May 11—SELLERSBURG — Silver Creek High School held its 26th annual Panel of Entrepreneurs on Thursday that featured three graduates of the high school and one business owner from Uganda.
The panel featured: Jefferson Shreve, a 1984 graduate of Sliver Creek and founder of Storage Express; Elizabet Kizito, who immigrated from Uganda and founded Kizito Cookies; J. Larry Gilbert, who graduated from the school in 1957 and started the Cabinet Barn; and Andrea Allen, a graduate from Silver Creek in 1993 and founder of Healthier You and Me.
The panel gave advice to the finance students including how they started their business and the struggles they went through while creating their businesses.
"When you first start out like I did start out, I was on the bottom," Kizito said. "I was at the bottom of this group, because I'm Black, I'm a woman and I'm an African. I couldn't get loans because I had nothing for collateral."
Kizito didn't let the struggle and the stress get to her or let it become a bigger problem. When she gets up in the morning, she does not let her struggles roll over into the new day, she told the students.
Gilbert said that he had always been an optimistic person and tends to look on the brighter side of things.
"People who succeed in life are people who solve problems... I always thought that there is a solution to whatever the situation was that you were involved in," Gilbert said. "Whatever you're doing, whether it's your classwork, whether it's a job that you have... if you approach that with a can-do type attitude, then it's going to be very beneficial to you and helpful."
The hardest thing for Shreve was not running out of money. He started Storage Express during his last semester of college and took out a $50,000 loan to get it started.
Shreve said that getting that first loan was harder to get than it was for his 10th loan of $5 million.
"It's hard to get going when you do have a network or net worth," Shreve said. "I'm also super thankful that I started when I did young. Because I nearly ran out of money, nearly hit the wall, but life would have gone on."
Taking risks like those is easier to take when you are young, if you took risks like that in your 40s, you have much more to lose like a mortgage and money for a family, Shreve added.
When Allen struggled, she would go through her strengths and weaknesses and work on the skills she needed to improve.
"If you don't have a skill set, everything is learnable," Allen said. "There's nothing that you can't learn now... put yourself in situations where you're going to learn the skills that you don't feel like you're the strongest and get around those people that have those skills."