Youth Entrepreneurship: What's the Big Deal?

The benefits of teaching youth entrepreneurship go well beyond the obvious practice of taking a product and selling it in the marketplace. There’s not only a plethora is life skills learned through the practice of entrepreneurship, but for some kids, especially at-risk kids, entrepreneurship can show them that their future can be different.

Life Skills

There are a wide range of skill sets needed to run a business: decision-making, calculated risk-taking, financial management, creativity, strategic-planning, teamwork, leadership, mathematics, communicative (oral and written), etc.

Aside from these life skills, there are also intrinsic benefits to teaching kids entrepreneurship. For most, it can be the one thing in their lives that they truly own and have complete control over. They can see the cause and effect of hard work and the importance of accountability. Youth entrepreneurship builds self-esteem and self-awareness. It is also the one course in which failure is a component to learning. In other words, the business world accepts mistakes as part of the path to success.

In a report by the D.C. Children and Youth Investment Corporation, other positive outcomes include:

• improved academic performance, school attendance; and educational attainment
• increased problem-solving and decision-making abilities
• improved interpersonal relationships, teamwork, money management, and public speaking skills
• job readiness
• enhanced social psychological development (self-esteem, ego development, self-efficacy), and
• perceived improved health status

21st Century Skills and STEM Education

While we can see how teaching youth entrepreneurship relates to 21st Century skills, there are increasingly vast opportunities to incorporate STEM education into the mix.
Traditional courses simply teach students how businesses run by studying large established businesses. While this is a necessary component of case study, it’s unrealistic for the student to actually apply the knowledge in his or her own setting. Most businesses in the US are considered small and how the small business operates, grows and succeeds is different from its large corporate counterparts. To instill 21st Century skills so that the student knows the relevancy and how to apply it takes real-world practice.

Traditional business courses also do not incorporate STEM education, which is a vital component to product development and innovation. Typically STEM education and entrepreneurship are kept separate when in fact they are skill sets that should be married. For example: Our SciPreneur program is aimed at getting young girls interested in science by showing them the relevancy of their innovations. The girls spend time creating beauty products using their own formula by understanding what each ingredient does when mixed with others. When their products are formulated, they learned how to properly package them and start a business. The outcome is that they not only see how their scientific skills relate to innovation, but they also get to experience marketplace opportunities. And the results do not simply stop when the course is over.

If we turn the table, we can show students the relevancy of STEM education if entrepreneurship is a partner in learning. It’s easy to compartmentalize coursework in relation to future career choices. For example, I have a cousin who is a math major at Boston College. While she loves math and excels in the subject, she believes the only viable career choice for it is to become a math teacher. She hasn’t learned how her mathematical skill sets can transfer over to a variety of career options. If a student loves chemistry but doesn’t want to become a chemist and work in a lab, have we shown him or her other career options in which those skill sets are valuable? Have we shown them that innovative ideas have value in the marketplace and that they are necessary for the well-being of communities?

Community and Workplace Preparedness

Businesses keep our communities sustainable. They provide jobs, skill training and revenue. New businesses that enter the market keep prices competitive and offer products that solve problems. Yet, in order to keep these businesses viable, talent must be produced.
Teaching entrepreneurship does not always translate into creating entrepreneurs; but it can provide for an entrepreneurial mindset. This is advantageous whether the student becomes an employer or an employee.

Job preparedness must focus on more than writing a resume and learning how to interview, especially in today’s environment. Approximately, 17 out of 100 teens are gainfully employed, leaving the majority of kids inexperienced when trying to enter the workforce. Couple that with the fact that 15 million jobs need to be created to support the influx of the existing and future labor market makes delaying one’s career a definite reality.

Teaching Youth Entrepreneurship: Why Start Them Young?

Most students leave high school with little or no knowledge of the business world and those wishing to learn more will simply wait until they enter college (if they do at all.)
Kids see the world far differently then their adult counterparts. When young, their perception of risk isn’t thwarted by the financial responsibility to raising a family, paying a mortgage and saving for retirement. They are natural problem solvers who have yet to be jaded by the complexities of adulthood. Entrepreneurship can and should be taught beginning at the elementary school level.

