Episode # 64

Business Education Through Community Leadership

January 14, 2025

About This Episode

On this week’s episode, we are joined by Craig Murnan, a business teacher at Loveland City Schools, and a group of his students to talk about Craig’s project Tigers Inc., a non-profit that gives business-oriented students a chance to be leaders in their community while gaining valuable education.

Guests

Craig Murnan

Craig Murnan is an experienced educator and business leader, currently teaching at Loveland High School in Loveland, Ohio. As the lead redeveloper of the school’s business department, Craig expanded course offerings by over 100% and created Tigers Inc., a student-run nonprofit recognized by Ohio’s Secretary of State. He also pioneered one of the first fully student-managed investment portfolios in the country.

Transcript

Kara  0:00

Today’s episode is sponsored by Learning Blade. Middle school is the ideal time for career exploration. With Learning Blade, you can easily integrate stem and career awareness concepts into your classroom. Find out if this resource is free in your state at learningblade.com. Thanks, Learning Blade. Hey. Is this thing on? Are we recording? Can I get a tech person?

 

Caryn  0:28

Oh, for the love of EdTech!

 

Kara  0:31

Joining me today is Craig Murnan, business teacher at Loveland City Schools, as well as two of his students, Brent and William and Craig is actually the brains behind Tigers Inc, which we’re going to get into as we make our way through this episode. So hey guys, thank you so much for talking to me.

 

All  0:52

Thanks for having us, of course.

 

Kara  0:54

So first, I want to start with Craig, and I want you to share how you became a teacher, because I know this wasn’t necessarily your first stop,

 

Craig  1:06

Yeah, so it’s, it’s been, it’s been a little bit of a journey, for sure. I graduated with an undergrad degree in accounting and double major in computer science as well, and I got out, went into consulting, which was just, it was an awesome time. Was an awesome field at the time. Lot going on with technology in the late 90s and early 2000s and it was really exciting time to kind of be a young person and be in that field. So got some great leadership opportunities. Worked for a firm called Ernst and Young and worked with several Fortune 500 companies over that period of of time. It’s really I got, felt like I got, like a master’s in business at that time. Because the cool thing about being a consultant was you got fresh starts every every project that you were put on. So for me, is a lot of growth opportunity, lot of interaction, lot of leadership opportunity. Was getting into my late 20s, the travel, you know, was up my last year, there was like 48 out of 52 weeks. So just trying to really, trying to consider, like, what the next step was, and if I wanted to kind of go on the partner road, or just really where my passion was lying and at that time, so really had to just do some soul searching. Kind of took a leave of absence. Always wanted to get my always wanted to be a teacher. Always wanted to be a coach. That was like, just always thought I would do it later in my career.

 

Kara  2:46

Oh, interesting.

 

Craig  2:47

Yeah. So was always a passion, even in my undergrad, you know, considered going into education right off the bat, but my path, I mean, I would really want to change my path, had an opportunity to leave an absence from firm with intention, actually going back to firm. Just wanted to get my education, licensure stuff out of the way. State of Ohio was getting ready to change some stuff, and it was an opportunity for me to kind of knock that out in the ninemonth period. So I I did that with all intentions going back to work for the firm, and opportunity came to get an education, I figured I could always go back to doing what I was doing. Took, took that opportunity out at Harrison high school for a retiring teacher, and got into coaching and teaching right then, and really just haven’t looked back, just kind of.

 

Kara  3:42

That’s awesome.

 

Craig  3:44

It was a good experience.

 

Kara  3:47

Have you always taught, like, a business as a, I guess, kind of like a broad or did you used to, like, focus on something? Or…

 

