A solar-powered payment processing device for smartphones was the first place invention idea at the South Valley Chamber of Commerce Shark Tank Contest, earning the three high school business students who came up with the idea $5,000 prize money and an extra $800 investment from a local businessman.

The winning team, known as the Beam Team, included Herriman High School seniors Mackenzie Gordon, Cannon Tidwell and Redford Hewlett. They qualified for the Shark Tank competition by winning first place at the state DECA business competition with their 23-page independent business plan for Beam, a payment processing device.

The Beam device, which magnetically attaches to smartphones, doubles as a solar-powered portable phone charger. The students also developed an app to run the device, with QuickBooks integration to appeal to small business owners, their target market.

To set their product apart, the students researched popular payment processing methods to determine what needed to be improved. 

“We wanted to make it feasible and worthwhile for people to switch to ours,” Tidwell said. “The biggest thing that we found is that all of these other companies charge a transaction fee that is 2.3 to 2.9% of the purchase. We were able to get our transaction fee down to just a low 2%.”

The project was a challenge for the three students who had never developed a product and business plan before.

“We learned as we went and we failed a lot,” Gordon said. “We failed more times than I can count. We redid pages and pages and pages. We had our adviser tell us that we had a terrible paper, that it just wasn't good—because it wasn't. We had no idea what we were doing, but we were able to figure it out.”

Tidwell said the criticism and suggestions from others helped them create the best product possible.

“The biggest thing that I learned is no matter how good you think your idea is, take the advice of those that have been in your shoes, because they know what's going to work and what's not going to work,” he said. “I think that was the biggest thing that helped us take this as far as we did.”

Gordon said the hardest part of the project was coming up with an idea.

“We had to come up with something that just wasn't dumb,” she said. “We had so many ideas that we were just trying to bounce around, and all of them had been invented, or it was just hard to come up with something that was original. We just wanted to make something that was not only worth our time to present it, but was worth the idea and the work that we put behind it.”

Gordon was disappointed when the team finished in seventh place at the international DECA competition, which motivated her to improve the presentation in preparation for the Shark Tank competition.

“I think that you can take that failure and channel it into something beautiful, even if it's just to satisfy the need to win—and it's okay to want to win, but it's okay to want to grow as well,” she said. λ