Colin Seale, founder and chief executive officer of thinkLaw, speaks after winning a business-pitch competition at the fifth annual Governor’s Conference on Business, hosted by the State of Nevada Department of Business and Industry at the Rio, on Friday, Sept. 30.
Friday, Sept. 30, 2016 | 3:52 p.m.
Young entrepreneurs, their stories and business pitches, were the focus of the fifth Governor’s Conference on Business at the Rio on Friday.
The event is held annually to provide entrepreneurs with resources and networking opportunities. It also recognized Nevada startups during a business-pitch competition. Lenders, government agencies and other organizations filled booths in the exhibition hall, and a panel of young Southern Nevada business owners shared advice and talked about the challenges of starting a business from scratch.
The panel included Shavonnah Tièra Collins, managing director of the business incubator RedFlint Experience Center; Avetis Mazmanyan, whose company Mezze Foods provides packaged Mediterranean food to supermarkets in Clark County; and John Santos, whose company Revive Brand Co. designs and manufactures backpacks and other bags.
Simply begin, regardless of your skills, finances or business experience, Santo urged. “Get started as soon as you can,” Santos said. “It doesn’t matter if you have no resources, or no plan.”
When he started, Santos said, all he had was a goal and no real idea of how to achieve it. “So when I started my business in 2010, I pretty much had the idea for a concept of a customizable bag … but no idea how to build it, or how to make it. Anything.”
Mazmanyan, with his brother Haik, spent years selling his food in local farmers markets before he was able to get their products into Whole Foods. He said perseverance and an acceptance that things won’t go as planned are essential traits for entrepreneurs.
“What can go wrong will go wrong. At the worst possible time. Always,” Mazmanyan said. “When you’re running your business and things get really hard, that usually means that you’re close to your goal.”
The business pitch competition was open to licensed Nevada companies that are less than 2 years old and haven’t generated more than $250,000 of gross revenue a year.
Representatives from 10 companies were each given two minutes to make a presentation and three minutes to answer questions from a panel of five judges in a format much like the reality television show “Shark Tank.”
The prizes included a first-place award of $16,000 in cash and services, a second-place award of $6,500 in cash and services and a people's choice award of $1,000.
The winner (which also received the people’s choice award) was thinkLaw, founded by former lawyer and middle school math teacher Colin Seale.
Seale said thinkLaw helps teachers develop critical-thinking skills in their students, something he learned while becoming a lawyer. It’s an important skill, he said, but one rarely taught to students outside of law school.
“It’s hard to teach critical thinking because it’s hard to find the time to teach it, and it’s hard to train educators to effectively teach it and it’s hard to teach it to all sorts of students,” Seale said.
“I always taught middle and high school students in schools that served low-income areas,” Seale said. Students in those schools, he said, are often so far behind that teachers spend most of their time getting the kids to learn at their current grade level.
“Those are the kids who need critical-thinking skills the most,” he said.
Seale said he will use his prizes to attend conferences, promote his company and build out a model to help teach critical thinking to children in younger grade levels.
The second-place winner of the pitch competition was Frameless LLC, which makes a kit to mount posters, photos, comic books and other art on walls without using a traditional frame.
The other competitors were:
• Brain2Bot, a toy with artificial intelligence aimed at both young and middle-school aged children.
• CDL Focus, that rents trucks to help people retake their commercial driver’s license test.
• Chefery, a service that delivers chef-prepared meals.
• Falcon Nano, an inventor of an electronic chip for wireless communications.
• Remmedy, whose product helps people be sure they are taking the right doses of their medications at the right time.
• Lip Smacking Foodie Tours, which offers guided tours of downtown Las Vegas restaurants.
• Healthybyte, which connects low-income people with resources to help them make healthy lifestyle choices.
• LRT Sunshield Sunscreen 3000, which makes a motorized remote-controlled sun shade for cars and other vehicles.
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