How These High School Students Turned $1 Into More Than $100

When Darrick Ramsey initially held single dollar bill he was given nightmarish hit him hard. “I was very nervous, like I was anxious,” he recalls in an interview with entrepreneur.

Alexis Jordan had one similar reaction: “For me, I was very nervous”, she says.

In February 2024, a documentary film crew tasked these two students, along with about two dozen of their then-high school classmates, with an unusual challenge: Turn $1 into $100 in one week using all the resources at their disposal. They started the challenge terrified of failure, then used their businesses, networks and hard work to turn $1 into well over $100 a week. A documentary film released last month called Learn to Earn: A Student’s Journey from $1 to $100 the chronicle of their experiences.

Both Ramsey and Jordan initially faced not just the math, but the reality of the endeavor build something in “this economy,” as Jordan put it, where “what can you get for $1?” it’s a real question. The time limit added to the pressure: They had roughly a week, packed with school, sports and other commitments, to turn $1 into $100. “We had other things to do, so it took a lot of time,” says Jordan.

How Jordan Made $1 Back: Services and Kool-Aid Pickles

Once the shock of the $1 challenge wore off, Jordan went right to it community she knew best. “My strategy was, where do people give the most money?” she says. “So for me, I grew up in a church; my church is like a big family. So I said, let me go to my number one supporters.” With that single dollar and her existing relationships, she offered work and creativity instead of products she could not afford.

“Usually what I did was clean their yards, clean the church,” she says, describing how she traded services for donations and payments.

Then she put together a homemade snack that became an unexpected hit: Kool-Aid pickle.

“It’s weird,” she says. “But a lot of people bought them. Everybody bought them, like everybody was going crazy over them.”

She explained the process simply: “You take the pickle jar, you pour in the pickle juice, and then you just mix the Kool-Aid packets and the sugar with it, and then you pour it back in and let it ferment in the refrigerator for a day or two, and then you put them in a Ziploc bag and you just sell them.”

with cleaning work for local small businesses and a head-turning snack, she surpassed her $100 goal.

Where is she now?

More than two years later, Jordan, 19, runs a business called Mixed Topics LLCwhich centers on childhood diabetes, a condition she was diagnosed with in the fourth grade.

She wrote a children’s book, Why did diabetes choose me?chronicling her struggles and how she overcame them. She is now working on a second book, this time a chapter book. She is also a keynote speaker, turning her lived experience with juvenile diabetes into education and advocacy.

“I wanted to spread the word and raise awareness because you rarely hear anyone talk about childhood diabetes or juvenile diabetes,” she says, adding that people in her community were “shocked” to learn more and “delighted” that she published the book.

For Ramsey, the turning point came when he realized that $1 was less important than the relationships he already had. He was part of it CEO Program at his high school, and the program had taken students on tours of businesses in the community.

“We had a diary and I wrote down every business owner, their name and contact number,” he says. When the $1 to $100 challenge came, he asked himself: Why can’t I reach out to these guys to see if they can help me?

He recorded a simple one-minute video about those contacts: “I tried to keep it real short and simple, explaining, hey, my name is Darrick Ramsey. I’ve talked to you on the CEO program before. I’m just wondering if you had any advice or if I could pressure washing your car or detail it for you,” he says.

He had bought the washing machine before the challenge with money from an hourly job.

The response was overwhelming. “I overlapped myself with all the people we’d met and all the people they knew,” he says. “I really saw the community come together. It was just wonderful.”

He initially focused on pressure washing and later added machine detailing as demand grew. “It got to the point where I had to pressure wash in the cold, I had to pressure wash in the rain; we had the detail of the car in the freezing cold, like the cars were freezing while we were washing them,” he says, describing one of the busiest weeks of his life. By the end of the challenge, he had far exceeded his goal, earning $2,065.

Where is it now?

Ramsey, 20, was born in Decatur, Alabama, and moved between Chicago, Atlanta and Alabama before settling back in Decatur. He struggled “academically, financially” in school, which has shaped his purpose now: “I feel like one of my life’s goals has been to try to help young people with what they do best and continue to excel,” he says. He is one physical education teacher and mentor who “goes to all the Decatur city schools” to connect with kids, pulling them aside to talk about “behavioral issues and really just things that I was struggling with.”

His business, PeerPressure, was born out of personal grief and bad influences in middle and early school. After a close friend died the summer before ninth grade, he says, “I was under peer pressure doing a lot of things that I really feel like I wouldn’t have done if I wasn’t around those bad friends.”

In his second year, with the help of his teachers, he turned that story into a brand. PeerPressure now offers pressure washing, mobile car detailing, house washing and light automotive work, built over “about four years” and expanded through working with “many business owners within our community and outside our community,” he says.

His biggest challenge was internal

Ramsey says he was his “worst enemy” simply because he didn’t really believe in community or family at the time. Academic and financial difficulties left him feeling isolated and under pressure, which “created a lot of self-doubt” during that week.

Contact with people changed this perception. “They started to tell me I wasn’t alone,” he says. “Then I started to see a bigger vision.”

of LEARNING stayed with him. He endured years of “long nights, lots of crying, lots of work”. Those years helped him define his purpose: “If I can change someone’s life through teaching and counseling, then I feel like I’ve fulfilled my purpose,” he says.

This article is part of our continuity The Young Entrepreneur® series highlighting the stories, challenges and triumphs of being a new business owner.

When Darrick Ramsey initially held single dollar bill he was given nightmarish hit him hard. “I was very nervous, like I was anxious,” he recalls in an interview with entrepreneur.

Alexis Jordan had one similar reaction: “For me, I was very nervous”, she says.

In February 2024, a documentary film crew tasked these two students, along with about two dozen of their then-high school classmates, with an unusual challenge: Turn $1 into $100 in one week using all the resources at their disposal. They started the challenge terrified of failure, then used their businesses, networks and hard work to turn $1 into well over $100 a week. A documentary film released last month called Learn to Earn: A Student’s Journey from $1 to $100 the chronicle of their experiences.