Utah Business Week is not your ordinary summer camp

LOGAN — "Whooo, look at your profits!" Jim Pehkonen tells a group of high school students. "As far as profits go, you guys are doing great."

Pehkonen, a Salt Lake City entrepreneur, is an adviser to these 11 students attending the 28th annual Utah Business Week at Utah State University. This isn't your ordinary summer camp: The students run a simulated corporation that makes custom jeans.

Two or three times a day, the students make decisions about how many jeans to produce, including whether new facilities are needed. They decide how much to spend to advertise and develop new products, including market research and the size of the sales force. They think about

how to finance the operation and how to determine stockholders' dividends. And they learn how to deal with problems.

The decisions are fed into a computer program that accounts for changes in economic conditions and even considers the costs of terminating employees. Each group of decisions represents a business quarter, and by the end of the week, the students will have been in business 2 1/2 years.

"The computer tells them how wise their decisions were," Pehkonen says.

To teach the students what decisions to make, Utah Business Week brings in more than 15 speakers, including the Utah Jazz's Randy Rigby, who lectured on the role of supply and demand, and Gaylen Bunker, a business professor at Westminster College, who discussed the basics of business ownership.

Pehkonen's group took to heart the words of Ryan Anderson, creative director of Salt Lake advertising firm Richter7, when it came to creating a logo for their jeans brand, Unkomformed, with the K backward. David Davis, a student from Mountain Crest High School in Hyrum, says they learned the value of simplicity.

"It was the most simple one," he says. "It's very clean. It has very simple lines."

Business camp's goal is to teach the students about business and the free-market system, says Peggy Larsen, chairwoman of the board of Utah Business Week.

"So they'll get out there and see how production works, how research and development happens, marketing — all of that stuff," says Larsen, a senior vice president at Workers Compensation Fund who volunteers to run the business camp.