When I was about fourteen years old, I signed up for something called Junior Achievement. It was a happy-go-lucky non-profit group that promoted business and entrepreneurship skills in children. Or basically, it was a bunch of kids in a room every Thursday night acting like middle managers with adult supervision.
My group ended up coming up with a business called Roc Creations. This was a clever play on our core product: cheap, homemade rock necklaces. We thought it was a brilliant, failsafe plan. After all, who likes necklaces? Everybody, of course. And how cheap are rocks? Pretty darn cheap, man. We just spent one Thursday at the beach, the next Thursday painting, and the Thursday after that drilling holes and tying string through them. We figured it was a solid plan, well executed.
Sadly, after a few weeks we realized we’d made a huge mistake. We’d bet all our chips on a losing hand. The necklaces failed to generate enough buzz and excitement at the flea markets, despite our screaming rhyming chants at terrified housewives, and we quickly tumbled into the red, piles of dead inventory and drill bit invoices mocking our poor judgment.
But then, like any good business, we evolved! We quickly changed our name to Roc-Cal Creations, and printed off a quickie run of cheapo laminated calendars. We tied them together with a dry erase marker, slapped some magnets on the back, and went door to door, neighbor to neighbor, selling these “reusable fridge calendars” for four bucks apiece.
Well, we managed to sell enough of them to get back in gear. We started to make money and established a strong business partnership with the lady in the markers aisle at Staples. Yes, it all ended well, but not without some late nights under a dim lamp with a dollar-store calculator, a stack of graph paper, and a pile of Laurentien pencil crayons, trying desperately to finish the numbers for our annual report, which was actually printed on the inside of one of our folded-up calendars.
It was a great experience and it really got my buzz going for running a business. That’s why I think it’s always fun when you see children running some sort of strange, hilarious, or terrible business. Because really, you’re just watching them learn stuff they don’t learn at school and have fun doing it.
How cute are the twins selling lemonade on the street corner? The gymnastics team running the barbecue outside the grocery store? Or the kid who takes your grocery cart back if he gets to keep the twenty-five cent deposit?
Those kids are all playing the game. So I say: go on, kids. Do it well. Next time you’re selling some rock-hard cookies or salty date squares at a Bake Sale, sign me up. Because we’re not just buying some mild indigestion, are we? No, we’re investing in the future.
AWESOME!
11 Comments
September 12, 2008 at 2:00 am
Kids are anyway more creative than us, if child labor is allowed I will make my kid run the company :)
September 12, 2008 at 6:20 am
I’ve heard some good things about this blog. Remember to balance the pics with the text tho. cheers!
September 12, 2008 at 9:41 am
Fantastic. My first business was selling pumpkins by the side of the road… Jack-O-Lanterns, Inc. Factory Outlet. Hooray for elementary entrepreneurs!
September 13, 2008 at 3:36 pm
I once saw a film about a happy-go-lucky non-profit group that promoted business and entrepreneurship kills, but that’s neither here nor there.
September 14, 2008 at 11:48 pm
I had some little girls knocking on my door selling iced tea that was in a picture that they poured in a tiny dixie cup. They charged me .50. I bought 2!:)
October 2, 2008 at 3:43 am
Interestingly enough, I too, have an early teenage entrepreneurial story. 6th grade, in Coach Sasser’s (that’s an awesome thing right there! Coaches that are given cushy teaching jobs so they can pretend they do more than teach jocks to punch people), economics class. Our state-wide project was to pick stocks out of the newspaper. I don’t have to tell you, but this was long, LONG before Google. Before the internet, to be honest. I recommended that my team just dump all our money into Motorola stock, as cell phones were in their infancy. And that shit shot up like a weed. By the end of the six weeks, we’d made over $300,000. 2nd in the state. The guys who beat us bought 1000 shares of Motorola (we bought 1100) and 100 shares of RJR Reynolds tobacco. Bastards!
February 1, 2009 at 8:44 pm
And it is a buy at only .10 cents in these tough times.
March 16, 2010 at 5:57 am
Haha, love this! And I never thought of it this way =,
April 14, 2010 at 2:43 pm
Thanks for the great post! It’s high quality. I have been reading your site for a a while already and it’s the first time I comment. Keep up the excelent work and keep on delivering high value!
April 21, 2010 at 5:17 pm
I think those kids are adorable. Never did it myself, but I love seeing their little tables out on the street selling strawberries or iced tea!
August 12, 2010 at 9:31 am
I was a young entrepreneur myself. I think we need to bring back the “paperboy”, which I truly believe teaches kids how to manage their finances and teaches them basic business and customer service skills. Trust me when I say I was more than willing to tuck that newspaper between someone’s screen and front door for the $1-1.50 dollar tip. Multiply that by 10, 15 customers add in the 7.5 cents I’d make per paper per day and I had quite a nice job for a 5th grader. What did I have to spend my money on? I love young entreprenuers.