two years of teaching, I started my first student-run business, and it did really well. It fixed everything.

It's more fun to build stuff for people than to just learn competencies.

I did that for six years and then I moved. A year later the local shop teacher left and I applied and got that job. That was in 2005.

I had a big shop, but it was cluttered with junk. Every tool was unmaintained. Everything was dull. It was messy. The kids’ skills were low. Slowly but surely, we pushed to a higher level.

I teach classes from 7th grade to 11th grade. The classes are prerequisites. Then they have to apply for Cardinal Manufacturing. It's a real shop.

It’s run by 22 seniors. We have a finance person and a marketing person, and engineering and project management, a production manager who schedules jobs and ensures everything is running smoothly, and then we have the shopfloor production workers — the machinists, the welders, the woodworkers and maintenance staff.

Jobs come in and it's pretty much all word of mouth. We can't keep up — we're busy.

We’ve got a variety of equipment. We do a little bit of everything.

We have a fund. Any money we make goes into the account and any money we spend comes out of the account. We can usually generate around $150,000 a year. Students get a cut of the profit, and clothing, travel, and we feed them a lot.

It's self-sustaining. It doesn't cost the school anything and all the profits get spent right back in the shop.

It’s the perfect way to teach employability skills, because you have customers and vendors in your shop. You communicate with them, you document, you make phone calls, you e-mail them.

I have ridiculous standards for them. Whatever you think they can do, multiply it by 100 and expect that.

We've had multiple kids start their own businesses or take over family businesses. I’m watching them be entrepreneurs, watching them be informed investors, watching them buy homes, watching them understand how to pay it forward.

More than half of the kids pursue careers in technical fields related to manufacturing. But all of them come back and say, ‘The biggest takeaway was my confidence and my employability skills and my communication skills.’ Because once you are confident you can do anything.

Learn more about starting a student-run manufacturing business at