 Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce — Success School Program Sometimes the most meaningful conversations don’t happen in front of a packed room. They happen in smaller settings—where students ask real questions, speakers share real experiences, and the conversation stops being about presentation and starts being about possibility. That was the case at the recent Success School Business & Entrepreneurship Career Panel at Edgewood High School. With just a handful of students in attendance, the setting allowed for something more impactful: an honest, direct conversation about what it actually takes to build something—and why that matters, both for students individually and for Bloomington’s economic future. Real Experience, Real Conversations The panel brought together three people representing different corners of Bloomington’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. Jay Nelson founded and scaled RCV Roofing, Siding & Gutters into one of Southern Indiana’s largest residential roofing companies before selling it in 2022; he now runs TradeWins, helping contractors build businesses that don’t depend entirely on the owner. Allan Buhr has spent decades moving between the inside and outside of business finance—holding controller roles at construction companies before returning to commercial lending at Farmers & Mechanics Federal. And Hana Kieger is finishing her PhD in entrepreneurship at IU while simultaneously running her third company, a supplement for jet lag recovery, and preparing to begin a professorship. Their paths couldn’t look more different. Their message to students was nearly identical: you don’t need to have it all figured out. You just need to start. That idea—about starting—kept surfacing throughout the conversation, and the panelists found different ways to make it concrete. Jay framed it around momentum. “You don’t go from standing still to just sprinting,” he said. “Take the walk, take the step, and always keep stepping.” He’s a self-described perfectionist, and he was direct about the trap that creates: “It’s so hard to go from zero to version one than it is from version one to version two. Starting from nothing to something is the hardest part.” Hana offered an image for the visual thinkers in the room. Think of your goal as the end of a long path, she said, lined with cobblestones you can’t all see from where you’re standing. You can’t jump to the end. But you can step on the next stone. “By the time you realize what you’re doing, you’re 10 cobblestones in. There may still be 100 left instead of 50 like you thought—but you’re 10 in instead of still standing there theorizing about how many there are.” The research backs this up. Hana’s work focuses on what she calls the entrepreneurial leap—the gap between thinking about starting something and actually doing it. She told students the biggest obstacle is usually the belief that they need a complete plan first. “You’re never going to know everything when you start. Even when you’re successful, there’s always going to be things you don’t know.” The people who gain traction, she’s found, are the ones willing to experiment instead of waiting for certainty. The Discipline Behind Entrepreneurship While entrepreneurship can look exciting and spontaneous from the outside, all three panelists were clear that what sustains a business is far less glamorous: structure, habits, and financial discipline. Allan brought the financial reality into sharp focus. He’s seen the books of enough businesses—first as a controller from the inside, now as a lender from the outside—to know the patterns. He told students that roughly 85% of business failures come down to one root cause: money leaving the business before it should. “Most entrepreneurs look at it as a job,” he said. “They just don’t want to work for somebody else. And if you take every dime that the business makes personally, most of the time that business fails because of that.” He also walked students through what he called the three kinds of entrepreneurs: those who build a business as a job, those who build it as a wealth vehicle they plan to exit, and those who are simply addicted to the risk. “You’ve got to figure out which one you are in the beginning,” he said—though he was quick to add it can shift over time. He pointed to Jay as a case study: started with a job, built something worth selling, and was already thinking about the next thing before the ink dried on the exit. Jay’s practical advice echoed this: break big visions into 90-day goals. “I’m a visionary. I always think of cool ideas and what I could do or what this could become--I’m thinking 3, 5, 10 years down the road. That’s great. But you have to ground yourself in the present.” The goal at the end of senior year doesn’t start at the end, he told students. It starts now. Failure Isn’t the End--It’s the Process One of the most powerful moments of the panel came when a student asked the panelists directly: with your losses and failures, how did you come back? Jay didn’t soften it. He told the room that while working a job in Tennessee, he caught a Golden Corral roof on fire. It made the news. The fire department showed up. He thought this was it. This is done. “But I’m a big believer in working hard and doing a good job and being a good person. And it’s just put your foot down and keep driving through.” He went back to