Entrepreneurial students at Culver get opportunities to run real businesses

 This story first appeared in the Spring/Summer 2025 edition of the Culver Alumni Magazine

Being operations manager at the Rubin Café was a life-changing opportunity for Angie De Otaduy ’25.

“I feel like I learned too much,” she said. “I learned how to be organized. I learned about how to run a business. I learned a lot about myself in the process, how I function and what I like and what I don't like.”

She learned she liked the operations side of business so much that she wants to be an entrepreneur and start her own business. She plans to major in entrepreneurship at Babson College.

Other students who took the Strategic Business Management class in The Ron Rubin School for the Entrepreneur at Culver Academies said they love the opportunity to run either the Rubin Café, a gourmet coffee and tea shop on campus, or Eagle Outfitters, which sells custom apparel for students and produces additional merchandise for custom orders. It is separate from the Eagle Outfitters campus store under the dining hall.

Students hire and manage the schedules for two baristas who work at Rubin Café, which opened in 2014. The students manage expectations for the baristas during shifts, both in setup, cleanup and recipes. The students also need to order all the coffee, tea and snacks and manage the finances for the café, which brings in more than $50,000 a year in revenue.

Eagle Outfitters, launched in 2017, doesn’t have any employees but designs and makes apparel using heat presses and other merchandise using 3D printers, bringing in between $16,000 and $18,00 a year in revenue. When the Culver hockey teams host rival Shattuck-St. Mary’s, the Eagle Outfitters customers (students) to learn about an event, whether it is a whiteout or a blackout, and other features of the rivalry the design. They typically sell 120 T-shirts a year.

 

 

Each semester students in the businesses create new goals to meet.

J.D. Uebler, director of the Rubin School, said the classes give the students the ability to fail and not have such an extreme consequence where the business goes bankrupt.

“They can fail and reflect on that failure and understand where that failure came from,” he said.

De Otaduy remembers a day when her team failed. Milk was delivered on Monday and snacks were delivered on Tuesday. The students ran out of milk on Labor Day because they didn’t know the delivery would be delayed because of the holiday. They realized it when they went to pick up the milk from the dining hall.

“They told us the milk wasn’t there and we’d have to come back in two days. We said, ‘We left a line (at the café) and we’re not going to close,’ ” De Otaduy said. “Most of our drinks involve milk, so we have to do something.”

De Otaduy said she and the general manager stepped outside for a moment.

“We didn’t know what to do. The bookstore doesn’t sell milk. We couldn’t skip class and go buy milk. We didn’t know what to do,” she said.

They didn’t want to go to Uebler and admit their error.

They then negotiated with the dining hall before they agreed to loan them four gallons.

“Being in those situations and being the ones that have to make the decisions are great learning opportunities,” De Otaduy said.

She also liked the creativity running the café offered.

“It was great to see our ideas become reality,” she said.

De Otaduy gave an example where they set up a Secret Santa system around Christmas where students could 0rder a menu item for a classmate and have it delivered on campus by the café management team dressed as Santa and elves.

“I think the people who saw how much fun we were having and how much we were learning are the ones who signed up for the class next year,” De Otaduy said.

 

Emma Butcher ’25, who worked at a café in her hometown for two summers, said running the Rubin Café taught her the importance of appreciating the workers. She said a barista was leaving at the end of the semester so the students put together a goody basket thanking her for her work.

“When we gave it to her, we thought we were just going to get a ‘Thank you.’ She started crying. She was so thankful. It just shows that being thankful has such an impact,” she said.

Jack Christiansen ’25 said being general manager of Eagle Outfitters taught him valuable lessons.

“I realized that financials and crunching numbers aren’t something I’m big on. I’m more on the production side or how can we market this out to customers.” Christiansen said. “That’s stuff I like more of. But I also learned you have to know the financials. You have to be able to do the numbers.”

Christiansen said it also showed the need for teamwork and collaboration. While the two businesses expose the students to operations, finances and marketing, it also reinforces the responsibility for each manager to fulfill the duties of their position and to communicate with the team.

He said working at Eagle Outfitters also reinforced something he learned from being regimental commander: the importance of being able to delegate.

“You can’t do it all. Otherwise, it's going to be a poor performance. So I had to learn to trust other people,” he said.

De Otaduy said Strategic Business Management and Honors in Entrepreneurial Studies were two of her favorite classes.

“They’re not classes where you learn from a textbook and have a quiz on the next day. You learn skills that are useful not only in business, but in life, like problem solving,” she said.

Ron Rubin ’68, who endowed the school that bears his name, said he is pleased to see so many students benefiting from the two businesses.

“I think those students who participate are going to be so advanced when they go off to college or start their own business. They’re going to know what a financial statement is all about and what cash flow is all about,” Rubin said.