Recently, I had the opportunity to attend Wisconsin Business World at St. Norbert college in De Pere, Wisconsin.

High school kids came to attend this four-day camp with only the vague idea that they were doing something with business, myself included.

I didn't even find out what we were doing until the end of the first night. It turns out, that we were put into "companies" with the goal being to create a product and a company to go with it.

Here I was, with eight kids I didn't know, with absolutely no idea of what to make for a product that we would be presenting the next day at a trade show. Luckily, the first night was a "junk auction" with each of the 11 companies given $10,000 and told they needed to buy at least two piles. After winning our two piles, we came up with the product of Future Frames, newly designed by our company The Future. Future Frames are a futuristic pair of glasses that allows people to download movies and TV shows and view them on the lenses of the glasses, wireless and WiFi-free.

After designing our product on the first night, our company needed to decide who was going to work in the different areas. Finance, marketing, production, IT and of course, the coveted position of CEO. I initially made the vice president of marketing, something I was more than OK with. But when our advisor said we should vote on the CEO position, three hands went into the air to run, mine included. Our company voted, our adviser tallied the votes, and emotions were running rampant. Let’s just say, I was a little more than stunned when my name was erased from vice president of marketing and moved to the CEO slot.

Well, I suppose I had always jokingly told my friends that I would one day be CEO of a multi-trillion dollar corporation, I just hadn’t expected that day to come so soon. Now I had three days to be the CEO, lead our company to victory and embrace The Future.

Lesson 1: Games are fun

With the leftover materials we had bought from the junk auction, our company decided to make a game that involved lots of duct tape. This game was then presented as an incentive to come to our booth at the trade show. Players even had the chance to win a life-long friend, a pet rock (also from the junk auction). While pet rocks being distributed, we had the opportunity to pitch our product over and over, and had the honor of winning first place for the best pitch.

Lesson 2: Have a good finance team

One part of managing our company involved competing in BizSim, a finance simulation. Math is not exactly my forte, but thankfully, with my three trusty finance guys, I had to only help weigh in on decisions and offer my help and thoughts. I never had to directly work with only the finance, and they managed to keep our company afloat and out of an overdraft loan.

Lesson 3: Take the reins

In many movies, CEOs are portrayed as evil tyrannical bosses, and I had no desire to be that person, as I was friends with most members on my team. However, one member of my team kept trying to take control of my company and perform the CEO responsibilities, even when he did no work at all for the company. He simply wanted to be apathetic but then sweep in and take the glory for himself. After a period of time, I found I was absolutely fed up with it, and I finally took hold of the reins.

Lesson 4: Don't hit the cameraman with a DVD player

When performing the commercial for our product, part of my role was to hurl a DVD player onto the floor. When the actual performance came, I found that my aim had been off by quite a bit and I had come very close to hitting the cameraman, who had been recording the commercial sitting on the floor nearby. He even came over to thank me for "sparing him," little did he know that the DVD was not supposed to get that close to him. Regardless, we took second-place in the commercial, bested by the dance battle commercial.

Overall, Business World was an incredible experience, I highly recommend it and I hopefully will return next year for the advanced program. The main takeaway is that being a CEO is tough (even though at Business World it was a blast), but maybe cut your boss a little bit of slack, or offer to do a little bit more in the workplace to help ease the weight from their shoulders (and gain some brownie points too).