The founders of SnoPlanks, a Bend-based snowboard company, decided to donate it to the Oregon State University – Cascades campus. Now, students are running the show.
SnoPlanks Academy aims to teach students skills like marketing, sales and supply chain management with hands-on experience. Students also ran a booth at the Snowvana trade show in Portland earlier this month.
We learn more about the program from Caitlin Colgin, the president of SnoPlanks and a senior majoring in outdoor products in the college of engineering and Todd Laurence, an instructor and executive director of SnoPlanks Academy at OSU-Cascades.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Last year, the founders of SnoPlanks, a Bend-based snowboard company, decided to donate their company to the Oregon State University-Cascades campus. Now, students are running the show. The program is called SnoPlanks Academy. It aims to teach students skills like marketing, sales and supply chain management with hands-on experience.
Caitlin Colgin is a senior majoring in outdoor products in the College of Engineering. She is also the president of the company. Todd Laurence is an instructor and the executive director of SnoPlanks Academy at OSU-Cascades. They both join us now. It’s great to have both of you on Think Out Loud.
Todd Laurence: Thank you, Dave.
Caitlin Colgin: Yeah, thank you.
Miller: Todd, first. How did this arrangement come to be?
Laurence: As you said, SnoPlanks is a snowboard company founded a little over 10 years ago here in Bend by two entrepreneurs, James Nicol and Ryan Holmes. They were also guest lecturers in my entrepreneurship class. They came to me a little bit over a year ago with this amazing idea to donate the company to Oregon State University-Cascades, and challenge us to create the ultimate experiential learning opportunity by letting the students manage and run the company.
So, we spent a good six to nine months talking to what seems like every department within Oregon State and multiple colleges. That resulted in a proposal that went all the way up to the OSU Board of Trustees, who approved it last December. Starting in January of 2024, we got to work on figuring out how we would actually do something as unusual and innovative as having a for-profit company within the structure of a public land grant institution and have that company run entirely by students. So that’s how it came about and the students have been exceeding expectations at every single level since then.
Miller: Was SnoPlanks a profitable company when it was given to the university?
Laurence: It was.
Miller: So it’s in that sense, it’s a more meaningful gift.
Laurence: A genuinely meaningful gift. And again, this is something that, to the research we’ve done, no educational institution has taken experiential learning this far. But that was the vision of James and Ryan. They wanted to give this company and all the assets to the students, and let them build upon the foundation that they had created over the past 10 years of them running the company themselves.
Miller: Caitlin, why did you want to take part in this as a student?
Colgin: I think that it just sounded like a really good opportunity to develop leadership skills, as well as kind of be a part of a business. I have been in snow sports my whole life and I’m really passionate about skiing. So it was kind of like a good education opportunity for me.
Miller: How did you become the president of the company?
Colgin: Well, essentially I just applied. But it started off as what they called the SWAT team, which was a couple students kind of making it fit within the university. And then, from that a lot of us became officers and we applied through there.
Miller: Does being the president or the CEO of SnoPlanks mean the same thing as it would in a company that’s not under the auspices of a public university. I’m wondering what level of control you have? And if you want to fire the head of marketing or HR, could you do that?
Colgin: Yeah, I mean, we haven’t had to cross that bridge. I don’t actually really know the answer to that question. I think that maybe Todd does.
Miller: Well, do you report to a board of directors?
Colgin: Yeah, so we have a board of directors that we meet with about once a term.
Miller: What are those meetings like?
Colgin: I’ve only been to one of them. I think Todd usually goes to most of them. They definitely ask you a lot of hard questions. Their job is to keep you accountable and they do a good job of that. I think, because it is a learning opportunity, we want to make this business successful, but we also want to make it a successful learning opportunity. So from those two parts, they work with us to balance those two parts.
Miller: Todd, that actually seems like a challenging line to walk. I can imagine students learning a lot by running a company into the ground … not intentionally running it, but experiencing that. That’s not, though, what you want to do if you want it to be a going concern. How do you balance this as a for-profit company that is intended to draw a profit and something that, more than anything, is supposed to be a learning experience at a university?