zero. He climbed back up. He sold the company nine years later. His lesson for students was simple: own your failures. Don’t point fingers. Ask what you’ll do differently. He used his daughter as the analogy—she came in crying the night before after crashing her bike because her shoelace caught in the spokes. He asked her what the lesson was. Tie my shoes, dad. “Same thing in business. What did you learn? What are you not going to do again?” Allan added a piece of context that reframes what failure even means: “Any entrepreneur you meet has had 10 failures for every success they’ve had.” The ratio isn’t the problem—stopping is. A Community That Wants You to Succeed All three panelists ended where they’d been circling all along: the importance of being surrounded by people who are doing what you want to do. Jay said the single thing he wished he’d done earlier was hire a business coach. He waited until year four. “Surround yourself with other people that might be doing this—you’re going to start to listen, learn, be motivated.” He noted that most entrepreneurs are eager to share what they’ve learned: “Always keep your ears open, because there’s always something you can learn from talking to somebody. And that’s not just in business. That’s in life.” Hana pointed students toward environments where entrepreneurial thinking is normal—clubs, programs like the Start It Up Foundation, classes that push you to build rather than just study. And as the bell rang, she made the offer explicit: if any student had even a vague idea they wanted to talk through, she was available as a sounding board. Allan reminded students that these resources don’t require a finished business plan or a polished pitch. “Come to my office and talk to me for free. The Chamber is a fantastic resource. The Indiana Small Business Development Center at Ivy Tech—all those things are free.” Bloomington’s Opportunity Moment This panel didn’t happen in a vacuum. Phil Powell of IU’s Indiana Business Research Center has spent much of the past year sounding an alarm about Bloomington’s economic trajectory. Between August 2024 and August 2025, average wages in the Bloomington metro area fell by 6.2%, placing the region near the bottom of the state. Employment fell nearly 2% in the same period. The primary driver, Powell says, is the contraction of Indiana University, which accounts for roughly 20% of regional employment. High-paying IU positions have been eliminated or left unfilled, pulling the regional average down. But Powell has also consistently pointed to a counterweight: Bloomington’s private sector. New business formation has grown at more than three times the national rate. The trades and construction industries—the very world Jay Nelson built his career in—have been part of what Powell calls the cushion, keeping the region afloat during hard times in higher ed. Life sciences and microelectronics companies are expanding and paying well. The Trades District, a technology and innovation hub just northwest of City Hall, is beginning to create what Powell describes as the conditions for “creative collision”—the kind of environment where research and entrepreneurship meet and generate something new. The people in the room at Edgewood on March 31 were living proof of the thesis. Jay Nelson was kicked out of high school, joined the Army, and became a multi-millionaire before 40 by building and selling a trades business. Allan Buhr spent years inside construction companies learning their finances before moving to the lending side—exactly the kind of dual-perspective expertise that helps businesses in that sector grow. Hana Kieger is training the next generation of founders at the very university whose contraction is creating the economic pressure the region now faces. What Powell calls “creative collision” doesn’t start at the Trades District. It starts in rooms like the one at Edgewood, where a high schooler hears Jay Nelson describe climbing back from zero after a building fire and thinks: maybe I could do something too. Why This Work Matters Programs like Success School sit directly in the gap between Bloomington’s economic challenge and its economic potential. They introduce students to real career paths. They put students in the same room as people who have built things and failed and built again. They make entrepreneurship feel like something a real person from this community can do—not a distant abstraction. In a small room at Edgewood High School, a question got asked. A connection was made. A mind started to see the world a little differently—not as a place where jobs appear or don’t, but as a place where problems exist that someone with the right mindset and the right support might actually solve. That’s not just good for a student. For a region trying to write a new economic story, it’s where the work begins. Get Involved Success School continues to connect students with real-world experiences that shape their futures—and our community’s. Interested in sharing your experience or supporting this work? Reach out to the Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce to learn how you can get involved.
By: Christopher EmgeSenior Director of Government & Community Relations This article was written with the assistance of AI but all of the opinions expressed are from the author and those in the story.
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