Teaching entrepreneurship isn’t a complex subject that requires extensive knowledge of business acumen. No two businesses run the exact same way and there’s nothing written in stone that to be successful, one must think inside the box; 2+2 can equal 5.

Biz in a Boxx

Biz in a Boxx was developed to provide kids with an experiential education in entrepreneurship. Unlike traditional coursework, the system is designed for students to take any idea and create a business around it whether in a school setting, afterschool club or in their home. It’s not dependent upon a teacher with business knowledge to teach it, rather someone who will guide his or her students through the process. It enables students to take complete ownership over their ideas because it’s through that ownership that students learn those vital skill sets best.

Entrepreneurs aren’t created overnight. Like playing a sport or musical instrument, it takes practice.

The Risk and Failure of Entrepreneurship

Junior Achievement recently conducted a survey and found that 74 percent of teens stated risk and failure were the biggest deterrents for starting their own business.

I can certainly understand this mindset if it were coming from an adult, especially from someone with a mountain of responsibilities, like feeding a family and providing shelter. But why would a kid who has far more to gain than lose have such an aversion to risk? And what has dampened their psyche at such a young age to believe that failure should be avoided at all costs?

The beauty about entrepreneurship is that it’s one of those fields where risk and failure are vital components. They present opportunities for learning and correcting mistakes. If you’re an architect and design a building that crashes down or a doctor who cuts off the wrong body part, you’ve failed. There are no do-overs. But entrepreneurship is full of do-overs. It’s an accepted practice.

While risk/failure-averse teens won’t be the ones to necessarily jump off a bridge because their friends are doing it, there’s a propensity to avoid other things in which they can reap rewards, such as running for student council or trying out for a sports team. Naively fearing risk and failure isn’t selective but a learned behavior that flows across all decisions; learning how to take calculated risks and accepting failure as part of the process enables an analysis of each decision. And there are long-term consequences to raising a generation of risk/failure-averse people.

Starting and running a business isn’t solely about the benefits to the owner. Communities are dependent upon them for goods and services at competitive prices. They provide revenue to fund vital programs and jobs and income to provide for families. Our lives are better for each and every person willing to take the leap and start his own.

Where will we be with a country full of people who are crippled by the fear of risk and failure? Where could we be if they are not?

The Relevancy of Pond Scum and Entrepreneurship

When I was in high school, I opted to take aquatic biology instead of chemistry for the sheer fact that cutting into the head of a shark seemed much more appealing than studying proteins and molecules. I took science classes only to fulfill graduation requirements. It’s not to say that science wasn’t interesting because it was at the time. I just never found the relevancy to integrate it into a future career.

Before we got to use our scalpels to cut open our sharks, we had a project that revolved around water and organisms. The assignment was to find a pond, lake or reservoir and collect jars of water and scum from it. Fortunately, there was a small pool of water that formed in the fields behind my house from recent storms and my lab partner, Erin, and I were able to collect three jars of the stagnant water to bring to class.

There was a lot that happened in those jars over the next few weeks. At first it was rather mild – an organism or two emerged from the bottled scum; but by the end of the second week, new bugs were all over the place. And the jars smelled. Really smelled.

It was a cool assignment. Every day we’d come into class to see a new type of bug floating or flying inside the jars and we were able to identify them all. But what lesson did I learn from it? It’s been 25 years since I took that class, so how has it been relevant to my life?

Here’s what I know:

1. Don’t have a pond or stagnant water near your property.

2. Don’t swim in a pond.

3. Don’t open jars of pond water/scum in an enclosed room.

There’s a lot of what our kids learn in school that has life-long relevancy, especially when presented in such a manner. When it isn’t integrated into everyday life, understanding the usefulness of a topic becomes lost. Math is an excellent example of this. I haven’t had to prove a right angle since leaving high school, but I also know there’s probably a lot more I could have done and products I may have been able to invent had I found a connection to those earlier lessons.

In the world of entrepreneurship, there are people with great ideas who lack specific skills to fully develop those ideas and there are people with great skills who lack the ability to foster ideas and take them to the marketplace. They’re dependent upon one another. For those who can do both, you’re a diamond in the rough.

Just think of the ideas and inventions our society as a whole could come up with and develop if we simply understood the relevancy of our early education.

