Training Nurtures Youngsters’ Career Dreams

Charles Gentry, a native of South--Central Los Angeles who once dreamed of playing for the Baltimore Orioles, doesn’t necessarily think of his entrepreneurial training program for teens as a business bassinet, but the effect’s the same.

In much the same way that business incubators help nurture nascent enterprises, Gentry--through his Sunland-based Excel Entrepreneur Club--is helping the growth of young business people, including one as young as 10.

Through a semester-long program of workshops, field trips and real-life business start-ups, Gentry helps students--most of them middle- and high-schoolers of modest means--to delve into the intriguing life of a young industrialist.

Six-year-old Excel is one of several programs around Los Angeles--either new or on the drawing board--designed to nurture a fresh crop of business people with the savvy and skills to actually make their businesses fly.

“A lot of kids say they want to start their own business but they don’t know what that entails,” said Tamika Bridgewater, president of the San Fernando Valley Black Chamber of Commerce, who was unfamiliar with the program but lauded the goals.

“There are many people starting businesses without a clue. If we get to them early, I think we have a better chance of building a strong economic base for all of us.”

Gentry said the program aims to capture the attention of the target audience while they’re still exploring career path options, “rather than wait until the kids hit college age.”

“By then we’ve lost so many of the kids to the fast-food industry and the takeout window,” he said. “A lot of kids assign themselves to work at that level because they’re not aware that they have the skills to go higher.”

Although some of Excel’s 70 students attend public or private schools, and enroll in the program as an extracurricular activity, two-thirds are part of the home-schooling movement and incorporate the program into their curriculum.

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Excel is housed in the storefront offices of Sunland Christian School, a home-school program that offers resources and curriculum guidance to parents of more than 500 elementary and high school students, most of them from the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Students who enroll in the program pay Sunland, which contracts with Gentry to run it.

Gentry, a lanky, soft-spoken man with the bearing of a former athlete, said he’s found no conflict in making his program mesh with the rest of a student’s school workload.

“I help them understand what the algebra is for, even what the history is for,” said Gentry, noting that all six of the program’s June grads have opted to go on to college.

“As part of the course, I make all of the academic courses more relevant. Because in business, these things count.”

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Gentry, 46 and a resident of Apple Valley, may seem to some an unusual role model for would-be business tycoons.

A high school jock who served a brief, injury-shortened stint in a local baseball program funded by the Orioles, Gentry said he was one of three children raised by a single mom on welfare.

After an ankle injury put the kibosh on his athletic career, he dabbled in music--writing songs and jingles--and worked as a free-lance writer before launching his own marketing consulting business in 1980.

But Gentry insists that when he was in his teens he was neither a Rhodes scholar nor a J. Paul Getty in the making.

“If I was raised in Pacific Palisades, and my family made $600,000 and sent me to Harvard, why shouldn’t I succeed?” said Gentry, an African American who estimates that 25% of his students are ethnic minorities.

“Students look at me and see he’s a black guy who was raised in South-Central L.A. I was C-average on my best days. Here’s someone who didn’t have all the earmarks of being gifted . . . but who’s standing here now saying you can do it and here’s how it’s done.

“It makes it a lot more believable.”

Gentry retains his marketing company to help pay the bills.

And marketing and advertising form a substantial chunk of the Excel curriculum, along with creating a business plan, management strategies, some economics and finance.

The group also takes field trips to such corporate titans as Xerox, Hewlett-Packard and McDonnell Douglas.

In fact, one field trip cost Gentry some students. Objecting to Gloria Allred’s politics, parents pulled their children from the program over a trip to the offices of the feminist lawyer, he said.

Excel students attend two monthly classes at the Sunland Christian School offices, and also run their own businesses.

“Last year, the students owned their own grocery [delivery] business, in connection with Costco,” said Sunland principal and founder Terry Neven, who hopes to see the program one day expanded to the Internet. “We’re talking about being skillful businesspeople.

“We’re trying to teach kids in their teen years to look at a vocation, rather than to go get a job at Taco Bell.”

Audrey Lau, who graduated from the Sunland program in June, and next month plans to attend Glendale College majoring in fashion design, said she loved the Excel program and the hands-on experience she gained while serving as vice president of marketing for the club.

Her mother, Feelian Lau, agreed.

“As a parent, you want your kids to be involved in all kinds of different things that will help them in the future,” said Lau, who has served as Audrey’s home-school teacher for the past three years. “Kids can’t learn everything through just books.”

In addition to the course work, the club has set up an investment fund, open to students and parents, that is managed by Merrill Lynch. At last check, the group had invested $7,790 and the fund was valued at $8,172.

Excel students pay a $30 registration fee and then $30 per month tuition--a figure Gentry said he wants to keep low to allow more cash-strapped families to participate.

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“My goal was to bring the program to kids without cost being a factor or a deterrent,” Gentry said. “To me, it’s a shame if you have a kid that could be the next regional director at Hewlett-Packard but they never got the chance because all of the programs that might have helped cost too much.”

Ten percent of the tuition money goes to the school, with the balance going to Gentry for his salary and to pay program bills.

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As much as Gentry hopes his students can pick up concepts like strategic management and supply and demand, he focused most of his comments on helping them think like business moguls.

“Business entrepreneurs are made,” he said. “They’re born with certain talents, but so many never go into that area. It’s really a way of thinking.

“There’s a certain mind-set to a person that becomes an entrepreneur or a CEO of a corporation. And that mind-set is learned.”

Valley@Work runs each Tuesday. Karen Robinson-Jacobs can be reached at Karen.Robinson@latimes.com.