Craig  3:58

Yeah, a lot of different courses I’ve taught over the years. Okay with the technology background I had had, did some computer science type courses. Always had some business course that I taught, whether it be accounting or investing, was always kind of like my main stain, probably where my passion probably lies on. That side, went to Mason High School, had an opportunity to work with Dale Connor, former guest. I was him and I kind of were the brains behind and kind of the innovators behind some mixed media courses that kind of you just kind of saw this revolution, kind of changing and kind of on the front side of a lot of really cool stuff that had the opportunity to build there so but, you know, my passions always kind of lied on the on the investing and money management side of things, just in general, it’s just, I feel like I have. You know, it’s an area of expertise, owner at different points in my career, being part of some different entrepreneur activities. You know, that’s kind of where my skill set, kind of passion lies. In the classroom, there’s a there’s always been, like the courses that I’ve taught, I’ve always kind of changed and evolved, and I’ve been blessed with the districts that I’ve worked with just they’ve they’ve trusted some innovation. They’ve trusted like, maybe not having a curriculum completely set and locked down, and let things kind of evolve, and give me some opportunity to put those things and formalize those things as the kids interests change, and as just, you know, the world changes, allowing to be a little bit more adaptable. And so I’ve always been blessed to have really good leaders that have kind of trusted that, you know, the student experience was going to be the focus. And so, you know, coming here to Loveland, this is where my family has has resided since my wife and I were married back in 2002 so had the opportunity to come teach and develop a program, and where my students, where my kids were going to go. So I took advantage of that, and always have wanted to be on the fourth side of doing something entrepreneurial in the classroom. And so Tigers Inc really became that outlet, and the school district here embraced a lot of change, and so I got to kind of be the catalyst behind some of that change that we get to see now here, what, six years later, here at Loveland.

 

Kara  6:49

Okay, so can you briefly like, I guess, just explain what is Tigers, Inc.

 

Brent  6:54

So basically Tigers a 501, c3, nonprofit student led organization, which we basically act as a separate entity from our own school. Even though we are we work through the classroom. We’re completely student led, as I mentioned before. So basically, we have an advisor in the form of Mr. Renan, ahead with a board of advisors, along with like Treasurers and other people who oversee us, but basically we’re made up of three cohorts, marketing, Wealth Management and community outreach. Marketing. We tend to work with a lot of small businesses around our community, but we’ve also notably worked with some large ones, such as the Cincinnati Reds with a business analytics project and Draft Analysis Project. And then also this year, we’re taking ahead on Xavier marketing, working with them, and also a new, up and coming smoothie company, Better Blends, moving on to community outreach. That’s kind of how we like to give our chance to make a difference in our community. So notably, that could be through a dog park that was created a couple years ago by some previous seniors, and then also some that we’re doing this pretty big this year is rally for the tally, which is one of our business partners, has agreed to match donations for canned food drive for every dollar that we’ve made from the community donating to us. So so far, I believe it’s in the realm of 3500 cans that have been donated to life food pantry here in Loveland. And then lastly, probably our most impressive, most impressive aspect of the organization will be wealth management, where we can confidently say that we manage a five figure stock portfolio, completely diversified among the stock market with tons of holdings and different mutual funds, ETS  and plenty of industries worth of stocks, basically, overall, we try and learn by experience from experience, and get the chance to fail now and gain that business experience. So we, when we hit the real world, we’ll be ahead of everyone else.

 

Kara  8:55

Yeah, for sure, and you will be! William, can you talk a little bit about how you get involved in this program. Or, like, is there a process, an interview process? Like, what does that look like?

 

William  9:09

There is an interview process. So it happens the spring before you go into the next year. So I’m a senior, and I was not in it my junior year. So last spring, I interviewed. It was like real, honestly, pretty simple interview. I got about five questions, but they had obviously key characteristics and qualities they were looking for. And then the interview was not with Mr. Murnan, it was with the other Tigers, Inc. students, which I thought peer to peer was really cool, to do it that way, and you got graded on a scale, and higher scores were selected, lower scores were not so,

 

Kara  9:50

okay,

 

