Be Inspired by These Top KidPreneurs & Encourage Your Own KidPreneurs
We are a restless family of four, looking for adventure, ways to increase our funds, and more educaitonal options for our littles. We have exchanged things for experiences. Join us!
Children are often given an allowance for doing regular chores around the house.
While this is a great way to encourage our kids to clean their room, it can also send a message that cleaning his own home is something he gets paid to do. We remember meeting a family that told us the allowance they gave their children was not related to their chores at all, but a way to learn about how to handle money. We’ve adopted this philosphy, which will hopefully make him an excellent roommate/spouse someday, but we wanted to take it a step further and help him understand the value of making money.
How does our nine-year old buy the things he desires? Video games, skateboards, nerf guns, etc… Allowance is an awfully slow way to save money for big ticket items. So what can we do as parents to help them along? Raise Kidpreneurs!
We will take a look at 5 great examples of kids who have become very successful entreprenuers and then offer a list of excellent ideas of where you could start to begin a business with your own littles.
Cory Nieves
Cory Nieves started his own business when he was only six years old living in Englewood, New Jersey. Young Mr. Nieves wanted to buy his mom a car because he didn’t want to take the bus to school anymore. He started out by selling hot cocoa, because it was cold outside and because hot chocolate is delicious. He did very well at this and his mom recognizing this amazing entrepreneurial spirit as special, she encouraged him to keep at it in order to save for college. He expanded his business to include lemonade, and cookies.
In the end, it was the cookies that brought his business to the successful place it is today, Mr. Cory’s Cookies. At 14 years old Cory has been on the Ellen Degeneres show and is the CEO of a national brand name company that has worked with Aetna, Barney’s, Bloomingdales, Citibank, J. Crew, Macy’s, Mercedes-Benz, Pottery Barn, Ralph Lauren, TOMS, Viacom, Whole Foods, and Williams-Sonoma.
This young kidpreneur is also a philanthropist and has worked with nonprofits, such as Bergen’s Promise in Rochelle Park, New Jersey and the Children’s Aid Society in New York City. Download our FAM-Preneur Business Guide to help your kids get started on thier own business venture.
Leanna Archer
Leanna Archer started off giving away free hair product when she was only 8 years old. Leanna made her grandmothers all-natural hair pomade to give away in repurposed baby food containers.
At 19 years old Leanne is now the CEO of Leanna’s Essentials and her company has been recognized by prominent business publications like Forbes and Success Magazine. The company’s all-natural, sulfate and paraben-free hair and skin products are sold worldwide and include cleansing masks, skin lotion, hair treatments, shampoos, conditioners and more.
Just like many other kidpreneurs Leanna has a heart for the community. The Leanna Archer Education Foundation raises money to build schools and safe learning environments for underprivileged children in Haiti. Download our FAM-Preneur Business Guide to help your kids get started on thier own business venture.
Robert Nay
Robert Nay created his own mobile game app called “Bubble Ball” in 2010 for sale in the Apple app store. In the first two weeks it was downloaded more than 1 million times, surpassing “Angry Birds” as the most downloaded free game from Apple.
What really makes this feat impressive is that Robert was a 14-year-old with no previous coding experience. He learned everything he needed to know through research at the public library producing 4,000 lines of code for his physics-based puzzle game in just one month.
At 22 years old the CEO of Nay Games now offers games to help students with literacy as well as creating Bubble Ball Pro, and Bubble Ball: Curiosity Edition, in addition to the original Bubble Ball.
By looking at three of the world’s most successful kidpreneurs you can see that there are many different paths to success, not unlike the Choose Your Own Adventure Books from when we were kids. With the internet making marketing and sales global with little to no effort at all it’s now our children’s chance to choose their own adventure.
Choose Your Venture
Bring your budding Elon Musk to a few different Craft Shows, Farmer’s Markets and Conventions. Tell them to find some vendors that make items that they could make or even ones that sell items they think they could sell better. Encourage them to ask vendors questions about how they do it and what to expect. Tell them they need three to five great ideas to pick from and need to be excited about all of them because they will eventually eliminate all but one.
Consider making crafts or other things if your child(ren) are too shy to be a vendor or would rather spend their time making products instead of sitting at a table. Take your child around the area to see what stores sell products on commision and explore online stores like Etsy. Maybe they could make fun fridge magnets with polymer clay, welcome mats from recycled products, lamps from old bottles, and numerous other possibilities. Tell them they need three to five great ideas to pick from. They need to be excited about all of them because they will eventually eliminate all but one.
Maybe your child sees a need that no one is filling in the neighbourhood? Is it an aging community that desperately needs a strong back for raking leaves and shoveling snow? Dog walking, weeding or a mobile car wash are just a few suggestions. Perhaps it’s a baked goods delivery service that brings freshly baked cookies one day a week straight to peoples doors? They could take their best ideas and do a door to door survey in the neighbourhood to gadge interest. Brainstorm 3-5 ideas and narrow down to their favourite.
The Path to Venture
Make a Plan
Now that your kidpreneur has some ideas help them to price out the materials or inventory required to make it possible. Help them research the different costs and the amount of time that will be involved. Once they’ve done this with all five ideas they need to eliminate the ones that won’t make them money, the ones they can’t get the starting capital needed to begin or the ones they won’t have time to pull off. Once they’ve picked one help them put together a business plan and then they can use it to make their pitch to an ‘investor’. Make sure their plan looks at projected expenses and income and is in a format that will ‘impress’ investors.
This plan will help them with addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, prediction, and comparison. It will also help them to understand concepts such as document design, supply management and how to create a business plan (albeit a very simple one)
The Pitch
Maybe it’s you, your spouse, a grandparent, anyone who will take them seriously and are willing to spend a little cash to teach your child a life lesson. They should instill in your child a desire to take ownership of the idea and work for the loan. If they succeed in their pitch or once they’ve made the changes necessary to receive the loan they can implement the plan.
The Pitch will help them with their ability to take ownership, how to present, to sell, and to negotiate.
The Follow Through
Help your kids stick to the plan, especially during the tough part where they actually have to do the work. Make sure they keep track of actual income and expenses and do regular comparisons to their projected budget. If the investors are up to it have your child do semi regular updates to let the investors know how their investment is doing.
The Follow Through will help them to learn one of life’s most difficult skills. Perseverance. They will also learn accounting fundamentals, practice all the same math skills as The Plan phase. Lastly, they will practice reporting to investors.
Help Them
Help them succeed. If they’ve made it this far they’ve invested a ton of effort and emotion into the project and will be heartbroken if it fails. See if you can find them good sales opportunities, offer suggestions to save costs and create other benefits. It shouldn’t be too hard, a kid running their own business should be a marketing gold mine. Make sure they keep enough to pay back their investors on the agreed date(s), to run the business and how much of the profit to save for a rainy day. Be sure they spend a little of that money so they can see the benefits first hand.
The End of the Venture
By helping them, you will be teaching them that you are invested in them. They will see not only that you care enough to spend time on their project but also you will show them some tricks on how to increase sales, save money and other tricks that should help them in future business ventures.
In the end they will have learned valuable lessons that will translate into their adult life and give them a little spending money so they can enjoy their childhood. Raise kidpreneurs and feed them for a lifetime.
