Raising Entrepreneurs

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Well, the young internet entrepreneurs are tearing into it this week!

We were just at the World Internet Summit in Sydney - and I tell you, the quality of the content from stage was even better than I expected. Most speakers gave good, useful, NEW information, and the focus on mindset and having the right attitude (from all the speakers, not just one or two) was fantastic to see.

But that’s an aside - I may say more about that later.

While we were there, I was talking to last week’s guest blogger, Michelle Peterson Clark, who was there with her family. She was really excited - check this out:

Video footage of Michelle Peterson Clark and Cash-Smart Kid, Taylor Bamford Clark, at World Internet Summit, Sydney, 2008.

Taylor has since started his own blog - www.carskidslove.blogspot.com - and plans to produce an information product soon.

My daughter Rachael also talked to some of the speakers over the weekend, and I caught some of that on video, too - more in later posts.

But my point is that these days it is not unusual to have kids as young as ten sitting in the audience in these seminars with the adults, taking notes, asking questions - even ANSWERING questions that the adults there were getting wrong!

Right now, it is still enough to get the attention of a speaker when someone is obviously quite young, yet understands enough about business to follow the presentation.

But not for long.

Two or three years from now, there will be dozens of kids at these events. Several people told me at this event that after watching the Cash-Smart Kids participants in action, they were going to bring their own kids next time.

Two points to note:

First - get your kids to these seminars!

Second - before long, it won’t be enough to just show up. To get the attention of a speaker they will need to have started an internet business.

Grab yourself a copy of “Finding The Right Niche For Your Cash-Smart Kid” and get it happening with your kids THIS YEAR, or they will be lost in the crowd in years to come.

I am thinking of creating “The Parent’s Guide To Taking Kids To Internet Marketing Seminars”. Who would find that useful?

At the age of nine, Andrew Napier learned how to edit video on his home computer. This early interest became a love of films and film-making, and ultimately, in 2002, Andrew’s business, too.

Andrew has produced many short films for Mauston School District and dozens of personal clients. He has also produced a training video for the company Body Scanning CRM.

In the summer of 2003 Andrew traveled with the People to People Student Ambassador Program through England, Ireland, and Wales. He created a documentary film of this journey, which was awarded first place in the nation wide Special Correspondent contest sponsored by the Student Ambassador Program.

In September 2004, Andrew was invited to participate in a community project to restore a 1000-year-old Native American artefact - an effigy of the Panther Spirit made by the Ho-Chunk people. His documentary of that project won him a $1,000 prize.

Andrew does wedding videos and compiles videos from photos, family videos, and other graphics. In his senior year in high school he taught a class on video production, and he is now studying at college while continuing his video production business.

I had one of those “why am I doing this?” moments the other day.

You know how it is, you’re talking to someone who just totally doesn’t comprehend why anyone would be interested in the thing you have devoted your life to doing.

And you stop and think “so why is this a good idea, again?”

It’s so easy to get caught up in what we’re doing that we forget the why.

So why teach kids about money?

I would have to say that one of the main motivators for me was working with a large number of frustrated, struggling, always broke adults. I remember thinking “they should be teaching this in schools, not leaving it to people to figure out on their own - or not - as adults”.

We teach kids healthy eating - why not healthy money habits, too?

But it’s not enough to say “why NOT teach them about money?”

There are lots of reasons why not - schools don’t do it, so it falls to parents, along with everything else that falls to parents these days. Between working two or more jobs themselves, and running the kids around to sport, church, scouts, extra-curricular school activities, music lessons, and playdates, not to mention squeezing in the housework somewhere in there, where are parents supposed to find time for yet another educational activity?

And that, right there, is actually the greatest reason why you MUST teach your kids about money.

Because if you don’t, they are going to end up just as stressed and frantic as you are, with just as little time for the truly important things in life.

If you had learned a bit about money in school, say you had studied and understood Robert Kiyosaki’s “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”, you would have enough passive income by the time your kids went to school that you wouldn’t have to work so many hours between you.

You would probably have set up a source of income that enabled you to work from home, or close to home, at the times you choose to work.

Now, you might not have that in place yet - although I hope you’re working on it, because it’s better late than never, and if your kids don’t master money you may find yourselves doing Granny day-care for ten years or so because your kids and their co-parents are working, and childcare is unaffordable.

But even if you aren’t there yet, you can still teach your kids about the journey and the ultimate goal.

Give them the life choices that you never had - give them the knowledge they need.

Maybe they will act on it, and maybe they won’t, but at least, as a parent, you will have given them the ability to choose.

