Raising Entrepreneurs

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The life of an entrepreneur is an never-ending series of trying something new, succeeding or failing, taking that feedback and moving on. As they start their entrepreneurial careers, our kids will try things that don’t work out.

The school system does a pretty good job of getting kids to focus on getting things right. The only problem with that is that it can also make them afraid to try things in case they “fail”. Even in the modern school system, where in a lot of places kids aren’t given grades, or even an accurate picture of their performance against what is expected of their grade level, kids are still learning that it’s excruciatingly painful to get things wrong. Put your hand up in class, blurt out the wrong answer, and you become instant cannon-fodder. They learn to keep their heads down.

As parents, we need to combat this indoctrination. We need to be utterly thrilled when our kids try something and fail. The only reward kids get for trying over and over to master something is our support and encouragement. We praise them loudly as they fall over time and time again learning to walk. We applaud the horrible noises that come out of their violins and saxophones. In just the same way, we need to be upbeat and encouraging about each and every attempt at making a business work.

This may be quite challenging, since we, ourselves, went through that very same school system, and we, ourselves, may be wound up and anxious about money, about failure, about “losing”.

If you find it difficult to honestly applaud your child’s failures as learning experiences and steps along the path to success, you may need to put in some work undoing your own indoctrination. Get a book like Suze Orman’s The Nine Steps To Financial Freedom, buy or borrow some guided meditations, do a seminar, or sit down with a counsellor and talk it through. (Although in that case I’d say - choose the counsellor carefully! They might be in a worse state then you are. Lots of people in the helping professions have terrible money issues themselves.)

As Winston Churchill says “Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”

When your kids fail, help them work through their natural disappointment and “get back on the horse”. It worked when they were learning to walk, and it will work when they are learning to be financially independent, too.

Wow!

I just got off the phone with Justin Brooke! (I know what that sounds like - don’t you see something like that at the top of every salesy email that ends up with an affiliate link to yet another “pay money to make money” offer?)

This isn’t one of those.

Justin is one of the big players in the internet marketing game, he’s in with some of the big super-affiliates, and he’s in the middle of a major launch of his own new product (and if you don’t know what all that means, I’ll simply say he’s got better things to do with his time than be on the phone to me right now!)

Justin teaches people how to sell their web sites for big money, just like 15-year-old Josh Buckley did.

Anyway, I tried to tune in to a webinar Justin ran yesterday, and couldn’t get the sound working - very annoying - You Tube works fine. Even my tech guru was baffled. I sent an email to Justin, and despite my email having a somewhat peevish tone, Justin graciously invited me to call him so he could answer any questions I had in person.

I was stunned. This simply does not happen in the internet marketing world.

What’s more, when I got on the phone, Justin was incredibly patient, and helpful, and interested in what we are doing with getting kids started in businesses of their own.

As you can imagine, I was incredibly grateful - but it didn’t stop there!

Justin offered to write a guest post for this blog about how to help your kids set up a saleable web site, and to sell it for good money. Then he said he was interested in any case studies of kids actually accomplishing a sale, even if all they made was $500.

And, to cap it all off, he then said that if you and your child use his information to sell your kid’s website for $500 or more, and write up a case study about it, he will give you 12 months free membership to his new SiteFlipAcademy.com website - not hundreds of people, of course, but the first person, and one person each month after that (to make it fair for people who might not yet have a site up and running).

Can you believe it? I still can’t believe it. That membership is worth hundreds of actual dollars, and Justin has priced the membership very generously anyway, so the real value of the offer is probably thousands.

Of course, it’s good for him to be able to say “hey, this is so simple, even kids can do it, here’s my proof”, but it’s still a very generous offer to make, when all you and your child have to do is write up a case study on how you sold the website.

I have a case study template document here, which I will give to Carolyn, so if you are serious about this, use the contact form on the Raising Entrepreneurs site to ask her for a copy of the template. It’s always easier to write something if you have a framework, and I promised Justin the case studies would all be really good quality write-ups.

Since Justin’s being so generous, I’ll match his offer. As well as a 12-month membership to Site Flip Academy, you will also get 12 months free membership to Cash-Smart Kids. Weekly lessons on money and business concepts, including teaching stories, activities, and real world money-making ideas, including setting up your own niche website. Take this short-term excitement for your child, and make it into a lifetime of wealth creation!

Now, if you want to get started immediately, you can go and do some research on Justin’s blogs at www.siteflipking.com and www.websitenegotiator.com. There are also free videos on the sales page for Site Flip Academy, just bear in mind it is a sales page. I’m not sending you there as a trick to get you to buy something - Justin is really genuine and a great guy, and you can watch the videos without paying a cent.

So, there you have it! Get your web site up and running, build a subscriber list, and add some revenue sources - you stand to gain two valuable memberships which will give you the information you and your kids need to be set up for life.

Don’t have a web site yet? Not sure how to get started? Register for our free Get Started! email course and we’ll give you an eBook and email you step-by-step instructions.

We have always said that young people are capable of much more than we generally expect of them, and I get a thrill each time I find a new example to prove that point.

Today’s young entrepreneur is Josh Buckley, whose internet income topped six figures for the first time this year.

