Raising Entrepreneurs

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There are many ways for kids to make money, and in the past we have listed quite a few. Today, we are going to take one of the ways for kids to make money that is often overlooked, and really break it down, so you can see the great possibilities that are available.

When looking for ways for kids to make money, we often focus on the obvious things, like babysitting, paper routes, lemonade stands, and yard work.

However, one of the best ways for kids to make money is as a consultant.

How can this be? Don’t consultants get paid for their expert knowledge and experience? How could kids possibly make money as consultants?

Technology.

Of course, there are adults around who are techno-boffins and have every latest gadget the moment it hits the market.

But there are many, many more adults who look at the array of electronic appliances they are expected to manage and wonder how they got into this mess!

There is an old joke about the number of video recorders which sit there flashing 00.00.00, because their owners never figured out how to set the time. These days, it is DVD players, but the flashing zeroes are still flashing.

Now that digital cameras have really taken hold, there is a generation of grandparents longing to hold pictures of their grandchildren as cardboard rectangles in their wallets, looking at paper clips in their email inboxes, and sometimes not even knowing how to view the images on the screen!

There is a definite business opportunity for a young entrepreneur right there - just printing out the photos (or even taking them to a photo shop to print them from a flash disk). But you can always add value by adjusting the size, cropping the images, adding labels, removing red-eye, and other valuable services.

Then there is scanning in old family photos to make slide shows on digital video, complete with sound-tracks. Young entrepreneur Andrew Napier has a thriving business doing just this.

If you think about it, kids spend a lot more time on computers than most adults, and even at an early age they can readily be described as “experts” in the programs and web sites they use regularly.

This expertise is valuable, and can be turned into one of the best ways for kids to make money, because it is a new market with growing demand, and can form the basis for an adult-level business as the kids grow up.

Photos: fllickrized, johnb2008