Announcing judges and businesses for our 2020 Children's Business Fair!

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Youth are capable of far more than we can imagine.

When inspired by stories of successful entrepreneurs, amazed by the power of using mistakes for growth, and engaged through real-world, hands on experiences, our young heroes can discover their passions and opportunities to make the world a better place. We want to give them the opportunity!

The Forest School is excited to let you know that we are hosting our Children’s Business Fair Saturday, December 12, 2020. It will be from 10am-2pm at Trilith neighborhood (formally known as Pinewood Forest) in Fayetteville, GA. Kidpreneurs will develop a brand, create a product or service, build a marketing strategy, and then open for customers at our one-day marketplace. It’s an incredible opportunity for growth, creativity, experience and fun!

This year we will also have food trucks and musicians during the fair. We want to create an environment of fun and a place for people to stay and shop. This event is sponsored by Acton Academy, the Acton School of Business, and the generous support of our donors and volunteers. We all believe that principled entrepreneurs are heroes and role models for the next generation.

Whether an entrepreneur is famous like Elon Musk or Oprah Winfrey or they are one of the thousands of unsung business owners across this country, these are the people who make sacrifices to innovate, create jobs and serve their communities.

These are the kidpreneur businesses that will be represented at this year’s fair:

Stretchy Hair Care
Crafty Cousins
Sweet Stand
hotter chocolate
Bleu’s Lemonade
pop of color
Cakey’s Lebanese meat pies
Sister's Snacks & Craveables
L & L Gloss
The Loaded Waffle
Chy's Art of Meaning
Chaotic Cooking with Sean

JBR Christmas Goodies
Wyatt's Works
The Weight of Ink
No Stress
The Cool Kiddo
Beybladers United
Cadence’s Creativity Corner
MJ Jewels
Hobart
K-Brooke
Griffin's Lovely Lanyards
Grace Hart Designs
cake pops by holly
Made With Love
Animal Care Boxes

Our judges for the 2020 Children’s Business Fair are:

SHANE QUICK

The entertainment industry is all about labels, but you can’t put one on Shane Quick. He wears many hats– He’s an artist manager, a promoter, a creative, a disrupter, and a visionary and most recently an executive producer of a new TV show. He’s from the small town of Cullman, Alabama, but his talent has reached the other side of the world. He created international touring models that changed the reach of christian music and family entertainment. He put together one of the nations largest country music festivals, Rock the South in his own back yard. He built the largest Christian team in the industry at Premier Productions, and with his leadership it became a top 10 touring company in the world. He started small, but after almost 20 years in the industry he’s now pulling off 600+ shows around the world each year. With all of this, his greatest accomplishment is being a husband to his wife Laura, and father to his sons Ethan and Clay. He puts his heart and soul into his community and his work– but he’s not finished yet.

LAURA QUICK

Laura Quick was born and raised just outside of Savannah, Georgia. She attended college at Florida State University and pursued a career in marketing and sales for 10 years before she decided to scratch the entrepreneurship itch.

Laura started her first business in 2013 in Mountain Brook, Alabama as a business consultant specializing in strategic sales and marketing. Laura has always been a woman in business who doesn’t mind standing in the gaps and teaching others how to do the same. So, when she read a New York Times article written about the South in June of 2014, she immediately saw a big gap in the southern magazine industry. She quickly went to work building a business plan for Good Grit Magazine.

Laura has grown accustomed to being called “crazy.” She has heard more times than she can count that “the magazine industry is dying,” or “paper is going away,” and “digital is taking over.” And while that may be true, since the inaugural issue in July of 2015, Good Grit has grown to 300,000 readers, is circulated in 48 states, and is sold in more than 2,500 retailers.

Laura continues to challenge herself, her team, and the industry by continually striving to create a better product in a way that is certainly non-traditional. She surrounds herself with talented people she believes in, and they all continue growing and learning together as they create each issue, insisting that each one be better than the last.

Good Grit is a progressive Southern culture magazine with beautiful imagery and gritty content curated to bust through stereotypical glass ceilings about “southerners” and inspire social responsibility. In 2019, after the success of the magazine, Laura saw another need. Many of the advertisers also needed help with their branding. Since Good Grit already excelled at storytelling, Laura got to work creating an agency to help advertisers tell their own stories. In under a year, the passion behind Good Grit has helped countless businesses take their branding to the next level.

Laura Quick has built her business by being unconventional and well… gritty.

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https://www.theforest.school/blog-and-news/2020/12/01/2020-childrens-business-fair