Craig  9:51

We have, we have had, we probably run about, maybe about a 60% acceptance rate. So we have students, we have, we’ll have. This year, we’ll have about 30-35 students in in the class, there’s some of our best and brightest, but they also are come from a little bit diverse backgrounds. We try to make sure that their interests maybe vary, so that we’re not getting all the same type of students, because some of the projects we’re on, the creativity and just the different skill sets that we need to be able to pull off some of the different projects we have, I think, 26 different projects that are going on within our our group right now, with over 30 business partners that or community members that we work with, they’re all tangible projects. You know, my day, I would say, is, they will tell you, like, I’m I’m as busy as they are. I’m in and out of the classroom. So like, right now, my class is going on, and I’m sitting here on this conference call with you. So we have set up some we have set up some procedures where our, our our, our school has allowed us to kind of act a little bit more entrepreneur. It’s not a traditional classroom. You’ll see kids up and moving. They’ll be out of the classroom a lot. They use this time. We have an hour and a half block where they’ll use this time to go meet with partners. We’ve kind of the traditional roadblocks that, like getting in out of school, have been like, kind of taken, taken away. The way the kids are managed. In the way they manage the projects is different. And so for us, you know our day and like, sometimes our projects are on the weekends. Sometimes there’s their meetings, or any evenings at different board meetings, or a lot of times they’ll have opportunity to schedule stuff and do stuff virtually, like we’re doing here right now. So it’s, you know, you a lot of times, you know, for us, getting around a lot of the financials, getting around how to be entrepreneurial. The only way for us to do this was to actually form a nonprofit and allow our school district to allow us to be able to run it during the day, so that we could kind of get out of a lot of the red tape that the state of Ohio and the school systems just kind of just generally have. We had to think a little bit differently. Our board is a board members of community members. They actually sat on a lot of the interviews. So it’s weird. I mean, I had the final say, but I, I don’t really even select the students that are in here. They go through that our for our students right now, really are sitting on that, and then they sit in with our board members. And so they, because it’s kind of selective. It’s it, you know, makes it’s a it’s a cool thing, because they understand the responsibility that they have coming in, and ultimately, the the characteristic that I’m looking for the most is the trustworthiness and the and the ability to be comfortable in the unknown. Because, like, a lot of the times, our students are so used to a traditional classroom where it’s teacher led, it takes, takes some weeks to kind of like, start functioning at a high level. I feel like, over the last, you know, like this year, over the last month, month and a half, we’ve really kind of hit our stride. You know, the first six to eight weeks is onboarding is kind of it’s hard for students to understand that the freedom that they have and responsibility that they have, so that’s ultimately,

 

William  10:02

It’s a big setup. But once you get moving, we get moving and just Yeah, it doesn’t stop from there, but you just keep going with it, keep picking up new projects, helping other people out,

 

Kara  13:40

so teachers you can now earn contact hours toward grad credit for listening to the podcast.

 

Caryn  13:46

Visit, for the love of Ed Tech, org, for more information,

 

Craig  13:49

Some of the cool things we got going on this year. I mean, we, I mean, we have an opportunity to go here in March, right? And I’ll have, Will, talk about it you want.

 

William  14:01

Yeah. So okay, it was kind of crazy how this thing all came up our I’m a part of wealth management, so we meet with different advisors around our community to, like, do a portfolio overview, get advice from other people, just because, obviously we don’t know it all ourselves. We need other people’s advice sometimes. So Mr. Chevalier, whose son is actually in Tigers Inc, he is the head of investing at P&G, so we called him in, met with him, did our whole meeting. Everything went great, and I’m talking to him after, I was like, thanking him for coming in, because I was the contact point for that. And he was like, yeah. Like, I’ve and he explained how he, you know, works with the New York Stock Exchange during his meeting, just to give us a little background of who he is. And he was like, yeah. Like, you need to talk to Mr. Murnan about this. Like, I’ve been trying, trying for years to get a Tigers Inc. group to the stock exchange. Like, I’ve been. Trying, I have the ability to get you there. Like, with we just need to make it happen. And I was like, well, that’d be really cool. Like, obviously, I want to do that. So

 

Kara  15:08

yeah,

 

William  15:09

We went and talked to him. It took some convincing. And I said, you know, I’ll head it. I’ll plan it, like we’ve been can definitely make this happen. So right now, I’m in the planning plus process of booking flights, getting shuttle transportation to and from the airport, getting hotels setting up activities to do in New York, because we’re trying to make this happen that get us to New York to go, go to the New York Stock Exchange, get a tour and open the stock market, which I think, yeah, awesome.

