Lam’s Lanes was a dilapidated old bowling alley. Located in the small town of Newburg, North Dakota, Lam’s Lanes had been abandoned for five years when high school senior and music aficionado Trent Hunskor decided the town needed something to do. Until that point, people had to travel to other nearby towns to find any proper entertainment venues for birthdays or holiday parties. Trent had the idea to re-open the four-lane bowling alley.

      After getting some help from his parents, Trent opened up Lam’s Lanes again. It has since become a hotspot in the center of town. Though Trent plans to become a music teacher when he graduates college, he hopes to continue running Lam’s Lanes on the side. At the very least he wants his brothers to take over and make it a family business.

I think it’s great to see someone capitalizing on a scenario. Of course, it’s never good when a company goes out of business. But taking that out-of-business building and put it to new use is a great example of adaptation and capitalization.

On top of that, Trent’s insistence on bringing back a valuable part of the community is admirable. Far too many people forget that a business is all about bringing value to your customers, and Trent seems to understand that this business is as much about helping the local community with new entertainment and jobs as it is about making money.

Finally, a lesson I haven’t heard of yet is his exit plan. He knows he won’t be able to hold on to the company forever, but he’s already bringing in his brothers to learn the ropes of running the business should they need to. It seems like a lot of these young entrepreneurs don’t really know what their exit plan is, but Trent hits with the double whammy of both having an exit plan and preparing his brothers to become entrepreneurs on their own.

Ultimately, Trent is a great help for his family and his community, and a great example to us all of what a good, capitalizing entrepreneur should look like.

Mahen Ratnayake was born in Sri Lanka. During his young adulthood he became weary of constantly reading SMS messages and texts. There was nothing personal about them. He wanted to talk to his friends at a distance the same way he talked to them in person, but he was too busy for phone calls. That’s where he got the idea for his new social media app, Katha.

Katha works much like other social media apps but uses short voice messages instead of texts! This way, even if you were busy you could leave a message with your friends that felt more personal than a simple text message. It also had an unexpected side effect. By not supporting video, Katha social influencers did not have to worry about looking presentable or getting the perfect shot when posting. This gave influencers in Sri Lanka a great break from full-on social media while still connecting with their fans.

After developing Katha, he continued to refine it, eventually launching his new version of the app called ShortKast. He states that ShortKast improves on Katha in almost every way by using the failures of Katha as chances to improve on his ideas, rather than as mistakes.

There’s something inspiring about seeing how a young adult created a moderately successful social media platform, and instead of settling on moderate success he took a chance to improve upon his mistakes.

I find that is a very important lesson for us all to learn. Far too many people think that failure is final. Ratnayake is the first entrepreneur I have written about in this blog that underlines how important working through failure is.

I also respect how he took a pain point and made it into a viable app. We hear about it a lot in class, but seeing how something as simple as wanting to hear your friend’s voice can develop into a whole business is quite inspiring.

There’s no doubt that Ratnayake’s grit, understanding, and vision should be an inspiration to us all.

Brighton Hood, 14, is a teen from Nampa, Idaho. Desiring to be a silversmith, he found that silver isn’t cheap. That’s when he found his niche, he made jewelry out of coinage. Antique, contemporary, or collector coins, it doesn’t matter to him. He continues to make high-quality rings for people looking for more affordable jewelry.

What struck me right away with Brighton is how resourceful he is. In most countries coins are so valueless that people don’t even carry them. Yet Brighton looked at them and saw them not as currency, but as something completely different. If we are to learn anything from his example, it is that every object serves more than one purpose, whether we know it or not. It is our job as entrepreneurs to figure out what those other purposes are, if people want them, and then to make them reality.

The other interesting fact about choosing coins over metal is the cost of acquiring more stock is literally pennies on the dollar. He pays people far more for their coins than they are worth, and in return sells them for a profit. He turns three or four one-cent pennies into a $8 ring, and everybody profits because of it. Perhaps that says something about where we place our value nowadays, that the same material worth 4 or 5 cents in one form is worth hundreds of times that in another.

Lastly, I admire his skill. He doesn’t just punch holes in coins, he puts wonderful designs on them. He knows that anybody could make rings out of coins, so he has to add extra value through his labor. With such wonderful designs and customizable options, it’s no wonder he makes a big profit. He even makes wedding rings!

Brighton Hood is the story of a young man who saw something of low value and, through his own hard work, made it something valuable enough to rival the highest valued competitors.

Jeremy Wood, an ex-google employee, realized that one thing the modern generation of innovators hated the most was managing their web stores. From clothing designers to tech entrepreneurs, all they wanted was to spend more time making new products and less time managing sales. That’s where OpenStore came in.

OpenStore is a platform that manages your webstores for you. They do all of the website maintenance, marketing, and traffic management. They ensure this is a profitable business in an ingenious way. Instead of taking a percentage of your profits, they pay you a monthly salary. They take the money your site generates, and no matter how well or how poorly your site does they pay you the same amount each month.

For many this would sound like a bad idea. However, to innovators who want stability, getting a good check even when their store isn’t doing so well is a lifesaver.

This method of payment has made me rethink what people are willing to pay for things. Sometimes people will fork over serious amounts of cash just for some stability. This is the space entrepreneurs thrive in, finding where people are willing to pay for some simple service they could do themselves. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that Jeremy Wood has taught me that sometimes entrepreneurship is less about inventing something wholly new as finding something nobody else wanted or thought to do. Just like how garbage workers make decent money just because they’re willing to touch the trash nobody else wanted to.

In addition, it’s a good example of how using your current knowledge can help you as an entrepreneur. Jeremy Wood worked at google for quite some time, and his knowledge of websites came in handy when he found all of these innovators that just wanted to go back to doing what they loved.