Junior Achievement Club Is in the Business of Leadership

Alicia Woodside, Junior Achievement | BCBusiness
Alicia Woodside’s foray into finances was selling ice cream at a school fundraiser.

Are great business people born or made? It’s a moot point, as alumni of Junior Achievement of British Columbia are proving daily. While even mediocre managers are improved, born leaders benefit greatly from opportunities and guidance gained early in life.

Science clubs used to be the epitome of geekdom – until a few alumni code-writers went on to found billion-dollar companies. Business clubs, on the other hand, remain the Rodney Dangerfield of high school: they get no respect.


But respect and confidence are the foundation of success in any field, and Alicia Woodside found both through a business club she started with friends and the help of Junior Achievement at Centennial Secondary School in Coquitlam.


“We were really involved in school, but we didn’t really know what we wanted to do,” says Woodside, now 23, recalling how she and a friend were left trying to figure it out themselves. “Our school really emphasized sciences a lot and I never really felt like the microscope thing was for me. So we thought, Oh, I wonder what business is.”


The school’s economics class was the default option for students needing credits to graduate, but how to do something useful and ambitious with that class’s lessons was a mystery until Woodside approached the school’s guidance counsellor, who told her about Junior Achievement.


Junior Achievement, a non-profit program that got its start in Canada more than 50 years ago, teaches students basic business practices. Each participant receives an average of six hours of instruction as part of the program, which has attracted more than 2.5 million participants in Canada. A report published by Boston Consulting Group in January this year estimates that Junior Achievement of Canada returns $45 in value for every dollar of its $12-million annual budget, with graduates of its programs launching 6,500 businesses a year and creating 12,500 direct and indirect jobs. 


Junior Achievement of B.C.’s “company program” provided Woodside and four friends the organizational support needed to establish a company at the school that sold ice cream at an annual fundraiser the school hosted. Woodside had recently finished a job at McDonald’s and the idea made sense. The following year, Woodside and her companions launched a formal business club that attracted dozens of participants who organized a school carnival. Woodside worked on the financial side of that venture.


Woodside continued to participate in Junior Achievement as a student at UBC’s Sauder School of Business, through Junior Achievement’s New Venture Design program. The program links businesses with engineering students to help the students learn how to market products, an ideal fit for Woodside who was studying marketing and international business. Upon graduating earlier this year, she spent the summer working in Europe and in October moved to Beijing to work with the non-profit East-West Coalition, which coordinates student exchanges.


Woodside attributes the direction she’s taken to the opportunities Junior Achievement gave her to discover her talents, and the confidence to exercise them. “We were 16 and we were exposed to this amazing opportunity and this mentality of, ‘Put your idea on paper; it’s an empty canvas and you can go and do whatever you want,’” she says. “Maybe other people haven’t had that as much and they see barriers, they see walls, and so for me leadership is all about helping other people tear down those barriers that they see. It’s not about showing them how to do it; it’s helping them feel liberated.”


Brian Phillips, a national director of Junior Achievement and former financial planner at Phillips, Hager & North Investment Management Ltd., says Woodside’s experience is typical. “The magic word that always seems to bubble out in the conversation somewhere is, ‘It gave me confidence.’ And a leader definitely needs confidence – any leader,” he says.


Phillips believes exposure to the business world at an early age is important for developing a future generation of business leaders, even if the knowledge itself isn’t applied for several years. He notes that a contractor working on his cottage this summer mentioned that he participated in Junior Achievement during the 1980s – that heady decade of Reaganomics, record-high interest rates and Gordon Gekko’s immortal line, “Greed is good.” 


“He’s running his own little business now,” Phillips says. “Junior Achievement for him was nothing that sparked an interest right at the time, but certainly he remembers it well and it was something that made him consider working for himself later on in his life.”


In short, business and leadership skills learned in high school are eminently transferable. Phillips himself was nudged toward engineering by his father, but when he discovered business in high school he hit his stride.


“What is leadership?” Phillips says. “It is among other things, charisma and understanding group dynamics and holding people accountable and helping break down tasks and all of the kinds of things that ultimately somebody running any organization needs – whether it’s profit or non-profit, whether it’s a school or a large corporation.” These are all skills that Junior Achievement participants learn at an early age, he says. 


These are the skills that Cheryl Nakamoto, co-founder of Vancouver’s McNeill Nakamoto Recruitment Group (and also a JA participant), looks for in job candidates. The majority she sees are between their 20s and 40s, and demonstrate leadership and communicate their values either in their actions or their relationships.


“They inspire people to action. You can see that even in youth,” she says. “Someone who doesn’t take something in high school, or take any extracurricular or join a club may not get that, either positive or negative. It does guide them.”