Luke Imlay was among the 10 students in Luke Cobb’s entrepreneurship class during the first trimester at Brownstown Central High School.
One of the required assignments was entering the Maverick Challenge, a business planning competition for high school students in southern Indiana that aims to further develop the innovative spirit of the region by reaching out to students and showing them viable career opportunities through entrepreneurship.
They could enter individually or as a team, and Imlay chose to go solo and incorporated something he has been around for a majority of his life: Horses.
His family has had horses since he was in second grade, and he become involved in rodeo in third grade. Nowadays, he’s still around the sport but just focuses on team roping.
Putting all of that together, he created Lucky’s Farrier Equipment and came up with a business plan for it for the 12th annual Jackson County Maverick Challenge. That turned into creating his own business, Lucky’s Custom Fab, where he designs and fabricates farrier shoeing boxes and heeling dummies.
Imlay, 16, a junior at BCHS, was among the 10 finalists who presented to a panel of judges in January at the Community Foundation of Jackson County in Seymour.
Soon after that, Cobb received an email from Jackie Hill, workforce partnership director for Jackson County Industrial Development Corp., with the results.
That’s when Cobb learned Imlay won the county competition and two others in the class, Karson Rollins and Aaron Skaggs, placed third.
“(Cobb) called me down, so I knew I must have done decent because I didn’t figure he would have called me down if I got last place,” Imlay said. “Then I came down and Aaron and Karson were down here. … They knew before I did, and then they surprised me. I wasn’t expecting it.”
Imlay received $2,500 for placing first, while Rollins and Skaggs earned $600 apiece. In total, the judges had $7,000 to split between the finalists thanks to funding sponsors JCBank and JCIDC Workforce Partnership.
The Columbus Area Chamber of Commerce started the Maverick Challenge in 2008, and Jackson County began competing in 2011. JCIDC is a sponsor of the county program along with the Jackson County Chamber of Commerce and Brownstown Ewing Main Street.
Since winning at the county level, Imlay has been preparing for the regional competition, which takes place Saturday via Zoom.
He will be joined by winners from Bartholomew, Dearborn, Franklin/Ripley and Scott counties in giving virtual pitch presentations. Imlay is scheduled to do so at 10:30 a.m., and awards will be announced at 11:50 a.m. He has a chance to win more money to put toward a welder, tools and materials for his business.
Before taking Cobb’s class, Imlay said he hadn’t heard of the Maverick Challenge. When it became a required assignment, he said a farrier business first came to mind because he had considered creating one in the past.
“I’ve shoed horses in the past, which is what a farrier is, and I started drawing up a box design that I was going to build for myself,” he said. “Then I thought about it and I was like, ‘I could probably build that for other people, as well, and sell it.’”
Imlay explained what a farrier does.
“Every six to eight weeks, horses need their feet (hooves) trimmed because they grow and they don’t break off naturally,” he said. “Out in the wild, they do because they’re running and all that, but whenever people have them, they are just out on dirt lots and stuff, so they don’t break off, so they need to be trimmed. Then there are different types. Some people just trim them. Some will put shoes on them to protect their feet for longer.”
He came up with the farrier shoeing box to have different slots in it to hold different types of shoes.
“We would sell these boxes that could be custom-built, and we would try to do it as cheap as possible compared to our competitors and make it affordable because a lot of the other ones are not cheap,” Imlay said. “I actually had looked into these, stuff similar to this, in the past, and there was nobody around here that did it. New York and Arizona were the main places where it was, so to actually get it shipped here would be quite a bit.”
In late 2022, Imlay created a Facebook page for Lucky’s Custom Fab and began selling farrier shoeing boxes and heeling dummies.
The latter allows a person who is the heeler in team roping to practice.
“Heeling is a team event, so you have a header and a heeler,” Imlay said. “The header ropes the steer’s horns and turns the steer, and then the heeler ropes the steer’s back feet, so this is a dummy that you can rope that acts like back feet to practice your loops.”
