A college student from Columbus is closer to a dream of owning a hotel after winning the "She Has a Deal" competition.
Kayden Edwards grew up in the Blacklick area and attended Columbus School for Girls. This fall, she will be starting her senior year at Howard University, a historically Black university in Washington D.C, where she's studying supply chain management.
Edwards and her project partner, Brooklynn Tucker, recently won 'She Has a Deal,' a hotel investment pitch competition. The prize was $50,000 in equity to invest in a hotel project.
"For me, it's the start of something more," said Edwards. "My dream is to obviously have more hotels and either more and more properties under my belt."
"She Has a Deal" is a seven-month program that teaches women about hotel ownership and investment, Edwards said.
"The whole idea is to put more women in the space of hotel ownership," Edwards said. "The percentages of women in hotel ownership are very low compared to other demographics."
The hotel pitch competition has two sections — one open to women of all ages, and one for women in college. Edwards and Tucker won the Early Careerist section for college students by pitching a total renovation of a rundown hotel on Canal Street in New Orleans.
"It's gutted out. It's a steel structure, steel frame. So part of our presentation and our pitch was playing around with what we wanted to that hotel to look like. And also, plugging in the numbers, of course," she said.
Edwards said that while she had considered going into hospitality, she hadn't thought about hotel ownership as a career path before learning more about the business through a scholarship program at Howard. Now, she hopes she and Tucker can use their $50,000 prize to enter in the hotel industry, either with their own project or by investing elsewhere.
"With us being college students, we want to make sure that whatever we're putting the 50k towards can definitely grow and that we're not just stopping here," Edwards said.
She said the prize is just her starting point — not the end. She encourages women interested in hotel ownership to check out the She Has a Deal program.