I don’t remember how I came upon Bianca Fortis’s blog, Young and Unemployed, but I was empathic enough to send her an email. Bianca is a relatively recent journalism graduate from the University of Central Florida who most likely had high hopes for easily pursuing her career once she completed her education. Like many, she just happened to have graduated during a period of high unemployment. She got the short end of the stick.

Bianca began chronicling her employment search back in May and has not yet been able to land a job as a reporter of sorts. She’s given up the independence she gained in college to move back home with her parents; it’s estimated that nearly 54 percent of college grads today are doing the same.

The short-term outcome looks rather bleak, especially in those states like Arizona, California, Nevada and Florida that are having a tough time rebounding from the recession. For places like Arizona, the AZ Department of Commerce estimates that it will take approximately seven years to get back to 2005 employment levels. (To put it in more perspective, in AZ the private sector added 700 jobs in September; the pre-recession average was 6,900.) For those of us with kids who will be entering the workforce then, you might want to delay converting their bedrooms into that second den or exercise room. Chances are they will be coming back home.

The long-term effects are even worse. If the young cannot get significant work experience until their early or mid-twenties, their entire careers are delayed. Experience is a critical factor in professional advancement.

We can prepare our kids for jobs all we want, but if those jobs aren’t there, they just aren’t there. Employment needs to be created.

As I went through Bianca’s blog entries I couldn’t help but think, “What if that happens to my own kid?” Would it be prudent of me to simply tell her to study hard and go to college because when she’s done, there will be a job waiting for her? It’s akin to telling her Santa brought all of her Christmas gifts – at some point we have to fess up that we lied.

I’m doing more for my kid. I’m instilling skill sets through entrepreneurship training that will give her options as an adult so that she doesn’t have to be financially dependent upon someone else. Besides, I don’t want her to be that adult child living in the basement because one day I’d like a craft room.

Is Old Fashion Business Fashionable?

This past weekend I had a meeting at a local outdoor mall and noticed the abundance of people either dining or shopping. It’s also a haven for young teens to gather and spend the afternoon perusing the latest trends. As I sat there at an outside table, I remarked how nice it was to see that this pastime hasn’t died, even in spite of the economy, and that the brick-and-mortar establishments still serve a purpose.

I’ve been noticing more stories lately about rising technology companies whether they’re digital, solar or medical. They are popular trends in the startup world. But, I also wonder how this new era of technology and the high use of the internet will change us as social beings.

My newspaper carrier was nice enough to toss me the local edition of the Arizona Republic on Monday, a day I normally don’t get the paper. In there was a story about a milkman in CA whose business is thriving.

Jim Pastor is a career milkman, having started in the biz after high school. Later he opened his own milk delivery business after contracting with a local dairy farmer. He delivers milk and other products (cheese, eggs, bread, butter) to over 4800 homes. He relies on word-of-mouth advertising from his customers who enjoy the convenient delivery and who are eager to support their local community.

So how is it that Jim’s business thrives in a world so focused on the digital age? What part of the human experience cannot be duplicated online? What are we, as consumers, willing to give up or accept in lieu of technology?

Redfining Customer Service or Defining It

The other day I was reading a blog post by Leslie Haywood, the inventor and entrepreneur behind Grill Charms who successfully swam with the Sharks on Shark Tank. On this particular post, Leslie talks about not having a receptionist and personally taking calls when her customers come a knocking.

We’ve become accustomed to the world of automation and voice recordings and pressing numbers on our phone to try to reach a live person. I don’t know too many people who actually like this form of customer service and yet it seems we accept it to the point of even doing it ourselves with our own businesses.

Leslie’s no small fish, but her willingness to connect to the consumer defies common standards. She’s smart. People do business with people they like. People. That’s the magic word.

I once wrote a complaint letter to Nordstrom and got a pleasant letter in return from Mr. Nordstrom. Now I have no clue if he actually wrote it or even signed it himself for that matter, but the fact is I didn’t get some lame response from someone else down the ladder. I liked that. I liked that I came away feeling as though my voice was heard.

That’s precisely what I like about Leslie. She wants to be in the trenches with her customers. She knows she’s not conforming to corporate standards, but she’s providing a face, a real person behind the product.

