New Jersey Jewish News
MetroWest Feature Story

A retired investor helps day school’s students become entrepreneurs

by Johanna Ginsberg
NJJN Staff Writer

Speaking to a class at the Nathan Bohrer-Abraham Kaufman Hebrew Academy of Morris County in Randolph, Steven D. Levy said that now that he has retired as a Wall Street analyst, he was thinking of opening a pizzeria.

One student wanted to know if it would be a kosher pizzeria. Levy was delighted with the question.

“I got to ask them what changes if it’s kosher,” said Levy, 49. In addition to the higher cost of cheese and the kosher supervisor, he offered, “the biggest difference is that you lose Friday night and Saturday. We played with the business plan.”

A lesson in real-world economics is the whole point behind Levy’s four-course workshop at the academy. As a visiting middle school math teacher, Levy teaches the arithmetic — and plenty of other details — involved in running a business.

Levy has been teaching a session on the stock market to middle-schoolers at HAMC every year since the bullish 1990s. But this is the first year he has offered the business workshops. “To really understand the stock market, you need to understand business fundamentals,” he told NJ Jewish News.

“The whole idea is to get to the notion that the more profitable a business is, the more attractive it is to public investors; that as profits go up, the stock goes up, and as profits get worse, the stocks go down.”

Levy spent 19 years on Wall Street, most recently at Lehman Brothers, where he served as managing director and global head of communications technology research until September 2005. Prior to joining Lehman Brothers, he was director of telecommunications research at Salomon Brothers and managing director and head of the communications research team at Oppenheimer & Co.

Now he sits on a number of corporate boards. His two children graduated from HAMC, and he has stayed involved with the school.

Some students have gotten so excited about his classes, it’s all they talk about. “My daughter is very excited. She talks about her project and how much she’s going to make,” said parent Helene Reich. “It’s a good life lesson about how business works.”

John Stone, a sixth-grader who has run his own herb business, added, “It’s really important to know how everything works — how everything is paid for. It’s not as simple as just selling something. A lot goes into it.”

After hearing about “Steve’s Pizza” at a session earlier this year, the classes broke into groups to come up with their own business ideas — these included a book store, a music store, an exotic pet store, even a healthy snack concession right on HAMC premises. And then the students had to write business plans.

On March 30, Levy returned to HAMC for the third of four sessions with the students.

This time the session was devoted to scrutinizing the plans, beginning with an HAMC concession called “8-Twelve” (as in “one better than 7-Eleven”). Students have decided they would actually like to open the concession after Passover.

“You think you can get Gatorade for 40 cents a bottle? I’m guessing you’ll get it for more like $1.25,” Levy said. “Now, do you have any capital needs? Anything to buy? You need startup money to buy supplies. And where are you going to [store] them — in the hall?”

Students suggested a locker, but Levy had another idea. “Are your customers going to buy warm Gatorade? And have you seen what a carton of Gatorade looks like?… You need a refrigerator.”

By the time he was done, he had amassed a list of expenditures, including the price of a cabinet and advertising costs, totaling $3,000. Students protested that they had already been given the go-ahead to use the school’s refrigerator and other space (along with free labor provided by themselves), but that would have prevented Levy from suggesting the students find investors to cover the startup costs. And that suggestion led to a discussion on whether or not the venture would represent a good investment, based on the profits the students had projected. The students came to the conclusion that with a return of about $60 per month, the store would not be a bad investment — unless the business closed within a few years.

The students in the 8-Twelve group are looking forward to opening their small business. “We’re very excited,” said Rachel Farber, 12, of Randolph. “We had a vending machine but it was banned because of the junk. So we decided people would want snacks.… We decided to sell fruit and energy drinks.”

Fellow group member Shane Neibart, 12, of Morristown has grown fascinated by the whole process. “We never thought we’d need all of that to start a business. Now I’m interested to learn more about stocks and how to earn money from [the stock market].”

When he returns for the fourth session, Levy will satisfy Neibart’s curiosity. He promised to bring examples of public companies similar to the ones the students have concocted. The goal is to provide the link between starting a business, taking it public, and understanding how and why share prices rise and fall.

As for Steve’s Pizza, well, it won’t be opening anytime soon, kosher or non-kosher. Unlike 8-Twelve, that was a purely hypothetical exercise.

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