Laurence: So it’s a great question. In fact, all of these are great questions, Dave. To that question in particular, the students know that they are accountable for the initial investment that the university is making in this program. I should say SnoPlanks Academy is a jointly-funded program by the campus here at OSU-Cascades, and by the College of Business over in Corvallis at the main OSU campus. So the students take very seriously their fiduciary responsibilities to manage this initial year investment. They have a financial plan, and a sales and go to market plan with a break even. The students think that they can get there within, let’s say three years or so, as we learn how to run this business and we learn how to run it efficiently.
Their goal is absolutely to draw a minimal investment from the university, and get to the point where we’re covering our own costs in a very true profit and loss perspective. Then at some point we hope to be able to return some of that investment that we’ve received in the first couple of years back to the university, and they’ve got a plan to do that.
Miller: Caitlin, SnoPlanks has two boards for sale right now. Folks can see them on your company’s website. One is $800, the other is $1,000 and has this sort of fishtail-like design. What do you see as the company’s market niche?
Colgin: Well, we’re looking for people that want high quality snowboards that they can be proud of having and excited about having. I think it is quite the investment. Not everyone is going to be able to afford our snowboards this year. But I think, if someone’s looking for a high quality powder board or something kind of different, I think that this is a really good option.
Miller: Maybe I was reading too much into your words there, but you said not everyone’s necessarily going to be able to afford one this year. Do you have a different strata of prices in mind going forward?
Colgin: Well, one good part about this program and challenging part about this program is that the leadership will change over every year. So because of that, I can’t promise anything. I think that we are a university and thinking about making products more accessible is something that might be in the future. But on the other hand, we still want to maintain this high quality snowboard. So I can’t really answer that …
Miller: Although your answer …
Laurence: May I comment on that?
Miller: Please do. But also comment on this question, because what Caitlin brought up is another fascinating piece here: How do you run a company where there’s a lot of executive turnover year after year after year?
Laurence: That is one of the primary challenges, actually of several, that we have to figure out how to do. So a normal company would not have to deal with anywhere near the level of labor turnover and executive leadership turnover that SnoPlanks Academy has. We actually have to design that into our business model. And as a result, our company has to be better at hiring, onboarding and training new employees and employees with relatively little experience than your typical company does and your typical startup. So that’s one of the things that as we learn and perfect this business model, I think that’s actually going to be a strength that all students take with them into their careers – the ability to do an extreme level of employee onboarding and turnover built into the business model.
But can I go back and talk about the product question?
Miller: Please do. Yes.
Laurence: So in this first year, with as little time as the students have had to stand up a business from scratch, they made what I think is some very, very solid product choices to introduce products that had been offered previously by SnoPlanks, and that had an existing customer base, and that were targeted at the traditional customer profiles that SnoPlanks has always served. Now, they’ve added their spin in different design iterations to both of those products, and those are the versions that you see on the website. But those are targeted at the traditional customer profiles that SnoPlanks has served.
What Caitlin was referring to is that yes, going forward, the next generation of students on, for example, the product team, could choose to introduce a model that’s targeted at a different customer demographic that might hit a different price point. These are examples of all of the business learnings that these students are getting. Most of us don’t get these until several years into their career. These students are getting these real world business experiences as they’re pursuing their undergraduate degrees, and that’s one of the things that’s really special about what we’re doing.
Miller: Todd, are you and the other non-students involved here, prepared to step aside and to actually let these students make decisions even if you think they may not be the right ones? I feel like that is a necessary component sometimes of truly learning something. Will you have the ability to just bite your tongue and let them truly lead, even if you disagree?
Laurence: We’ve already had that experience several times. And in fact, early on in the spring term when this, when we were first standing up the business, Caitlin and the officers came to myself and to Geoff Raynak – the academic director for the program. I think the quote you used, Caitlin, was, “We’re ready to have you take your hands off the steering wheel. And we expect we’ll make mistakes, but we want to fail forward because that’s how we want to learn.” So in fact, as part of the faculty, Geoff and others and I are learning to meet the students where they are, because they are absolutely capable of running this business, and we’re already stepping aside so that they can go run it themselves. That’s what they’re doing.
Miller: Todd Laurence and Caitlin Colgin, thanks so much. It was great talking with both of you.
Coglin: Great, thank you.
Laurence: Thank you, Dave.
Miller: Todd Laurence is the executive director of the SnoPlanks Academy at OSU-Cascades, where he’s an instructor. Caitlin Colgin is a senior at the College of Engineering. There, she is the president of this company.
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