Students Learn Work Ethic, Small Business Principles with Free Clipart
Released on: September 30, 2008, 1:45 am
Press Release Author: Peter Hilton
Industry: Internet & Online
Press Release Summary: To most high school students, summer means staying up way too late and sleeping in far too long. It means trips to the beach or the pool and weekends with friends. It means, too, that Mom and Dad crack down and force enrollment in the work force, with food service, lifeguarding, landscaping, or a host of other job possibilities.
Press Release Body: To most high school students, summer means staying up way too late and sleeping in far too long. It means trips to the beach or the pool and weekends with friends. It means, too, that Mom and Dad crack down and force enrollment in the work force, with food service, lifeguarding, landscaping, or a host of other job possibilities. For Jeff, John, Scott, and Wyatt of Spanish Fork, Utah, however, summer meant something different. It meant, among other things, UniversalClipart.com, a website for free clipart and design ideas.
When hired over a year ago by Rich and Ron of CastleWave, LLC, the four friends knew that they would embark on a very different sort of high school job track. After spending most of their junior year working part-time with CastleWave, they had come to develop skills in management, idea generation, Internet marketing, and search engine optimization; from there, they were faced with a new challenge at work: summer.
Though not necessarily a challenge of sunny temptation, the fact that school was out meant that there would be more time for leisure—or for work. The difficulty came in deciding which to take. Rich and Ron were supportive. Knowing that Jeff, John, Scott, and Wyatt needed the money and the experience, they had lined up a number of projects and goals to have knocked out by the time the next school year rolled around. There was plenty of work in place to keep them going full time. Equally important, though, the flexibility of the work atmosphere would allow the students to maintain a normal lifestyle. If they needed to take a week off, though could. Time out for piano lessons was just as possible. So it was that the four young men—by now termed the “Asset Managers” for their job responsibilities and teamwork—dived headfirst into a summer of full-time employment.
Over that summer, they worked with engineering teams and freelance content developers, both overseas and local, to build a number of web assets. With work hours that sometimes stretched from eight in the morning to eight at night, Jeff, John, Scott, and Wyatt got baptized by full small business immersion, coming up full of vim, vigor, and vision. In that summer, one of the projects that they spearheaded almost completely on their own was UniversalClipart.com. Starting with an idea and nailing down content, design, monetization, and marketing, they built it from ground up. So while summer also included pools, friends, and late nights, for the Linkers, it also focused on building skills and a budding career.