BUTLER TWP — There was a time when Katie Liebler never would have thought she’d be an entrepreneur.

The Butler High School senior once had aspirations of being an equestrian veterinarian. However, after seeing how she enjoyed her work at Kozy Rest Campground for a few summers, her father had an idea.

“My dad looked at me one day and goes, ‘You know, you love working at the campground. Why don’t you do it for real?’” Liebler said.

She took his advice and decided to become a hospitality management and tourism major. To do that, she joined the Entrepreneur Academy at Butler County Community College.

The academy, which has 13 high school seniors, is new in Butler County this year. It is funded by a state grant and run by the Midwestern Intermediate Unit IV.

The program has students from Butler, Knoch, Mars, Moniteau, Seneca Valley and Slippery Rock high schools. It teaches them about how business works and how they could start their own business.

By the end of her senior year, Liebler had a second-place finish at the Grove City entrepreneur competition May 4 for her team’s PlanIt! travel smart phone application. Another team from the county, QualiTEA, took first place.

The academy wrapped up its first year in Butler County on Thursday with a graduation ceremony and a talk from motivational speaker Anne Marie Alderson, who rode in the 2015 Race Across the West, an 863-mile bicycle race.

Liebler looked back on her participation in the academy, recalling that it took her a while to come up with an idea.

Once she did, she came up with something unique: PlanIt!, a travel-based app that is a trip adviser for vacationers and sightseers.

“It is like a travel buddy,” she said.

The app has three main features: Search It, Do It, and Track It.

Search It has an internal search engine so if someone is going to a location, he can type in that location and activities, hotels, and attractions will come up.

Do It is an itinerary folder similar to a calendar that allows people to schedule events at certain times and receive notifications as reminders for those events.

Track It is for finances. If someone has a spending limit, transactions can be manually filed to make sure he doesn’t spend more or less than intended.

“(It’s) something that would just help people keep track of things better because in this day and age you don’t see very many people that are organized, and I’m an organized person,” Liebler said.

“But it’s just kind of one of those things that’s it’s just going to help them along. You’re going to be so much more relaxed. There’s going to be so much more time to enjoy yourself.”

Liebler, along with team members Zac Schier and Becky Turner, finished second after giving a five-minute presentation at the Grove City contest. They faced competition from 10 other teams, including those from BC3 and from the Entrepreneurship program in Hermitage.

The first-place team, QualiTEA, was made up of Emily Kristoff, a Seneca Valley student who came up with the idea, Matt Walter and Hannah Carlino.

Walter and Carlino, both Knoch High School students, reflected on how much the academy has done for them.

“It’s great for everybody, not necessarily just people that want to go to college,” Walter said. “We have one kid that’s going into the military that signed up for it. It’s great for everybody to get that feel of the real world or the college life. It’s just an awesome program.”

Carlino agreed.

“No matter what you do in life, you’re working for a business or somehow you need to know how to run a business no matter what you’re doing,” she said. “You need to know the ins and outs of it to let you know what you’re getting yourself into.”

QualiTEA’s creators would not say what their business model is while they try to create a real business from that idea.

Carlino is headed to Penn State Behrend to major in marketing. Walter already has started projects for a woodworking business and plans to go to BC3.

Liebler will study hospitality management and tourism at Youngstown State University and will undertake PlanIt! by herself.

Academy instructor Christen Dunn believes PlanIt! and the QualiTEA teams can succeed, but the students behind those apps aren’t the only ones of whom she’s proud.

“This year was amazing,” she said. “I think I just got blessed with a really good group of kids. They were a joy to teach.”

This year was considered a pilot program, according to Anthony Conti, an educational consultant with the MIU IV. Next year, the program hopes to make a few changes.

“We believe that we have a solid model for our kids,” he said, saying that the MIU IV is confident in how well the program engages and instructs the students.

It’s just a matter of getting the students signed up and transported to BC3, he said.

Eagle staff writer Amanda Spadaro contributed to this report.