 

Craig  15:39

We’ll get the chance to ring the bell and be,

 

Kara  15:42

oh, cool,

 

Craig  15:43

your nonprofit on that day. So looking like, what? March 7? March 7? Yeah, so, yeah, we’re, so that’s kind of a, kind of a cool thing that we’re, we’re working through, which is awesome, because, you know, for our students and be able to get that experience. But, you know, they’re, they’re and they’re watching the market. They get to make decisions our portfolio, you want to describe where, I mean, yeah, portfolio has been around since 2019 so ourperformance

 

William  16:17

is percent, which is just killing the market where it is right now, we have very we’re very diverse throughout. I’d say our main main holdings are in technology, as about five years ago, that’s where a lot of our first original group put our investments in. We’ve been holding on to them, but we’ve just been working on this year, just diversifying our portfolio even more. And the 28% growth growth in the past year is huge. We just meet. We’ll have different meetings, like I’d say, we have a meeting once every two weeks to discuss where we’re at right now, what holdings we’re looking at or purchasing, and then where we want to be. So yeah,

 

Kara  16:54

okay, that’s really cool. Okay, I have two questions, and I don’t care who answers them, but one, can you start in this program as a freshman, or is it strictly tied to like upperclassmen? And then I’m curious too, how do you choose your projects?

 

Craig  17:15

Yeah, I would say. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s evolved since 2019

 

Kara  17:21

Okay,

 

Craig  17:23

so in 2019 I kept the I kept our projects. We probably had four or five projects, and we kept our business partners, pretty, pretty, pretty tight, because we had so much groundwork to lay on just the organizational pieces of like our business plan, working through a lot of the processes in place. And so we had, we had, we had a couple of those projects, but it was always the hope. And we don’t go out and actually seek projects, the project people come to us and ask us to partner with that’s where which is a great place for us to be. So we don’t, I don’t. I don’t take all the projects. I’m kind of the filter point. I don’t take all the projects, and, quite frankly, I don’t take all the business partners, because it takes a unique business partner. I’ve got a really good idea of what projects work well for our students and which ones don’t. And what we found was worked best is which is out said, Hey, we like to partner. So, like, it used to be like, Tigers Inc, wanted to partner with them. Now it’s like, hey, we’d like to earn Tigers Inc, which is a really cool place for us to be, because we’ve been able to flip that model over the last four or five years based on some of the results that we’ve gotten our business, some of our small businesses seen major growth in sales based on some of the marketing stuff and some of the interactions that we’ve been able to kind of employ for us, the way I describe our we are great at if you have a project that you liked, that like You just a great idea that you don’t have time to work on, but like for your business or your community, but like you have some ideas and you just don’t have the time, those are the best projects for us to work on, because our business partners, then are who are ultimately really busy. They can meet with us once or twice a month, and we kind of work through that project to some kind of end date. So everything that we like to do, it needs, like, I’ve just focused on tangibility this in the time frame that you were talking about. Like, we don’t typically have projects that run longer than six to nine months, we try to we have an event where there’s some kind of conclusion, there’s some kind of present out, or there’s some kind of transfer of knowledge and transfer of our ownership from us back to the small business unit or back to the community or back to the business partner. So to your point juniors would be in here for a semester, so that do have some a little bit of carryover. Majority of class is seniors. So it’s just, there’s, there’s two parts to that. One is transportation. Typically need to be able to provide transportation, kind of on their own, and so some of your freshmen, sophomores, aren’t, because they’re going to, they’re going to have things that they need to go do, and they be able to have the transportation to kind of be able to do that, so that’s kind of a or at least, be able to have a friend that they could ride with to go do those things. And two is just, it’s a bridge class, you know? And I say it’s a bridge class, these students are going to go on to some of our best universities, and when they hit the ground that the campuses that they’re on, and so we’ve had, we had 101 graduates of this they they’re getting internships, and they’re getting into student Leadership organizations at their respective universities, because they have, they have something to speak that said that they’ve actually done something versus they’ve learned. It’s like, that’s like, if, if you say, like, what is what are these kids going to walk away with? They’re going to say, I did versus I learned.

