Entrepreneurship might be the farthest thing from your mind when seeing the average teenager today – who usually appear preoccupied with taking triple-chin Snapchats or composing clever captions for Instagram. Heck, teenagers are just trying to get through puberty. One might assume that starting a business is the furthest thing from their mind.

Four girls at Fargo South High School are aiming to change that.

Meet Anna Benson, Neha Patel, Lydia Hanna and Nancy Ngo – all members of DECA, a worldwide non-profit organization implemented in high schools and colleges with a mission to create young leaders and entrepreneurs. Each year DECA members break into teams to work on different projects, ranging from community service to creative marketing, and at the end of the year the projects are presented in a state competition. What these girls have chosen to work on is an Entrepreneurship Promotion Project.

“The goal of the project is to promote entrepreneurship in the school, the community, your city, anywhere,” said 15-year-old Patel, the chairperson of the project and currently a junior at Fargo South High. “We want to inspire [people] and empower them to actually fulfill their dreams of creating a product or a business.”

The girls have guidance available through their DECA adviser, but the bulk of the work is done on their own. This includes event-planning, reaching out and forming relationships with community leaders, and collaborating with other entrepreneurs. It’s a lot of work, but they are willing to sacrifice to make it happen – 17-year-old Nancy Ngo, who is working on a different DECA project in addition to being an unofficial member of the entrepreneurship project, even gave up cheerleading to create more time for DECA work.

And yet, though they are all extremely passionate about DECA, their motivation for promoting entrepreneurship to students stems beyond just their role in the program or the competition at the end of the school year.

“Sometimes people forget about that, they think you’re just doing it because you want to win. But no, it’s because we’re actually passionate about this,” said 18-year-old Anna Benson, a senior at Fargo South High and president of the school’s DECA chapter. “It’s for our DECA project, but entrepreneurship is something we’ve all been a part of, personally.”

Both Benson and Patel are the daughters of entrepreneurs. Mr. Benson was originally working at Scheel’s when he decided to quit and open up a small shop selling skis, bikes and other equipment called Paramount Sports.

Mr. Patel left India for North America in the hopes of becoming an entrepreneur – a journey that led him from working in a textile factory in Canada, to selling Bollywood DVDs, to eventually buying a hotel in Minot which has now expanded into managing five hotels throughout North Dakota.

Now, all four of these girls plan on owning their own businesses someday. And they’re going to take the necessary steps to reach that goal.

“We’re all inspired by our parents, or our relatives, so we want to pass that on to others and say they can do that too… connect with entrepreneurs and be an entrepreneur,” Patel said.

This message of being bold for your dreams is exactly what these girls hope to communicate to the students of South Fargo High – many of whom are New Americans themselves. They want to specifically reach this audience through having speakers like Mr. Patel, who will present to the students in a few weeks, share stories of finding success as a New American.

“New Americans can relate to him,” Patel said. “And they can know that…having limitations, you can overcome them and work through them.”

Another major inspiration for the girls has been the entrepreneurial energy of Fargo itself. Work on their project led them to connect with Greg Tehven, co-founder and CEO of Emerging Prairie, who in turn showed them around the co-working space CoCo Fargo – which Benson described as “SO cool!” – and invited them to 1 Million Cups. Seeing the vibrant entrepreneurial scene and the Fargo-based technology being presented there was a huge eye-opener, the girls said. “I never realized there was something like this in Fargo. It’s amazing,” said 17-year-old Lydia Hanna, who is called the crazy-idea-maker of the group.

“There’s all these cool things happening in Fargo but people just don’t know about it,” Benson said.

Seeing places like CoCo and attending events like 1 Million Cups are showing these high-schoolers that so-called “boring ol’ Fargo” might not be so boring after all.

“Colleges are coming up and asking, do you want to stay in Fargo, do you want to go?” Benson said. “And last week, I thought, I can honestly see myself staying in Fargo. This [1 Million Cups] is here, Fargo is becoming this booming place for business, and it’s like, why not stay here where it’s actually happening?”

Now the girls want to take the energy they see at events like 1 Million Cups and bring it to the younger students at their high school – starting this week. In recognition of Global Entrepreneurship Week, the girls set up a Dream Box where students could write down their goals, dreams, and business ideas. Their plan is to take the submissions and paste them up on the cafeteria wall, spelling out their theme for the project: BE BOLD – a phrase that stuck with them after a conversation with Dr. Wells at 1 Million Cups.

On Friday morning, November 21, they are hosting a Shark Tank event, wherein two sophomores will present their innovation ideas they made for class and get feedback from a panel of judges – two of whom are Fargo entrepreneurs that volunteered at 1 Million Cups.

But the grand finale, the event that the girls want to be so spectacular that “people don’t think high schoolers are running it,” Hanna said – is the Be Bold conference. This will be held at the end of the year in downtown Fargo. The girls are still brainstorming for the event, but what they know for sure is they want the speakers to be intermingled with activities so that students are having fun while they learn.

Most importantly, they want students to feel the passion that they have, and that they can see in the entrepreneurial community of ‘real-world’ Fargo. They want people, of all ages and backgrounds, to know that they have the capability to be an entrepreneur.

“A lot of people don’t really understand what [entrepreneurship] is. They look at it like, oh I can’t open my own business, that’s for someone else,” Hanna said. “We want to really open it up and say, you are capable of fulfilling your dreams and ideas. That’s what we’re about, is telling people that that’s possible, that anything is possible.”

If you’re interested in talking with these girls, keep your eye out for them at the next 1 Million Cups. You will probably find them talking with CEOs and exchanging business cards. Raising that teenage standard, one firm handshake at a time.