Who I am…
Hi, my name is Payden Buchanan. I live in a small town called Olney in Illinois. I am 18 years old, and I dream of becoming a business owner/entrepreneur and retiring before I am 41. Thanks to my company, Custom Key Creations, I can get a jump start on my dream.
How It Started:
I was a junior in high school when I decided to apply to this program called CEO. CEO is a program where they take normal day to day high school seniors and they teach them real life business characteristics. CEO is not your normal day to day high school class, NO, CEO is a class where high school seniors can take, they go out and meet in different areas throughout your county all week, all senior year, to learn real life scenarios. CEO makes students use creative mind set thinking, we use real life critical skills everyday when we are in CEO. CEO mean Creating Entrepreneurial Opportunities. CEO allows students to make three businesses throughout their senior year, these businesses we start are called our Micro Business, our Class Business, and our Individual Business As of right now (2/8/25) in the presence of me typing this, we are transitioning into our Individual Business part of CEO. My FAVORITE part of CEO I should add. I wanted my Individual Business to be something I enjoyed doing, thats when I found my passion in making custom mechanical keyboards. My Individual Business is Custom Key Creations, where I make custom mechanical (gaming and office) keyboards to fit your personality and style of typing.
In this section, I will explain more about the CEO program and go more into depth on the three separate businesses we have started this year.
Micro Business: Just like any normal business you need to have funding to start. Whether you are selling a product, event, or service, you are going to need start-up funds. In our Micro Business, we sold advertisement spots to our CEO investors, friends of CEO, and many businesses around town. We do this to raise seed money for our next business, the Class Business. We also do this not just to get funds for another business, we raise our scholarship funds by doing this, and when we are out selling advertisement spots we are also making personal business connections with other business owners around town. My CEO Class of 2025 raised $17,750. This concludes how our Micro Business went and concludes everything you need to know about the Micro Business.
Class Business: The Class Business is an example of introducing the roles of any successful business. The Class Business made us (students) vote against ourselves to determine who will be the class CEO (Chief Executive Officer), CMO (Chief Marketing Officer), COO (Chief Operating Officer), CSO (Chief Sales Officer), and CFO (Chief Financial Officer). In every successful business, there are these officers, every officer except the CEO has an assistant. This year I got elected CMO for our class business, which also means I had gotten an assistant along with being elected. I was the head of marketing and the person I worked together the most in our class business was the CSO because marketing and sales go hand in hand. I’m going to be completely honest, I did not want to be elected CMO, I wanted to be elected CSO. The reason I wanted CSO is because I love to go out and sell products, event tickets, or services to people. When I found out I was elected as the class CMO, I was confused about why, but then it hit me, I was elected for a reason, and that reason was to get better at marketing and to expand my knowledge beyond what I knew already about marketing. As a class, we got to pick what we wanted our business to be, and our options were either a product, event, or service. Our class ended up picking the event side. Our class business took place from late October to the end of January, and in January we through a Bake Off Event called “Bake It, Until You Make It”. As a class, we raised $11,958. This concludes our Class Business and everything you need to know about the main important roles in having a successful business.
Individual Business: I’ve explained how to raise funds for your business and the important roles in running a successful business. That is what the first two businesses do for you, the help you learn and grow as a personal business owner for when the time comes to run a business by yourself. Well, this is it, the special individual business. A business where get to pick what you do (a product, event, or service), and a business where you are the CEO, COO, CMO, CSO, and CFO, unless you hire people to work for you. So here I am, I decided to build a custom keyboard business, where I build custom keyboards for you from the parts you pick out from my website. So far I have made $615 in total revenue in four days. So join me in my journey to become a successful entrepreneur like my grandfather.
In this section, I would like to talk about how I got to where I am today.
My journey to my small success: Junior year was the year I knew I wanted to stop waiting around and do something with my life. So one day in my office aid class, I mentioned to my teacher, Mrs. Vandyke, that she should get a custom Olney Tiger-themed keyboard so her office would be complete with the rest of the Olney Tiger things in her office. Fast forward to Christmas and we decided to get each other gifts because I was her first office aid student and she is my favorite teacher. I ended up building her an Olney Tiger-themed mechanical keyboard and she loved it. After Christmas break my football coach asked me to make him the same keyboard but smaller; I told him that I would love to and in one week I assembled and installed the keyboard in the head coach’s office. All of this happened around the same time I submitted my application to join the CEO program. Fast forward to senior year and I was leaning toward making candles for my Individual Business, but then Sheri Gray (CEO Facilitator) told me that I should challenge myself and start something new because someone does candles every year. Instantly I knew I had to continue making custom keyboards, so that’s what I did. For over a year now I have been slowly growing my brand Custom Key Creations. With the help of CEO and living in a small town and knowing everyone here in Olney, IL, my business has really been growing in the last couple of months. I cannot thank everyone enough for supporting me and pushing me into becoming the person I am today, and I certainly could not have done any of this without the help of having my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, on my side. The Lord works in mysterious ways and I firmly believe that if I did not have God in my life then I would not be here where I am today. With all of this being said I could not have done any of this without having God by my side and all of the wonderful people praying for me and supporting me from the beginning.