Who is Josh Buckley?

I’m a 15-year-old kid from England, still in school. Just over a month a go, I sold my largest project to date for a high five-figure sum to a company that I have always had a lot of respect for … read the whole interview at Retire@21.

Kids can be self-motivated, entrepreneurial, and successful on adult terms long before the time our culture thinks they can. Josh Buckley was managing staff by the time most kids are starting to think about maybe flipping burgers a few hours a week. One of my 11-year-olds is on a steep learning curve as she manages a writer working on her eBook - how do you get someone to stick to deadlines when you’re not actually paying them by the hour?

One of the greatest barriers to kids succeeding in business is the attitude of their parents. I have been told things like “Kids at 12 or 13 shouldn’t be worrying about responsibilities. They should be in their bedrooms, playing their music, and be called to the table when dinner is ready.”

Of course it’s not desirable for kids to be the family breadwinners at that early age. But we’re not talking about that level of responsibility here. We’re talking about kids who don’t have to do any business activities, they just want to.

My prediction is that over the next 5 years, more and more kids will want to, as the word gets out. Business is a short-cut to adult incomes, because you can start before you are deemed “old enough to get a job”, LOL!

As parents, our challenge is to get our minds out of the last century and come to grips with the new reality. The internet has made it possible for kids to compete on an even footing with adults - and win!

If we, as parents, don’t get behind our kids and give them the tools, experiences and attitudes they need for this new reality, if we persist with the old-fashioned mantra of “study hard, get a good job, save for retirement”, then we are crippling our kids financially. It’s not that the old-fashioned values and principles are completely incorrect - they just need to be reconfigured to a new reality, a new paradigm, and a staggering new array of vehicles. Otherwise, you are doing the equivalent of teaching your kids to drive in a horse-drawn cart instead of a motor-car.

It’s a challenge, because our generation were only taught the old-fashioned mantra.

But rising to the challenge will not only equip our kids for success in the New World Order, it will provide each of us with a whole new sense of possibility and excitement. Release those tired old fears of business, of technology, of sales and marketing, of the ever increasing pace of change. Learn with your kids, learn from your kids, and rest assured that your hard-won wisdom will be valued in return.

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Last weekend I went on a road trip with one of my daughters. It wasn’t that far, just a couple of hours up into the mountains near where we live. She’s writing an eBook, or, rather, she has contracted a writer who is an expert in her topic to write an eBook to her specifications, and the writer had bogged down a little.

So, she and I headed off to visit the writer with a nifty new Ipod microphone to do some interviewing to help get the project moving again.

On the way up there, she was telling me about the Zone athletics meet, where she represented her school at shot put.

“I sucked,” she said. “I only got to go to Zone because the best two in each sport went to Zone, and there were only two of us who put our names down for shot put, so we both got to go.”

“Well,” I said, “It’s easy to come first when not many people are competing with you.”

“Hey!” she said. “That would be a great example for the internet business!”

And so it would.

What we are doing, with all the researching we teach our members to do, is looking for the niches like shot put in athletics - the places where not many people think of competing. The places that aren’t sexy and flashy and celebrity-generating.

And the beauty of an internet business of course, unlike sports, is that they don’t gather people together from further and further apart until you meet some real competition. The internet is a global market, but it’s composed of millions of little pockets, and you only need to come first in your own little pocket to make a decent income.

All we are doing when we look for a profitable niche is finding our own little pocket where we can come first.

Just like my 11-year-old shot put “star”!

In a recent survey, the number one reason given by parents who don’t discuss money with their kids is “children have no business knowing that”.

Now, I can see an argument in favour of waiting until kids reach a certain age to teach them some topics. Sex education springs to mind immediately. Obviously, you don’t want to try to teach kids about sex and romance at too young an age - not only would it be potentially disturbing to the kids, but they actually can’t grasp the idea at all until they reach a certain level of maturity.

You could express it as a bit of a rule of thumb - the time to teach kids all about something is immediately before the first time they are likely to think of using it.

Now, the topic of money is just as charged and difficult in some families as the topic of sex. Parents don’t know how to discuss it between themselves, let alone in age-appropriate language with their kids.

Problem is, unlike sexual transactions, which under normal circumstances don’t start for kids at least until puberty, financial transactions are part and parcel of life from the time they are tall enough to wave their coins over the edge of the supermarket checkout and buy their first candy.

When is the right time to start formal discussions about earning and managing money?

At the moment, we regularly hear of grown women in their 40s and 50s, on becoming widowed or divorced, confronting a complete knowledge void when it comes to managing money.

I don’t advocate teaching 12-year olds how to do mortgage wraps and no-money-down property deals, but there is definitely a middle ground in there somewhere - a middle ground that not enough parents can find.

Regardless of the age or gender of your children, your goal is to prepare them for life - prepare them in such a way that they can take care of themselves even if you aren’t around, and even if they don’t have a romantic partner.

Make a list of the financial topics you deal with each month or each year - earning money, budgeting, saving, investing, giving to charity, insurance, consumer credit, and so on. It gets quite large!

But if you gradually work your way through discussing the items on the list as the issues arise in daily life, you’ll probably find you can cover all the topics without undue strain.