Entrepreneurship director: Our students helped businesses transition to online sales

Years with organization: 2

Years in current position: 2

Hobbies: Drinking coffee, reading and writing, launching new ideas, cooking and spending time with my family.

Family: I have an amazingly talented wife, Taylor Mertz, and three young girls aged 7, 5, and 3.

What has been the biggest challenge your organization faced in 2020?

We were well-positioned for the move to digital. Our students helped over 100 businesses transition to online sales during March and April. With this skill set, we are focusing on the best opportunities to share this knowledge and talent with others. We are also looking to build partnerships with high schools and high school organizations like 4H, FBLA, DECA, FFA, etc.

How is your organization managing its most important resource -- employees -- during this time?

We are a small time of two, but we augment our staff with a student team of 10 Nice Productions team members. We offer flexibility in location and work schedule to allow everyone to get their work done when it works for their life.

In what ways have you seen the business community adapt to this unprecedented time?

I have seen community and idea-sharing find new homes online. I am especially encouraged and fascinated by the pace of change within education as new skills are shared in online cohorts and communities.

What are you most looking forward to when it comes to your organization and the year ahead?

I am excited to launch an online, on-demand entrepreneurship course for high school students that provide dual credit for high school and college. We believe this model of start whenever, wherever fits what students want and will help us share entrepreneurship with students across the state.

What motivates you every day when you get to work?

I love imagining what’s next and then helping that vision become reality. We believe The Nice Center can be the “skunkworks” of NDSU – identifying and testing new models of education. When they work, the university can adopt them. When they fail, we can just chalk it up to The Nice Center trying crazy stuff.

*The Nice Center introduces entrepreneurship to high school and college students with the goal of reaching 95% of North Dakota students by 2025.