Yosef Spear ’26. Photo by Mr. Michael Aldridge.
My name is Yosef Spear, and I am a 4-year senior at Northwood. Last summer, my friend and I started a local landscaping business to earn some money and gain real-world experience running a business. Even though it is not quite what people would call “legit,” we still learned what it is like to be our own bosses and entrepreneurs. This year, I signed up for the Entrepreneurship Peak Pathway class to work on our business and learn more about entrepreneurship.
I started the year working on a website and finding ways to improve next summer, including running Facebook ads, creating social media accounts, setting up a review collection system, and more. The class offers more than working on what is already real. The somewhat hypothetical business I have been working on has been a rental business for landscaping tools. My vision is to scale our business in the future to the point where we can buy equipment and let people rent it instead of paying a company or someone else to do jobs around their house. I am solving the problem that many people want to work on their own, but they lack the right resources.
Spear’s business logo.
I have watched many videos, read articles, talked to people and entrepreneurs, done speed pitches, and done other research. Some of the crucial information I have found includes the target age, household income, machinery prices and rental rates, the industry’s value, etc.
At the end of the year, we work on creating a pitch that we record and edit to be professional and to leave viewers well-informed about our business vision. So far, I have recorded my video using a professional-grade camera and a green screen. As of now, I have been editing my video to include visuals, which should make the pitch better. Doing editing has been a big task, finding ways to do it without paying for a subscription. I have gotten help from my classmates who have more experience than I do in editing.
