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CHAMPAIGN — Throughout Jayden Recker's childhood, his father told him he was a born leader, that he would one day be his own boss and maybe even start his own company.
So when Recker's father approached him last year about the idea of starting a lawn-mowing and landscaping business together, the 20-year-old Gibson City native was all for it.
Recker's business plan for “Recker's Mowing Service” won first place in Parkland College's Cobra Venture Pitch Competition, receiving $4,000 in seed money.
The competition was the culmination of a semester-long program designed to allow students with startup ideas to craft sustainable proposals and learn from other local experts and entrepreneurs. Five other students were also awarded startup funding.
“I worked really hard not only on the pitch but throughout the entire Cobra Ventures process, so I was really excited that all that hard work paid off,” Recker said.
“But I was equally happy for my colleagues because everyone got something to help their business and everyone did a great job.”
Recker, who began studying business administration at Parkland College in 2023, said he first learned about the program when Cobra Ventures coordinator March Channon encouraged students in his Introduction to Entrepreneurship class to participate.
Channon, who retired after 22 years as a career programmer for Champaign Unit 4 School District, said Parkland asked him in 2018 to help create the CobraVenture Competition.
He brought his network of local experts into the program, hosting biweekly workshops with speakers on topics such as how to identify customers, what colors to use in marketing, how to get bank loans and how to manage finances.
Now, up to 14 students are selected to participate in the workshops each spring. Every workshop begins with each participant giving a two-minute elevator pitch about their franchise.
Channon said these proposals always start off poorly, before students learn how to phrase their proposals.
“Writing a business plan is one thing, communicating it verbally is another. And one of the things that all of our students said was, 'C, in the world we live in now, we don't talk as much as we used to. It's all phone calls and texts,'” Channon said.
“So speaking and sharing something through words is such a difficult, scary, hard thing to do, and I said, 'Okay, I'm going to do everything I can to make it easier for you.'
In order to secure the initial funding, students were not allowed to miss any workshops.
Recker, who worked a full-time job as an engineer for the Army Corps of Engineers in Champaign, mowed lawns, studied full-time for Parkland courses and supported his wife during her pregnancy, said attendance was hard but he heeded the advice that you have to work hard for the first five years to build a foundation for your business.
Recker said the only reason he missed the workshop was the birth of his daughter, but he was lucky that she was born a week between the two classes.
In preparation for the May 20 presentation competition, Recker said he gave his five-minute speech more than 40 times. The real test was whether he could condense all the important information into such a short amount of time.
Recker said what the CobraVenture program emphasized was that marketing is only effective if there is a target audience.
In his presentation to the judges, he touched on how he wants to serve clients who value a beautiful garden but don't have the time, desire or energy to landscape it themselves.
Now he plans to use the money to buy a new trailer so he can haul two mowers to the job site at once.
The program gave him the confidence to become more ambitious in his dream of owning his own company, eventually hiring multiple teams and expanding to other cities.
“It's all a learning process and it's fun because I'm always gaining knowledge,” Recker said. “It's so exciting to learn something new, especially when I can apply it to my business or life in general.”
