UNO’s CEO Club recently took home four awards, including Best CEO Marketing (pictured above). 

OMAHA—The students of the University of Nebraska Omaha Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization (CEO) may not want to work for others in the future, but their unorthodox approach to entrepreneurship worked for the judges at the recent Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization Nationals Conference in Orlando, Fla.

Wearing shirts emblazoned with the phrase, “I don’t want to work for you,” the group made a name for itself at the conference, which ran from Oct. 30-Nov. 1.

Thanks to our sponsor

Become an SPN sponsor »
Meet our sponsors »

The CEO club took home four awards, including first place for Best Marketing out of 240 chapters, overall winner and honorable mention in the Student Startup of the Year category, and second place in the Nationals Pitch Competition.

It’s quite the turnaround for the UNO CEO club, which started the school year with 10 members and has since grown to 60.

Dale Eesley—the director of UNO’s Center for Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Franchising and the club’s faculty advisor—isn’t surprised by his students’ success. He cites the club’s diverse makeup and the variety of activities available to members as factors that make the UNO chapter unique.

“As a commuter school, (UNO’s) CEO is almost like a fraternity or a sorority,” Eesley (right) told SPN. “A lot of schools have other things to replace that, but we kind of stand alone.”

Then there’s the number of student-run businesses at a school to take into consideration—most CEO chapters are lucky to have one. The UNO chapter has several, including Photo Booth Dudes, a premium photo booth service, and MavPress, a T-shirt printing company. The chapter also is working to revive daily deals app DailyNav and is looking into opening a student-run coffee shop.

It’s opportunities like these that attract a wide variety of students to the CEO club, says UNO senior and the club’s vice president Jenna Taulman. Neither Taulman nor the club’s president Anthony MacBride are entrepreneurship majors, but both joined the CEO club looking to be inspired by the entrepreneurial spirit.

“If you want to start your own business or if you want to work for someone, being able to have the mindset to think like an entrepreneur, that is something that is of value to every employer,” Taulman said.

“[CEO] has definitely taught me to approach things more open-mindedly,” added MacBride, a UNO senior and a current intern at TD Ameritrade. “Being in the corporate world where everyone is like, ‘Well how do I make sure that my manager approves this?’ it’s kind of turning it around and being like, ‘Well, let’s actually solve the problem instead of just trying to follow the path with all the red tape.’”

Meanwhile, sophomore Hannah Olson came to the CEO club with previous experience as an entrepreneur. Olson started her business, a plus-sized clothing line called Hannah Caroline Couture, in high school, and the CEO club has helped her grow her business.

Olson began selling her clothes on e-commerce site AllNative in November, and won the Student Startup of the Year award at the CEO Nationals Conference, an award she didn’t even apply for.

“We were all sitting at this dinner table at Nationals, and they started announcing the award for [Student Startup of the Year],” Olson (left) said. “I was looking over at Dr. Eesley, and he said, ‘I think this is you,’ and I’m like, ‘It can’t be, I didn’t apply for it.’”

Olson’s humility isn’t exclusive among the members of the UNO CEO chapter.

Despite their success, Taulman jokes that the club is just fine with being known by what their competitors at the CEO Nationals Conference referred to them as—”some school from Nebraska.”