One West Feliciana High School student’s vision to make driving easier is driving his future and has earned him top honors in the 2021 Young Entrepreneurs Academy.
Cardell Smith has just completed the 11th grade, but he also spent the pandemic year in Baton Rouge’s Young Entrepreneurs Academy, a program that works with high school students to develop businesses from conception, planning, pitching to investors, and launching of the venture.
Smith said he went from the classroom experience to the different steps of starting his own business. “My personal idea was Driving Life and throughout the course of over the year, I've been going every Wednesday and the instructors have been helping me format and develop my business,” he said. “And then recently, we filed it, and now it's a real filed business.”
Driving Life offers training and skills, but it doesn’t duplicate drivers education. Smith explained that it picks up where drivers education ends. “Driving Life takes on a major issue within Louisiana and throughout the country,” he said. “Whenever you go down (the) road, there's a very high chance that you're going to see someone on side with a flat tire or something. Driving Life provides courses alongside like the regular driver's ed courses that cover how to change your tire, how to change oil, and just how to change fluid in your car today in case it does come up while driving. You can get them quickly changed and then get back on your way safely.”
Everyday life observations shined a light on a need often not addressed. “It’s an everyday thing to see someone stranded on the side of the road with a flat tire,” Smith said. “It just got me thinking what if they could just change it themselves instead of having to pay AAA and people like that. Instead of coming out of pocket, you can just do it yourself real quick.”
Smith, who just learned how to drive himself, will not be the Driving Life teacher. He is excited about his management, finance and bookkeeping roles. His father, Jeremey London, owns a mechanic’s shop and will partner with his son to provide the ongoing drivers training services.
This year’s academy involved 14 area high school students. They registered their business LLCs with the Secretary of State’s office and pitched their business concepts to an investors panel in a process similar to TV’s Shark Tank. Smith’s winning concept now advances to a national pitch competition that will be held in New York. He also won $4,000 in “seed money” to help get Driving Life out of the garage and rolling.
Smith is excited about numbers and figures like many young men his age are excited about sports stats and terms. His favorite subject is pre-calculous and he was already interested in pursuing a career in mathematics and accounting, but now he has real-life business skills.
“The first step for me that I carry boldly in my mind is the advice they gave us — no idea is too big,” he said. “It has helped me because it shows that you can take any problem that you see no matter how small it may seem, or how big and you can work with that problem and create a solution to that problem, and then turn into a solution to a business."