World Photo by Lou Sennick Jay Farr, general manager for Farr’s True Value Hardware stores in Coos Bay and Coquille, talks to about 40 North Bend High School students Wednesday for the first Vocational Venturing gathering.

NORTH BEND — For local business owners, it doesn’t matter what industry you are in as much as the time, education and energy you put into your enterprise.

That was the message for local students from Bay Area entrepreneurs who told them that starting and maintaining a small business is a difficult path lined with pitfalls, but for the successful owner, the experience is completely worthwhile.

 “I wouldn’t be anywhere else ... but it’s a long road getting there. You want to give yourself all the building blocks you can,” Jay Farr of Farr’s True Value Hardware said Wednesday morning.

In a room typically used for theater classes, about 40 North Bend High School students gathered to gain tips and stories from Farr, restaurateur Joe Benetti, insurance agent Russ Clark and office goods supplier Tim Bishop about how they started their operations.

Farr, dressed in a navy blue polo shirt embroidered with the word Farr’s, said the family business has been running for about 93 years since it was founded in Coquille. A second store operates in Coos Bay.

While five generations of Farrs have or are working at the two stores, Farr said he originally planned to get into computers. In the 1970s, he started Northwest Microcomputers in Coos Bay after gaining a degree in chemical engineering from Yale and an MBA at Stanford. One objective of the company was to create a smaller yet powerful computer that held 16 kilobytes of memory.

“We wanted to get it under 100 pounds so we could ship it by UPS,” he said.

Holding up his iPhone, he pronounced that times have changed. Farr said he wanted students to understand that just going to college isn’t enough to run a business. They need to continue education throughout their careers and must understand that failure isn’t a bad thing — if you learn from it.

“This world that we live in is a dramatic world, dynamic ... it’s changing incredibly fast,” he said. “You gotta have a very good background in math so you can understand the business you are involved in.”

Bishop, who runs Bay Area Copier Company Inc., told students they should learn bookkeeping, become community-minded and hire people who know more than them.

“If you don’t have control on that, you’ll let your business fail,” Bishop said of bookkeeping. “This is America and you can dream and you can do it, but you need to plan.”

The men also offered tips on keeping clean credit histories, taking speech classes and forming bonds with the community.

Eleventh-grader Jack Prater said he attended the panel because he plans to start a coffee shop or lounge, but also wanted to get out of his science class.

“It’s hard work to get it started but it should be worth it in the long run,” the 16-year-old said. “You get to choose what you want to do for yourself.”

School Counselor Pam Romanko, who put on the event, said the small business panel was just the first of a series of talks through the Vocational Venturing program. The program is the result of a partnership between the high school, local Rotary clubs and the Boy Scouts of America. Romanko noted that about 600 students were surveyed about which they’d like to learn more about. The top three, which will be featured in future panels, are small business, health care and construction. Another three will focus on clothing — retail and manufacturing if possible, — dentistry and the automotive industry.

“If this is highly successful here, it’s a program that could be replicated practically anywhere else in this country or overseas,” said Will Wright, a Coos Bay/North Bend Rotary board member who helped develop the program.

Romanko said she was satisfied with the student turnout.

“I think the students got a good, honest view of what it’s like to be a small business owner,” she said. “I think very often students see success — they see Farr’s or they see Benetti’s — and they don’t understand how much hard work has gone into making that business a success.”

That message seemed to hit home with senior Michelle Crabtree, who plans to run a graphic design business in the future.

“I learned that different types of businesses have the same rewards as well as cons and that when trying to create a business you need to have at least the basic knowledge it takes to start that business. And, you have to be willing to expand your knowledge of the components it takes to run a business.”