Today’s post is a guest post from Michelle Peterson-Clark, the creator of Raising Gifted Kids, on the role of money and business in the lives of gifted kids.

As the mother of two gifted boys and a business woman (www.RaisingGiftedKids.com )I was interested in finding out what I could about teaching kids to run their own businesses and to grow up being entrepreneurs.

There is no doubt that most gifted kids need extra activities to keep them stimulated. Much has been written about what makes them “tick” and how mainstream schooling often doesn’t do enough for them.

So are they any different to the average child when it comes to the ability to set up and run a business? My research took me to the website www.cash-smart-kids.com and my husband and I began to think of ways in which we can help and encourage our gifted boys to start their own business and to begin to understand the role money plays in our society at a young age.

After following the first few lessons from cash-smart-kids, we realized we were trying to “manufacture” the outcome of what we were trying to teach them. When it comes to getting things done quicker we are no different than the parents of the average kid. The tendency to “help” is overwhelming, but we have to stop ourselves from doing that.

One of the good things we do for our boys is play cash flow kids by Robert Kiosaki. The author of the “Rich Dad- Poor Dad” fame has a special kid’s version of the adult “Cashflow 101″ game.

It took about 2 months of playing the kids version of the game before our boys wanted to play the adult version. It took them another 5-6 games before they “got it” and really started playing the games with a serious determination to beat the adults at making money.

There is a lot of research that shows that the parents of gifted children tend to have higher representation at higher education and business levels. They are more likely to own their own business, or hold high managerial positions in large companies. In my role as

The research also shows that this does rub off on the children. We are in the process of working through options with our boys on what they might like to do for their first business venture.

Our youngest got a milk shake maker for Christmas. His original idea was to start charging us all to make milk shakes because he was making 3 or 4 of them a night for free…taking up all of his free time for no financial reward hhmmm sounds like being a parent!!! Lol What we had to talk to him about was the fact that he would have to pay for the ingredients and deducted that from the price he charged to work out how much he could sell them for and there for make as a profit.

We offered to be his joint venture “JV” partner, where we would supply the ingredients for 50% of the revenue he collected.

Our eldest thought this was a “rip off”..he offered to finance his brothers milk, syrup and ice cream purchases for les than half the talkings!!. The last we spoke about it Daniel was still trying to work out if our family members would be prepared to pay $2 or $2.50 a night for a home made milk shake J

But what options are there for them to start a small business besides a milk shake business?

Here are a few we are considering that you might like to think about

Ebay selling: - they may have lots of stuff around the house (old toys and books) that they might want to sell to get some money for. Plenty of children move on from that to setting up actual EBay stores to sell products that they buy to fill orders.

They could do what Jenny Ford’s girls did and set up a business breeding rats for pet shops.

If you run your own business, there is no reason why they shouldn’t be able to help you do some aspect in that business, even if its filing papers or sending faxes or packages.

Filling orders for my paper business (www.notjustpapers.com) is an easy simply task the boys are able to do. So is counting stock when we do our stocktake.

As a result of what we are learning at www.cash-smart-kids.com , we have talked to our children about the importance of saving (and not just for the latest Playstation game) but for their longer term future. We have instituted at 25% savings plan on ALL money they receive, even for birthdays and Christmas, and making them bank the money themselves. From as soon as they could write properly, we have made them fill in their own deposit slips and stand in the line at the bank and pass their book over to the teller. The older ladies in the line at the bank love seeing 5 and 6 year olds standing there with their bank books and money saving their money.

There is no doubt that as we progress with our program at www.RaisingGiftedKids.com, we will be able to help our members more, from the knowledge we have learnt at www.cash-smart-kids.com but more importantly for us, we are gaining important personal knowledge that will help our boys grow with a better understanding of money and the role it plays in our society. If that leads to them being entrepreneurs or not remains to be seen, but they will certainly have a head start.

Michelle Peterson Clark

Director, mother of 2 gifted boys

www.RaisingGiftedKids.com

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Zach Vruwink started his computer business at the age of 14.

He started helping family and friends with their technological needs. After about 8 months Zach realized that he was filling a niche and the community had a need for his services. On July 1st, 2003 Zach opened a retail store in downtown Wisconsin Rapids with only $500!

He operated under short hours of 3:00pm to 6:00pm during the school year and 10:30am to 6:00pm during the summer for 3 years.

After his 2006 graduation from high school, Zach decided to hire 2 employees to operate the store while he attended college at the University Wisconsin-Stevens Point. Kevin, the full time employee currently operates the store during the day and Calvin, a part-time employee operates in the afternoon.