Jonathan Campos turned an interest in aviation into an aerial production company

When Jonathan Campos signed up for aviation classes, he didn’t expect becoming a business owner.

Campos moved to Dallas almost three years ago from Panama and is now a junior at W.T. White High School. The year after he started at W.T. White, his counselor helped him take the next step toward his career.

“Since I can remember, I’ve always wanted to be a pilot,” Campos says.

His sophomore year, he enrolled in Dallas ISD’s Career Institute North, which offers career and technical education programs, to study aviation. But, his schedule also placed him in Rebecca Palmer’s entrepreneurship class.

Palmer introduced Campos and his classmates to the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship. Each year, NFTE hosts its National Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge, in which students from around the country pitch their small business ideas.

While brainstorming his idea for the competition, Campos was working on his Part 107 certificate, which would give him a commercial drone license. This overlap steered his idea toward something familiar: photography.

Campos created JC Productions, a company offering aerial photography, videography and cinematography for real estate agents, marketing firms and other agencies looking for drone footage. He worked with Palmer to create a four-slide pitch deck for the school-wide competition.

As he advanced through each round — first school, then district, then regionals — the pitch deck expanded, along with his confidence.

“NFTE makes you a really confident person,” Campos says. “It teaches you how the business world works, how to do networking, how to talk with people, how to make connections with people, how to run a business.”

JC Productions eventually brought Campos to the national competition in New York. NFTE paid for Campos and his mom to stay at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square for four days. The first round, quarterfinals, semifinals and finals were all held on the same day, with Campos being the only student representing Dallas ISD.

He credits both NFTE and JROTC for how he carries himself now.

“When I got here on my first day, I was a really, really shy person, but that and JROTC just made me really confident.”

Though the competition is over, Campos is still working on his business. He is currently building a website to house his entire portfolio, and he recently attended a NFTE event to network with real estate agents and spread the word about his business. He is also working on a documentary about W.T. White’s JROTC program.

Campos says that though he maintains his aspiration to become a pilot, this experience has given him the long term goal of tying aviation and entrepreneurship together.

“Don’t be scared to try new things,” he says. “You never know what the outcome will be or the stuff you’re going to learn and what other opportunities are going to show up or how many doors are going to open if you don’t try something new.”