As the temperatures rise and the snow melts, juniors Ted Knox and Nico Zaveleta sit back and count their money. For most Whitman students, Snowmaggedon meant an extra 10 days of sleep, movies and mindless television. But for juniors Zaveleta and Knox, it meant making $3,200.

Due to the immense snow buildup from the storm, Zaveleta and Knox chose to stray away from the usual shovel and invested in an $800 snowblower for increased man power. On the Friday before the 10-day snow break, they went to the Gaithersburg Home Depot and waited for snow blower shipments to arrive, and finally got one six hours later.

“Mrs. Knox, and just our parents in general, encouraged our entrepreneurial ambitions,” Zaveleta says. “They preferred it to two teenagers playing video games all day.”

Zaveleta and Knox hit the street on Friday Fed. 5,  posting flyers for services. They got about 10 reservations in the first few hours, in addition to free services they performed for elderly people in their neighborhood.

Charging between $100 to $200 per house, they each received an average of $65 an hour, over eight times the hourly wage of the average 16-year-old with a job. Each of the 25 jobs took less then an hour, including one house that paid $200.  In total, Knox and Zaveleta put in about 25 hours of manual labor over the course of three days in their neighborhood.

They originally got the idea for buying the snow blower from their neighbor. In the pre-winter break storm, he taught them how to use a snowblower, and even lent one out to them in exchange for their digging him out.

Three days after the second storm, they put the snow blower on Craigslist for $850 and got six calls within a few hours. They sold the used equipment at a profit, making their net gain approximately $1,500 apiece, with which Zaveleta bought stock and Knox bought a laptop.