Mayo student creates his own business
High school is a time for discovering yourself and finding a path for your future. For Mayo High School junior Cade Cassidy, it has also been the perfect time to start a business.
Mayo High School junior Cade Cassidy
“I started working at the Army-Navy Store in Hartsville; it is a family-owned business,” Cassidy said. “I started moving everything in the store to online. I also really wanted to get the store more involved with the community so I was looking around online and I found a charity called Operation Gratitude. They send small care packages to troops overseas and I started talking to them to see what they need.”
Cassidy said that it was through his talks with Operation Gratitude that his business idea began to grow.
“A short while after talking with them, the idea for Semper Fi Energy Drinks was born,” Cassidy said. “I started researching online and I found out that the military is the number one consumer of energy drinks and energy shots. We came up with the idea and started building off of it.”
Part of that building came in the form of a competition through his business class at DCIT.
“The school DECA competition came up and I decided to do that,” Cassidy said. “We had to come up with a thirty page, five-year growth plan. We came in third place. Our plan was too long and it was formatted wrong so I think that’s why we lost. After that, we got the energy drinks made and I started talking to distributors.”
Semper Fi Energy Drinks
After getting a little bit of a run-around about who he needed to get in contact with to get his drinks in stores, Cassidy talked with distributor M.R. Williams.
“I got a lot of advice,” Cassidy said. “Basically, I’ll have to do a test run. If it goes well they will give us spot and then I’ll go to the distributor.”
Being only a junior in high school, Cassidy said he has been getting help with his business.
“My cousin Mark, who is from New York, he worked on Wall Street and he is very educated in business,” Cassidy said. “He has financed everything and he has taught me a lot about business; so has the class at DCIT.”
Though progress has been a little slow, Cassidy is not letting that get him down: he is trying to carve his own path.
“We are going to do school fundraisers with the small cans of the energy drinks,” Cassidy said. “There is a school in North Carolina that we are working with to do that. They also wanted to put it in their school store because it does have zero calories and zero sugar.”
He is also pushing forward with another project.
“I have another idea that I am working on, not an energy drink or anything like that,” Cassidy said. “I am planning to unveil it at the beginning of summer.”
Cassidy said that his parents are proud of the work he has done, even if they don’t always understand it.
“I tell my parents as much as I can but it is a lot,” Cassidy said. “I’m working a lot and sometimes I forget to tell them what I am doing but my parents love that I’m doing all of this.”
Looking to the future, Cassidy would like to attend Wake Forest University to study business.