To me, that’s just good business.

A Jobless Generation

As a kid, I can remember my grandmother telling me stories of how people coped through the Great Depression. I now suspect that living through that era altered her life path mentally. Of course it all seemed foreign to me and the thought of experiencing anything remotely like it in my lifetime appeared more fictional than possible. After all, we’ve prospered as a nation; women’s lib had prevailed and technology was progressing. I was young and I had naive notions that my life would have fewer struggles than generations before me.

My generation, Gen X, has been rather removed from an extreme economic downturn like the one we are experiencing now. We’re older, in the midst of our careers and many of us are raising our own families. This is new to us and many don’t even know what to make of it.

Unemployment plays a large role, not just in terms of financial survival, but the havoc it wreaks on the psyche of those unable to land a job or those who are unemployed.

It’s easy for me to say, as a parent, that in the year 2018 when my own daughter embarks on a career things will be better. But according to Don Peck in the Atlantic, 10 million new jobs would need to be created just to bring the unemployment rate down to 5 percent today. “Even if the economy were to immediately begin producing 600,000 jobs a month—more than double the pace of the mid-to-late 1990s, when job growth was strong—it would take roughly two years to dig ourselves out of the hole we’re in.” Peck writes.

Youth unemployment today remains high. It’s estimated that only 17 out of 100 teens are gainfully employed. Employment means far more than a earning a paycheck and having pocket cash. According to experts, the state of the economy and the time line when young people enter the workforce have lasting impacts, positive or negative, on professional mobility and attainment. A college degree is no longer an employment guarantee.

Many of us already know that the Gen Y generation (our kids) are different than generations before. They tend to be more micro-managed in their activities and need constant direction to complete tasks. They also tend to be less entrepreneurial than their forefathers. Couple this with gaining necessary skills later in life will have a profound affect not only in their careers, but in their personal lives as well. Those with a sense of self-entitlement will have the rudest awakening when reality sets in.

Jobs don’t just appear out of thin air. They’re created by existing companies and new firms. They’re created through the innovation of new products and through people who have learned to think outside of the box, can take a risk and start something new. Those who wait for opportunity to land at their doorstep will likely find an empty stoop.

Entrepreneurship and High School Dropout Rates

I happened upon a great article by Julie Silard Kantor from the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship. She writes about the foundation's mission to educate low-income youths, the high dropout rate (1.2 million) and the effects of teaching kids entrepreneurship.

When we think of exposing kids to the business world, we tend to think that it's a topic they are far too young to comprehend or something they don't need to be involved in at such a young age. Let's let kids be kids, right?

But teaching kids entrepreneurship is so much more than outfitting a kid with business cards and letting them dabble for a day as "business owner." Not only are kids exposed to a menagerie of important skill sets, but it's an opportunity to be creative in a relatively free-flowing environment. Furthermore, preparing our kids to lead independent, productive lives is a major component of youth entrepreneurship, just as much as it's a valuable component to our economy.

Kantor writes, "Many also fail to see the correlation between the health of the economy and the people who have a vested interest in its health: entrepreneurs."

Kantor continues with the fact that the US high school dropout rate could be positively impacted if entrepreneurship is introduced to kids early on. John Bridgeland's research in The Silent Epidemic reports that 81 percent of high school dropouts said they would not have left school early if the subjects being taught had more relevancy to life.

Go beyond the obvious benefits of entrepreneurship and the skills sets learned like decision-making, risk-taking, creativity, financial management, strategic planning, etc., and look at what it can do to heighten one's self-esteem. If you ever started a business as a kid you know what I mean.

When I created Biz in a Boxx, I didn't have any of the information on hand to support the value of entrepreneurship. I was 20 when I started by first real business and I remember everything it taught me. I remember walking on the UA campus with a stack of fresh business cards my dad had made for me and feeling as though I could conquer the world. I had no idea what I was doing, but the feeling was empowering and life defining. The data I have found fully supports everything that Biz in a Boxx is designed to do.

Check out Kantor's article at http://bit.ly/8vJR82.

For more information about youth entrepreneurs and how you can set a foundation for child's future, click here.