In 2014, Midway resident Joel Clark appeared on “Shark Tank,” seeking investment in his bear-branded pancake mix company, Kodiak Cakes.
None of the sharks offered the investment Clark was hoping for — $500,000 for a 10% of the company — so he walked away. Despite the botched deal, sales skyrocketed from $3.6 million in 2013 to $6.7 million the next year, according to Inc. business magazine.
“When they aired that episode, our website completely crashed,” Clark said. “For two months, we were just trying to keep up.”
These days, Clark is a bit of a shark himself, albeit one with fewer teeth than Kevin O’Leary or Mark Cuban.
On Monday, he was one of four local business owners serving as a judge for Invest Nest, a competition between 10 Wasatch High School students pitching their start-ups in hopes of winning the $10,000 grand prize.
“It’s a cool opportunity to get young people going early on creating businesses, because that’s really how this economy grows,” Clark said. “I have so much respect for entrepreneurship. Creating jobs. Taking risks. It’s really cool. And to start teaching kids skills at an early age like this, it helps them believe that they can do it, because it’s kind of an intimidating thing.”
Invest Nest was started nine years ago by Heber City locals, J.W. Davies and Brad Allen, from the Davies Allen CPA firm, whose children went to Wasatch High School. When they brought the idea of Invest Nest to Weston Broadbent, the school district’s career and technical education director, he was instantly on board.
Since then, it has become an annual competition that has expanded to 15 other school districts across Utah and Idaho.
Students compete in three rounds, the first two involving the judges narrowing down contestants through short pitches.
The third round involves a “Shark Tank” meets “American Idol” competition open to the public. Attendees vote for their top-three winners, who are awarded $10,000, $7,500 and $5,000. The remaining seven contestants walk away with $1,000.
Each school district’s winner will compete in a state competition for $25,000 on May 4 in Provo.
The competition is entirely organized by fellow high school students, who participate to learn leadership and organizational skills and receive scholarship money. This year’s team of student volunteers at the high school will be awarded between $10,000 and $15,000 overall, Davies said.
“I want to own my own business eventually,” said junior Easton Anderson, one of the organizers. “It’s taught me how to make connections and how to ask people for help, and it’s connected me with all the local business owners. So, I have lots of connections now to hopefully help me in the future.”
Anderson and the rest of the student team have led the charge in securing a venue, finding judges and soliciting sponsors and donations from local businesses. What stuck with Anderson the most was just how clever his competing peers were.
“I would have never come up with their business ideas,” he said. “Most of them have started from just hobbies that they were doing, and then they said, ‘Well, let’s go sell it to someone.’”
That was certainly true for senior Sarah Cutting, who has transformed her passion for illustrating and painting local flora and fauna with watercolors into a business called Rewild Design Co.
She sells merchandise for nature lovers, like shirts, stickers, educational posters about birds and bugs, 3D butterfly bookmarks and even a set of playing cards based on a frog’s metamorphosis.
Cutting dove into nature during an eighth-grade ornithology project. She began bird watching in her spare time — a hobby which “got a little intense” — as well as hiking along the Provo River and researching plants and insects. One of her favorite species is the Wasatch penstemon, a tall, berry blue flower native to the Wasatch Mountains.
“So many people don’t know that we have such a huge diversity of species here in Wasatch County and beyond. In the past couple of years, I’ve discovered that. It’s just incredible to me, and I want to share that with others,” she said.
Cutting started Rewild Design Co. around January 2025. She sells at art markets, through her website and even a wholesale catalogue she launched last fall and distributed to seven retailers, including REI and the Natural History Museum of Utah.
Invest Nest’s 10 finalists stand in a row: from left, Jesus Zarco, Camden Rose, Colten Seiter, Hallie Hicken, Chloe Gordon, Luci Rand, Vince Witt, Will Shaw, Kasen Rafie and Sarah Cutting. Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park Record 
Will Shaw presents his 3D-printed snowmobile rack, which he sells under his business, Rocky Mountain Racks. Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park Record 
Sarah Cutting of Rewild Design Co. shares her love of nature with the audience at Invest Nest’s final round at Wasatch High School. Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park Record
She’s made just over $12,000 since then, taking home over $4,100 after expenses. In 2026, she hopes to bolster her social media presence, increase her presence in retail stores and take home $35,000 in revenue. In five years, she hopes to make $350,000 yearly — donating 1% to local conservation efforts — and have a presence in 100 retail stores across the Mountain West.
Cutting didn’t join Invest Nest until this year because she had to work up the confidence to compete.
“I’m not the most expressive. I don’t consider myself a great and engaging presenter. I’m going to lean into what makes my business and myself unique,” she said before the third round.
She must have succeeded in showing the audience her perspective on the natural world, though, because she took home the second-place prize of $7,500.
Taking home the top honor and $10,000 was 17-year-old Vince Witt, who runs Vince’s Turf and Landscape. He does landscaping on homes from start to finish. He’s currently shifting his focus to artificial turf installation in response to Utah’s largely snowless winter.
“New construction in certain HOAs isn’t allowed to have traditional lawns anymore. The water is too scarce. So you have to have artificial turf or xeriscape landscaping,” he said. “Therefore, I think this trend’s going to move upstate, and everyone’s going to be forced to buy what I offer.”
Vince has been landscaping professionally for four years.
“I’ve been doing this with my dad and my uncle since I was a little kid. And my dad and his seven siblings all did construction of some sort. So, I’ve grown up in it,” he said.
Vince’s father was Joe Witt, a prominent homebuilder in Wasatch and Summit counties who died in an avalanche while snowmobiling in the Snake Creek area in February.
“I worked for him pretty much my whole life. I remember, since I was little, him asking me to run and grab tools from his truck,” Vince said. “Slowly, he started incorporating me more and more. And then, he started letting me do his landscaping on his jobs.”
His dad’s connections have served him well. He’s worked on multimillion-dollar homes, one of which appeared in the Park City Showcase of Homes, and brought home more revenue than any of his Invest Nest competitors.
In 2025, Vince had a gross revenue of just over $230,000, profiting over $50,000. In 2026, he’s already booked almost $160,000 in jobs. He expects gross revenue of $478,000 this year, taking home $105,000.
After adding the $10,000 prize to his bank account, Vince hopes to double his employees from four to eight and participate in a three-month “turf training” internship in Los Angeles through his family’s excavating company.
Vince doesn’t yet have a strategy for the state competition. For now, he’s going to bask in the glory of his win.