A weekend in the Gaylord of the Rockies gives students a chance at FBLA Nationals. Grandview High School’s FBLA chapter had 11 groups qualify for Nationals at the state competition earlier this month. Of these groups, Senior Kabir Srivastava and Junior Haanie Mohammed, with their teammates, earned first place in their projects. Also, Senior Matthew Hayden and his teammates earned second place

All groups that qualified planned out different projects. Hayden and his group competed with their Business Plan. 

“[Our] business was just in the medical field of diabetics,” Hayden said. 

The two products Hayden’s team focused on were the Nova Patch and the Zap Guard. The idea for these products stemmed from Hayden and his teammates’ personal connection to diabetes. 

“My brother had diabetes,” Hayden said. “I’m really passionate about trying to make a change with the diet for diabetics because it’s in my family.”

While Hayden’s focus was on the process of building a business, including marketing products and creating sales projections for the business, Srivastava and his team were working on their Digital Video Production. 

“We had to make a video that helped describe what an FBLA alum’s life is like after FBLA,” Srivastava said. “So we made a podcast where we interviewed an FBLA alum, and then we had a flashback scene that showed the difference between if they had or had not joined FBLA.”

Srivastava’s team had their own challenges as they had to communicate with the Grandview alum, who currently goes to UCLA.

“We had to coordinate with someone who isn’t at our school,” Srivastava said. “So it was just kind of hard, keeping sure we were on the same timeline with him.”

Additionally, Mohammed and his team worked on their Website Coding & Development project.

“We shared the files of the code and we kind of just worked on that together and we made changes to the code together,” Mohammed said. 

When it came to presenting his project, Mohammed’s team used their own strategy to give them an extra edge.

“We recorded all of our slides so we wouldn’t have to look down and press the button to move through the slides,” Mohammed said. “So we could make constant eye contact with our judges.”

Mohammed was not the only group concerned with the impression his team leaves on judges. 

“Some judges will give you a lot of reactions, and some of them will kind of keep up like stone faced,” Srivastava said. “So it’s just hard to read your judges and see if they’re liking or not liking your presentation.”

In order to combat any nerves around presenting to judges, FBLA hosted several practice nights for its members to practice. Sponsors of the club, like Ms. Ann Lujan, also helped their students feel more confident during wait times before groups went up to present. Hayden was presenting with more support than he’s had in the past, with his teammates by his side.

“I presented by myself before, and being able to present with them, I felt more comfortable and confident,” Hayden said.

For every group that competed at state, they had to manage working with their teammates, whether that was coordinating times to work or managing arguments. 

“We obviously know we were all stressed out, especially towards the start, and giving ourselves some time to work things out, because we knew we all had to work together to get this done,” Hayden said. 

“We would set aside sometime when we hung out to specifically work on FBLA and make sure we were all committing our bits to the project,” Srivastava said. 

Working with their groups of three allowed for learning more from FBLA than just marketing, finance, or business. 

“I also learned a lot about just being a good partner, being good on a team,working together with a partner, and organizing the work as a team, which is really important for the future,” Mohammed said. 

On top of learning about teamwork, these groups were able to improve from previous years. 

“I’ve played for nationals before, but I was bottom of the barrel,” Hayden said. “I was fifth place.” 

For Hayden personally, he moved up from fifth place in prior years to second place this year. While Srivastava and Mohammed both placed first in their events, Srivastava, as a senior, had different emotions around reaching the end of the competition.

“The last night, we realized it was the end of FBLA for us after 4 years,” Srivastava said. “So we were going around meeting new people and having a ton of fun talking with them and enjoying the Gaylord.”