I’m Zac Northup, welcome back to The 50 Pages Project.

A lot has happened since the last episode of 50 Pages. When the latest class of StandWatch Academy’s entrepreneurship program started in August of 2019, I was introduced to 75 students from four different schools who expressed interest in joining what we are now calling our i3 Entrepreneurship Program – by the way the i’s standing for ideas, invest, and impact.

So starting out, I had 75 students interested in learning the basics of entrepreneurship. After giving an orientation brief, by September, 52 students decided to attend our kick-off design-thinking workshop and began working on developing their own business ideas. By the end of December, we were down to 43. By the end of January 2020, our class had reached 21. It was about that time period, when we were floating around 50 active students when I came up with the idea for a podcast series called… you guessed it, The 50 Pages Project.

Today, eight months after that first brief in August, we’ve got 13 of the best student entrepreneurs in the state still working. These young men and women are smart, their ideas are awesome, and they are self-motivated. How do I know this? Well, first I have spent over 70 sessions at their schools working with each of them on their ideas, coaching them, and teaching them how to present to customers and investors. So I not only know them by name, I know their personal stories, their backgrounds, and their strengths and weaknesses. Things were going really well.

But then the COVID-19 pandemic hit and students were sent home… basically, for the rest of the semester. All of those school visits where I interacted with students, driving around 700 miles each week. All of that stopped in one day. The backbone of StandWatch Academy’s i3 entrepreneurship program was shattered, and I’ll admit, I was at a loss at how to proceed.

Within a few days, though, I decided to try and continue with the weekly sessions using LinkedIn as a messaging platform, and Zoom for the face to face contact. Now to be perfectly honest, given everything that’s been going on, after scheduling the first call, at best I was expecting five or six students to call in.

But here’s the amazing part; even though none of these students receive a grade for participating in StandWatch Academy, when I launched the Zoom meeting, 13 students and all their teachers logged into new remote classroom. I was amazed and humbled, but it made me think back about the initial interview.

Before the course began back in August, I interviewed each student and asked them one simple question: “If I walked out the door today and never came back, would you still want to start your own business?” If they answered yes, I knew they would have the proper motivation to make it through what some teachers have characterized as a college-level course. These kids are the brightest part of West Virginia’s future. And now that the economy has been so devastated by COVID-19 – current projections are putting the state’s unemployment rate at somewhere around 19% - they are still logging in, practicing their presentations, meeting with guest speakers and looking forward to the time when we can move on to Level Three of the course.

Now, the stimulus package that Congress passed and the president signed is huge. As a historian, I liken it to a modern day version of the Great Depression’s WPA program that employed millions of Americans through some of the nation’s hardest times in the 1930s. And we should not be deluding ourselves, the hit the U.S. economy has taken is just as bad as the economic devastation that my grandparents, and generation Z’s great grandparents lived through. It’s huge but the stimulus will save thousands of businesses. But here’s the truth, we will see thousands more small businesses that will never come back. It will take years to recover from this pandemic. Years. And that leads me to the most important thing we have to remember, as business educators:

The heroic doctors, nurses, physicians assistants and the entire medical community will save America. I have no doubt about that. But eventually, entrepreneurs – innovation builders - will have to rebuild America.

We have to start preparing these young builders of business in new ways like never before. Entrepreneurship is now an economic soft power that will save nations, and the go-slow rule book the education community has been using over the last few years is useless. We must produce innovation builders now. Not four years from now. Today. Our future depends on it.

So that’s one more task that I have assigned to StandWatch Academy’s i3 Entrepreneurship Program – in fact, I’m not going to call it an entrepreneurship program. It’s now an innovation builder’s program that will rebuild Main Street, communities, states, and nations. I’m going to keep using the same curriculum, but add more items focused on start-up finance and even courses that try to teach grit, leadership, and determination. That’s what it’s going to take. It’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be hard. I’m going to need some help from the finance community. But I know we can do it. We have to do it. Our nation depends on it.