AKRON – Photography is a passion for Tippecanoe Valley High School senior Michael Thacker, and that passion is taking him to New York next week. Thacker took the Young Entrepreneurs Academy class at TVHS this school year. YEA! is a Kosciusko Chamber of Commerce initiative. As part of the class, YEA! conducted an Investors’ Panel March 26 with the students. Thacker won first prize at the Investors’ Panel with his business Invictus Photography, and he will go on to compete Friday in Rochester, N.Y., at the YEA! Saunders Scholars Northern Regional Competition. It’s one of three regionals, with winners from each region moving on to compete at finals. Thacker leaves Thursday morning for the regional competition on Friday, returning Saturday in time for prom. YEA! is a nine-month program that guides students in high school through the process of starting a real business, according to a previous Kosciusko Chamber press release. The end result of the YEA! program is a fully formed and functioning business. The course at TVHS is taught by June Yazel and Jeff Shriver. “I started my business this year, actually,” Thacker said in an interview Thursday morning. “I started taking pictures for the girls and boys basketball teams. And I kind of separated it – I wanted to take pictures of individual players as much as I could, and then I decided to put them on discs and sell them to the parents at Valley. I figured that the parents really wanted that because a lot of parents don’t want to have to go to games and take pictures of their kid. They want to be in the moment with their child, which is really awesome. I feel like me doing my business helped them by knowing that ‘someone is there taking pictures, someone’s there handling all the aspects of the game while I am watching my child.’” He started taking pictures about halfway through the basketball season. It wasn’t just individuals’ photos, as he also took game photos with multiple players in them. “It’s really hard to get just one individual player, so when I went through my process, if there were four or five guys in one pictures, all four or five got that photo. If there was one, that one got that picture,” Thacker explained. He kept a photo file for each player. “I came in three days before the Young Entrepreneurs Academy Investment Panel and saw how much money my business was making, how popular it was becoming, and I decided I really needed to start this. This was becoming awesome,” he said. For this year, Thacker charged $20 per disc because he started halfway through the season and he didn’t know how popular his photography would be. “Going through and actually doing the business and selling, I can’t give an actual price limit at this time because I am still making money off it, but it was pretty popular. A lot of the parents responded very well. They got a lot of good pictures for my price,” he said. Next year, if everything works out and he’s able to come back and run his business, Thacker said he will have to up his prices. “My hope is to start from the beginning of the season to the end of the season, and sell the discs for more because that would create a lot more profit,” he said. “As the word gets out, I think it will be (more successful),” Yazel said. “I think it will grow really rapidly,” Thacker agreed. “The cool thing about it though was I was the guinea pig for my own business. I just ran my own business, did everything” and fixed the problems. “Hopefully, next year, it will go smoother, but as expansion goes, you will run into more problems.” “That’s the way running a business is,” Yazel said. “There’s no hard and fast rules, and it’s kind of try it out and see if it works, and adjust as you go.” Thacker wants to do a full launch with his business at Valley, expanding to all seasons for every sport. He also wants to improve on his photography skills. Most of his current skills he learned as he went. He served an internship with White Tiger Photographic, which mostly does weddings. “I’ve learned a lot from them. A lot of my photography skills just came from me wanting to do it and a passion that grew,” Thacker said. His first camera was just the one on his phone because he couldn’t afford a camera. Once he got a camera, he started taking more photos. “After I graduate this year, I am looking forward to possibly try to get into somewhere and take classes more on photography and that way my product gets better and better as I grow,” Thacker said. Yazel said Thacker’s business will face 84 other students at regionals Friday for $30,000 in scholarships. To prepare, Thacker said he was doing a lot between now and then. “A lot of panicking, but underneath all of that, keeping a level head. I’m focusing a lot on my PowerPoint, what I can say better this time around. What I can do to add, what I can’t do to add with rules and guidelines to follow. Basically, I want to be able to speak better, run into fewer problems than I did at the Investors’ Panel. They told me at the Investors’ Panel that I may have been really nervous but (I) never showed it. I feel like I showed it a lot because I was a nervous wreck,” he said. Yazel said he can’t make any changes to his actual business plan or PowerPoint, so from here on out he can only work on his communication skills. She said Thacker switched his business midstream. He started out with one group, but once Thacker realized how well his photography business was going, he asked to switch. “So for what the other kids had been preparing for since the beginning of the school year, he completed in a much shorter time. But because he had gone through it with the other business, he had an idea of what it was. He had to really buckle down and focus and get it down on paper,” Yazel said. Going to New York will be a lot of firsts for Thacker as he’s never left the state before or flown. He will be traveling with Yazel and Renea Salyer from the Kosciusko Chamber of Commerce. Long term, Thacker said he wants to set up shop somewhere and expand his business as far as he can take it. “I know in other school districts, parents will want my product. The kids, they’re going to want my product,” he said. “He’s found kind of a niche market so it has a lot of possibilities,” Yazel said. “I would like to really start off though in Valley,” he said. “It’s where I started, it’s where I’ve grown a lot, it’s where I’ve grown up a lot actually. Valley would be a great place to start.” Yazel thanked YEA! for the opportunity and the Chamber of Commerce. “Thank my teachers for pushing me,” Thacker said. “They push me pretty hard. They’re like, if you want to do this, there’s no turning back, you’ve got to do this.” Yazel also thanked Grace College Professor Al Grossnickle for working with Valley through YEA! Through him, Valley is able to offer the program as a dual-credit course through Grace. She thanked Valley Superintendent Brett Boggs and TVHS Principal Dr. Michael Bendicsen for supporting the program.
