Wednesday, Dec. 26, 2007

Student plays the right hand with custom-card venture

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Charles E. Shoemaker⁄The Gazette
Aaron Sacks, a student at Montgomery Blair High School, flips a deck of custom playing cards he made through his company, You’re On Deck. Sacks, a 17-year-old entrepreneur, recently won an award for his startup business.
In two years, 17-year-old Aaron Sacks, a senior at Montgomery Blair High School, has taken a class assignment and transformed it into a $5,000-a-year business model.

His company, You’re On Deck, custom-designs and prints personalized playing cards for weddings, bar mitzvahs, birthdays, corporate outings and poker groups.

This year, Sacks started a Web site that allows customers to order and upload their own designs over the Internet. Last month, YoungBiz USA, a group that provides education opportunities for young entrepreneurs, named Sacks’ site as one of their Top Ten Teen Entrepreneur sites for 2007.

‘‘I was pretty surprised,” said Sacks, a Wheaton resident, while sitting in a classroom at Montgomery Blair after school on a recent afternoon. ‘‘We just did the Web site over the summer.”

Since launching his company in February 2006, Sacks estimates he’s had more than 200 clients and printed between 15,000 and 20,000 decks of cards.

Individual orders range from a minimum of five decks for $5 each, to more than 250 for $2 each.

Though mostly a one-man operation, Sacks says his parents have contributed. His company shares office space with a print shop his parents run out of their home, and his father helped him with the Web site design, he said. And until this year, when Sacks got his driver’s license, his parents would drive him when he made deliveries.

Sacks buys the cards from a distributor that leaves one side of the cards blank. Once Sacks finalizes the design, he uses a digital printer in his parents’ shop to print the cards and then trims the corners to make them smooth. Each deck of cards also comes with You’re on Deck’s logo on the joker and ace of spades.

Sacks’ father, David, said when his son came home from school with the idea, he realized, ‘‘ ‘Wow, this is serious stuff,’” he said.

‘‘... [Aaron] really has an idea of what he wants. He’s sort of independent,” he said. ‘‘He likes to do things his own way.”

As a small business operator, David Sacks said he’s proud of the business his son has built.

‘‘It’s really amazing how we have our own business, we talk about it at the dinner table and stuff, but it’s amazing how much of the business sense [Aaron] absorbed,” David Sacks said.

Originally, Aaron Sacks sold to people he knew and advertised through word of mouth. Now that he has a Web site, as well as some notoriety through trade shows and an article in the Washington Post, Sacks said he doesn’t have to worry about advertising.

‘‘People come to me, which is kind of cool,” he said.

Publicity has helped Sacks nab some high-profile customers. A few years ago he produced more than 1,000 decks for a roast of then-mayor of Washington, D.C., Anthony Williams. His design featured a caricature of Williams.

Some of the appeal of his business, Sacks admits, is that he is young and doing it all on his own.

‘‘Everyone connects with me because I’m a kid,” Sacks said of his customers. ‘‘If they have kids, they see their kids in me.”

Sacks estimates his net profit since starting the business is somewhere around $10,000, including $3,000 he won at a regional competition for the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship. Kevin Murley, a business teacher at Montgomery Blair who supervised Sacks’ original idea for his company, said Sacks’ success was no accident; he simply followed good business practices.

‘‘What more could you ask for? It’s a simple, sellable idea,” Murley said, adding, ‘‘He’s a terrific business thinker.”

Amy Neilson, managing editor of YoungBiz USA, said You’re On Deck was picked from more than 100 other sites because it was creative and easy to access.

‘‘What we’re looking for are teens that not only are doing what they do and doing it well, but also serving as good examples to their peers about what a teen can do in the business world,” she said.

Sacks said he’s saving most of his earnings for college, where he plans to major in business. He said he isn’t sure if he’ll keep You’re On Deck going after high school.

‘‘I understand that it might have to end, and I accept that,” he said, ‘‘because with the skills I’ve gained in class and through this, I can start something else.”

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