Chamblee’s Entrepreneurship Club was recently founded by its president, Ella King (‘26). The club focuses on helping high school students find a way to create a business and teaching proper business practices. Recently, club members successfully sold their homemade products during the 2024 Brookhaven Cherry Blossom Festival.
“I want to be an entrepreneur when I am older, and I thought starting a club would be a great way to express my passion to others and help others create their own businesses. I didn’t realize how successful it was going to be. I was really pleased with the results,” said King.
King’s experience founding Entrepreneurship Club shows that creating a club takes many hours of hard work and dedication.
“To create my club, I first had to come up with an idea for what to do, and then I made a layout of what the club would be like. I made a Google Doc and wrote down my main goals, objectives, restrictions for members, when we would meet, times, and more. Then, I also had to explain the structure of each meeting in this semester and have an outline of what we would talk about. After that, I had to find a teacher sponsor to sponsor my club. From there, my teacher sponsor, [Lucretia Gant], the engineering teacher, got the club approved by the school,” said King.
Utilizing social media and advertising is important when forming a new club; a large aspect of strengthening a club includes gaining members.
“To get people to join, I posted flyers around the school, texted people the information, and made an Instagram account for the club. Next year, I plan on posting more on Instagram to gain more publicity for my club. I really need to take advantage of social media more in the future,” said King.
Being the founder and president of this club, King prepares every meeting and helps other members prepare their businesses.
“We meet every other week on Mondays from 3:30 to 4:30. Every meeting is different. During the first semester, the club was all about developing a business plan and getting ideas. During the second semester, it was all about actually executing that business plan. For example, we’re talking about marketing strategies and developing products into something more unique. We’ve talked about pricing, quantity, quality, and other general business things. Everything the members sold this year was handmade, so we didn’t have to work with any factories, which was super convenient,” said King.
For most of the year, Entrepreneurship Club members have worked on their businesses to sell products at the 2024 Brookhaven Cherry Blossom Festival.
“I reached out to the City of Brookhaven to try to get a sponsorship for the Cherry Blossom Festival. We were provided with a tent and tables and had the opportunity to sell products. I had to do a lot of emailing and coordinating back and forth, but it worked out really well,” said King.
Learning about proper business models and creating quality products takes up the majority of Entrepreneurship Club meetings.
“At meetings, we talk about our plans for the businesses we hope to run. We [planned] selling our products at the Cherry Blossom Festival, so at most of the meetings, we made sure everyone was on target with their products,” said Nick Jovonavic (‘27).
Being a fully student-organized club poses many challenges for the members.
“The biggest challenge that I faced was getting people to respond to my emails. It’s a lot of behind-the-scenes coordination with adults that I didn’t actually expect. I feel like they kind of put us off because we’re just high schoolers, and we weren’t the top of their priorities. I’d have to write up a lot of follow-up emails to get people to respond to me,” said King.
Preparing for the Cherry Blossom Festival prior to its occurrence took up most of the time during club meetings; being able to see the end result was very motivating for members.
“The Cherry Blossom Festival was definitely a big success. We made over $1,000 in profits. I loved seeing everyone be able to see their vision put together,” said King.
Many members were initially interested in joining Entrepreneurship Club to better their skills in business.
“I love to make candles, and this seemed like a good opportunity to sell them. I wanted to learn more about business,” said Sloane Drummond (‘26).
Others wanted to join to have the chance to sell their own homemade items.
“One of my friends told me about Entrepreneurship Club, and I was really interested in joining. I’ve always wanted to make my own business because I love art, especially painting tote bags,” said Madiha Sayeed (‘26).
Several members say that the opportunities the club has given to sell products have led to personal success.
“I love to do art, so I paint tote bags, make clay pins, and make jewelry. I came up with the idea over the summer, and I made these things for my friends. Then, it turned more into a business. It ended up being very successful with Entrepreneurship Club, and I had a lot of fun preparing and selling my products,” said Sayeed.
Entrepreneurship Club is unique because unlike other clubs, it is almost fully organized by students.
Jovonavic said, “I was interested because there weren’t any other hands-on clubs that were student-led at the school. We were able to make our own products and work on advertising.”