 

Kara  21:15

Brent, I’m going to start with you. So what has been your favorite thing that you’ve gotten to do through being involved with Tigers Inc.?

 

Brent  21:23

I’m gonna have to say I’m gonna go with the golf outing, because I’ve been part of this for the last couple years. I got to do a full year my junior year and this year. So last year I wasn’t really on the organizational part, but I kind of got to experience because it’s just a big outing where basically a bunch of us get to golf with somebody that’s prominent in their field, whether it’s business finance or even a different profession that might be of interest in the near future. But basically it’s we go out golf, have fun, get to network and connect with a lot of mentors, and then get to have lunch after but then this year, I was able to kind of head that project. It was, it was a lot. I mean, it was, it was very different experience for me, organizing 55 people going out to golf, identifying who’s a prominent professional that would be a good fit to work with our organization. Be able to go out and play and network with the members of tigers Inc. I think me kind of being able to see like, how what it’s like to manage, manage things, and what it would be like in the real world. And I think it was rewarding in the end, because I was able to get a lot more out of that, and able to enjoy the experience of going out there spend a school day golfing, versus just going there, skipping school. So I think that was the number one.

 

Kara  22:47

Yeah, what a cool experience. What about you, William, what would you say?

 

William  22:51

Honorable mention to the golf because that was yesterday. So Brent mentioned the rally for the rally can drive earlier. And I was the head of that project, along with George and who’s in our class too. And that was just a super fun project. Whole thing, figuring out how we’re going to get students involved, the communities involved, the sports teams involved, because that’s what it was for. It was a fall sports can drive. So we found to figure out how we were going to get all of our students involved, all the teams involved, how we’re going to get donations from our community. So I want to two of my favorite things about that were for the Friday night the last two Friday night home football games, the few days at lunch before we were selling raffle tickets, it was $1 ticket, and the winner was going to get, like, just if you got your name drawn out of the raffle, you’re gonna get $100 Amazon gift card, which was donated from one of Our local businesses around here. And then we went over to Raising Canes, and we told them about what we were going to do. And we got a, like, gift basket that had, like, gift cards, stuffed animals, T shirts, hats, all from Canes. All of our students love Canes, like, that’s after every Friday night football game. That’s where they go. Oh, so their name got drawn out of the raffle. They automatically got that $100 Amazon gift card, and then they got the chance during the Friday night football game, at halftime, to go out there and kick a field goal to win that gift basket, which they loved. We got so many donations. Who’s everyone wanted to go and try and kick that field goal. The first person that went up and kicked it missed it. So we had it for next Friday night, ailed the field goal, which was super cool to see in front of the entire student section, beginning the gift basket. And then so that raised a lot of money. A bunch of our fall sports teams raised a lot of them down to the life food pantry in level and. And we met our business partner, Jarvis Gold Investments. Mr. Jarvis, he brought all of his cans. He brought over 1700 cans, which was the donation he had to match. And we probably had 100 to 200 physical cans, and the rest of ours was a Venmo donation. So we had probably 32 to 3400 cans and cash donated, and just to see all the workers faces like they were just so happy. It just you can just tell we’re making a huge impact in our community and help support over like 700 families.

 

Kara  23:18

That’s crazy. That’s so cool. If anybody wanted to check out what you’re doing. Is there some place where they can find you?

 

Craig  24:44

Sure? Yeah, we’re www dot Tigers inc.org. Is our website, and obviously that’s our that’s our nonprofit website, and that’s has a lot of information about what we do and and how we’re structured. And at LH s Tigers Inc on Twitter.

 

Kara  26:05

Thank you guys so much for talking to me today.

 

Caryn  26:09

Thank you so much for listening to this episode. We hope you found our discussion interesting and insightful. Don’t forget to check out the show notes on our website, where you’ll find more information about today’s guest resources we mentioned and information on earning contact hours for listening.

 

Kara  26:24

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, share it with your network and check us out@forthelottech.org This podcast is produced by SOITA, the Southwestern Ohio Instructional Technology Association, in partnership with think TV and cet the local PBS stations in Dayton and Cincinnati, until next time, keep exploring new ways to empower your students through tech, and we’ll catch you in the next episode you.