Chad Vail might be young but he is no newcomer to the word of business. Now a successful entrepreneur, he has entered into a new line of work. Chad is training a new generation of entrepreneurs reports The Berkley Independent.
Vail, who is president of Junior Achievement’s South Carolina Coastal Region, recently spent a few minutes with the Goose Creek Rotary talking about his organization’s mission and goals and how he got involved.
Vail was still a senior at The Citadel when he opened his first business. With the help of his parents, the Summerville native started a hot pretzel franchise, “The Pretzel Twister.” Within a few years, the business had prospered, ultimately opening in several locations around the tri-county area.
But early on, Vail found the old saw, “Good help is hard to find,” to be true, he said.
It wasn’t that there were no candidates; on the contrary, he said he never had a shortage of applicants at all. Because of the business model, Vail’s labor pool was mostly teenagers — students looking for work after school.
The problem was, they not only had no work skills but they had no sense of what it means to be responsible for a job, and no idea how to approach something as simply but as vital as a job interview. “Eight out of ten were simply unemployable,” Vail said.
Vail said his concerns became so great he decided to volunteer in schools to try to teach these vital — and seemingly non-existent — skills. He actually put together his own curriculum, and did his best to identify with the students.
Eventually, Vail found out about Junior Achievement Worldwide, which is the world’s largest organization dedicated to educating students about workforce readiness, entrepreneurship and financial literacy through experiential, hands-on programs, he said. The program recruits volunteers to help empower students with the knowledge they need to become productive workers, good citizens, and informed consumers, and more important, how they can achieve their dreams.
Vail said he was so impressed with what he found out that he went to work for Junior Achievement — as president of the organization’s coastal region of South Carolina.
“They have a curriculum in place, a tried and true, turnkey situation,” he said. “It’s so well thought out, step by step, that if you just follow the steps, you can’t help but succeed.
“It’s a credible, targeted, proven financial literacy curriculum and it’s broken down for all ages — elementary, middle, and high schools.”
Screenshot from Junior Achievement