In terms of expanding his business’ offerings, Imlay said he’s also interested in making gates for horse stalls with a V design.
“I’d like to make it a full fab company deal, so to the point to where I have a crew and a shop and doing work constantly,” he said of his ultimate goal.
He still has to finish his junior year and then go through his senior year to determine if he wants to go to college.
“It all depends on where I’m at,” Imlay said. “If it’s going really well, then I might just keep doing what I’m doing. It all just depends on the situation and money for college.”
Imlay considers himself fortunate to get the opportunity at his age to compete in something like the Maverick Challenge, which turned his idea of a business into reality.
“It’s very cool, especially whenever I didn’t even realize it was going to be a deal where I’d get money out of it to go toward a company and all that stuff,” he said. “Then I figured that out, and then I actually won, so it kind of got real.”
Working with mentor Ryon Wheeler, executive director of the Boys & Girls Club of Seymour, Imlay was able to put his presentation together for the county competition.
While he was nervous going into that, Imlay said he settled in and became comfortable and confident.
“I felt like I knew what I was talking about pretty well, so I wasn’t questioning myself,” he said.
Now, Imlay is set to give his presentation again and hopes to earn more money, get his name out there and gain more clientele.
“Since I am starting up and I’m 16, so I can’t get any loans or anything like that, I’m actually kind of banking on that, getting some more money from them to expand the business,” he said.
“For example, getting an actual setup at the house (in Freetown). That way, I don’t have to drive all the way to Bloomington,” he said. “Then I’ve also come to the conclusion that my dad is not a big fan of his 16-year-old son taking his pride and joy of a truck two hours north to pick up materials by himself.”
Cobb said he was happy with the results of the county Maverick Challenge contest.
“I was pretty impressed with how we placed,” he said. “I know they worked really hard and everything coming up to it, so I was pretty proud.”
After Christmas break, Cobb said he could tell Imlay had gotten really serious about his business.
“He had started this Facebook page. He was asking questions about making it into an LLC. He had been researching. He had been selling a bunch of stuff over the break. I was like, ‘OK, he’s serious about this,’” Cobb said. “I know my third-place guys had also started their stuff, too. They had done really well, as well, so I was pretty pumped and could tell it went from just a class project to something they could see in the future for them.”
Cobb said that’s the great thing about the Maverick Challenge. A student can actually do something with their business idea instead of it being a hypothetical concept.
“I think it has opened a lot of eyes,” he said. “We’re trying to make it as big as possible right now, especially with the fact that we have a first and third place, to show that ‘Hey, he just won $2,500 for his business idea, and now, he’s starting a business where he’s going to make that money and it’s a lifelong thing now.’
“He can carry that business out of high school. It’s not limited to just a trimester, to inside the classroom. It’s something that he can take on for however long he wants,” Cobb said. “It’s real-life applications.”
12th annual Jackson County Maverick Challenge
First place: Lucky’s Farrier Equipment, Luke Imlay, Brownstown Central High School, $2,500
Second place: Wehmiller Welding, Blaine Wehmiller, Trinity Lutheran High School, $1,700
Third place: SR Automotive, Karson Rollins and Aaron Skaggs, BCHS, $1,200
Fourth place: (tie) La Repas International, Diliana Gaspar, Seymour High School, $500; Custom Attire Truck, Madelyn Ramp and Enrique Morales, SHS, $500
Participation awards: Mental Massage, Averie Linville, SHS, $100; Tiny House Recovery, Melanie Castro, SHS, $100; Cruzin Cabs, Breanna Lawrence, SHS, $100; Pink Armor, Maria Gamiz, SHS, $100; R.E.S.T., Lorelai Dixon and Chloe Long, SHS, $100 each
On the Web
For information about Lucky’s Custom Fab, visit facebook.com/profile.php?id=100088852899012.