“I’m co-owner of the store StudentComputers.ca. We started with the goal to focus on students. Being students just before we started, both myself and my business partner Zack, we realized that nobody took the time or the energy to focus solely on students. But we didn’t want to sell ourselves short, so we also encompassed price sensitive consumers. And by doing that, we’ve found that they are many clients ranging from business to home to students, so we’ve encompassed the whole demographic as far as the market’s concerned.

Apple’s Steve Jobs is the lowest paid CEO with a salary of only $1 a year.

We went from just over $30,000 in sales in our first year, with maybe $5,000 of inventory and two staff, to being a store that has over $100,000 worth of inventory, and sales that are in excess of a million dollars.

We have a web site and because of it we’ve had sales as far away as Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. So we’ve had some really good success with our web store, but its function more is as a business card and as an information brochure or a catalogue to a lot of our customers. We get approximately 1,500-2,000 hits a month, so that’s really good traffic and we try to take advantage of that by having monthly specials and so on.

The earliest computers were huge machines, many as long as football fields.

Having people work for us and having people depend on us has been a really big challenge. We’re here right out of school and now all of a sudden we’re the bankroll for 7-8 guys, and if we don’t do our work, they don’t get paid. And if they don’t get paid, they don’t eat. So those are some pretty harsh things to have come down on your shoulders all of a sudden.”