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EGCC students get down to business advising
Eastern Gateway community college students study companies
By Denise Dick
YOUNGSTOWN
Eastern Gateway Community College’s accounting and business students got a sample of the business world outside of the classroom with a class project.
Students in James Senary’s managerial-accounting class last semester examined the facilities, operations and sales at OH WOW! The Roger & Gloria Jones Children’s Center for Science & Technology and Joe Maxx Coffee and made recommendations for improvements.
The same examination is underway for the Mahoning Valley Historical Society’s Tyler History Museum.
Suzanne Barbati, executive director of OH WOW!, said she’s already
implemented some of the students’ recommendations and realized positive results.
“We had a souvenir shop, but it was behind our reception desk, so it wasn’t accessible,” she said.
The students recommended moving that feature to the exhibit floor.
“We’ve doubled our revenue stream,” Barbati said.
Sarah Bowers of Mineral Ridge, an accounting major and one of the students who worked on that project, developed the idea for moving the shop.
“If you were coming into the museum with kids, you probably didn’t even realize the gift shop was there,” she said.
By moving it to a place where parents and their children could see it, she reasoned, children are more likely to discover items they want their parents to buy and take home.
A student in each group was assigned to an aspect of the work. Some others who were on the OH WOW! team are Kim Speare of Austintown, Terrell McDowell of Youngstown, both accounting majors, and Walter Raniolo of Poland and Glenn Binion of Niles, both business-management majors.
Kevin Runkle of Youngs-town, an accounting major, worked on the Joe Maxx Coffee team, and Jay Kurey of Youngstown, a business-management major, is part of the Tyler History Museum team.
For Speare, the project allowed her to see the variety of opportunities open to someone with an accounting degree.
“When you tell someone you’re studying accounting, they say, ‘So you like math,’” she said.
Math is fine, Speare said, but what she’s really interested in is problem solving and helping to teach people ways to improve their business. This project enabled her to do that. She worked on the OH WOW! team.
Though financial accounting deals with what’s already happened, managerial accounting focuses more on predictions and forecasting what might happen, the students said. It’s more subjective.
“It opened my mind about business and all of the different things you have to think about,” Kurey said.
The project began with the students visiting the business and getting an idea of the space, traffic flow and type of business it is, Runkle said.
Students evaluated strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats for each of the businesses and made recommendations accordingly.
“The recommendations for the most part were spot-on,” said Mike Avey, Joe Maxx owner.
They dealt with the menu and hours of operation.
Avey said it was a worthwhile enterprise.
“The students were very polite, very respectful of my time and they waited for when I had time to work with them,” he said. “They realized it was more than just their project at hand.”
Other OH WOW! recommendations included offering science-of-sports activities.
“That will appeal to youth in sports, which is a pretty big deal in this area,” McDowell said.
Binion said another recommendation was focusing on more adult events to maximize revenue.
The students also recommended changes to the way the center stages children’s birthday parties.
“They found that we were basically pricing ourselves out of the market,” Barbati said. “We adjusted that, and we’ve doubled the number of birthday parties in the last six months.”