National TV Show Recognizes VHHS Entrepreneurship Class

Vernon Hills High School Business Education Teacher Beth Richards is committed to keeping her students on the cutting edge of happenings in the business world. She also has a knack for using social media. So, when an opportunity presented itself to combine the two, Richards seized the opportunity—and the result was quite a surprise for her and her students.

CNBC premiered a new show last fall called, "The Profit," that features entrepreneur and owner of Camping World, Marcus Lemonis.  In the show, Lemonis helps turn-around struggling businesses. The businesses are typically smaller, entrepreneurial businesses.  “Many of the business concepts he addresses on the show directly relate to units I cover in Entrepreneurship class,” explained Richards.  She has shown some of the applicable episodes of The Profit to her Entrepreneurship class, which is a new class to the VHHS curriculum this year. “The show was an instant hit with students last semester and this semester,” noted Richards. 

So, when season two of The Profit was scheduled to begin last week on Tuesday night, Richards tweeted a picture of her Entrepreneurship class to Lemonis stating that they were ready to watch the Season 2 premier. Lemonis ended up re-tweeting that tweet and the class photo. And, if that wasn’t exciting enough, CNBC’s Twitter account saw the re-tweet and replied/re-tweeted it as well.  “CNBC ended up direct messaging me because they were pretty excited that high school students were watching a CNBC show,” said Richards. “They wanted to send me something for the students in my class, so I messaged them back with our address, number of students, etc.”

On Monday morning, Richards received a delivery from CNBC!  They sent "The Profit" t- shirts for the class, along with a personalized note. “I took a picture of the class wearing their t-shirts, which I then tweeted to CNBC and Marcus yesterday to say thanks, and they replied again on Tuesday,” said Richards. 

“It‘s an exciting story about the power of Twitter and how I've used it in the last two weeks to connect the Entrepreneurship students with their favorite show and entrepreneur.”

"It was really cool to receive a response back from CNBC on Twitter because they are a national news network," said VHHS Senior Jake Nabat. "Additionally, I tweeted Marcus Lemonis, and he retweeted me and started following me as well. Twitter gave our class a way to interact with a show we really like!"