Raising Entrepreneurs

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Young entrepreneur, Cameron Collings

Cameron Collings is businessman and tech-geek in equal parts. He started his first entrepreneurial venture at 6, selling candy, and built his first computer at 10. Today at 20, he runs a successful web-hosting company.

Collings said he built his first computer at ten and started coding websites since he was 12.

Collings’ business sense must come from his genes; every one of his family members is an entrepreneur of some sort. His father builds hotels in Las Vegas, and is a source of inspiration and motivation for him.

In fact, Collings’s first foray into business was at age six, when he sold candy to people around him. He quickly moved onto bigger things; he raked in $7,000 in the first ten days of his electronics business at age 10.

A part of the growing trend of young entrepreneurs, Collings acquired Host Quack in May 2008 and it has been growing ever since.

The then 19-year-old had just shut down his electronics site and was on the lookout for his next business venture.

“My sister randomly suggested web hosting and told me a little about her provider. So I looked into it,” Collings said.

“I had already had years of experience in networking, system administration, website building, coding, etc… so it sounded great!”

He proceeded to draft a 45 page business plan and structured his business model.

Collings then married his computer skills to his keen business acumen when he purchased the company for $1,200.

He explained his strategy. “I saw HostQuack for sale online and it was a very small company that had everything configured so that would save me time of thinking of a name, building a site, integrating a billing system, etc.”

The young owner of the web-hosting and online company has lots to prove. He has more than a hundred clients from as far away as Saudi Arabia and India.

The company’s edge over its rivals is its commitment to round-the-clock, personalised servicing. Having a competitive price range (plans start from as low as a dollar a month) helps too.

In fact, Collings is proud of his record thus far. While he declines telling his total earnings, he reveals that Host Quack has grown over “14 times its original size” and he manages a staff of ten. All of them work remotely.

The company broke even by its first month, and Collings said: “Every month since I purchased the company  has been better than any previous month.”

Read the full story in The Digital Journal.

Young entrepreneur, Rahim Fazal, sold his first business for $1.5 million while still in high school.

The first keynote speaker at this year’s Extreme Entrepreneurship Tour was Rahim Fazal, a dot-com millionaire. Fazal’s journey from McDonald’s worker to a millionaire caught the attention of students.

“You’ve got to be a bit crazy to become successful,” he said.

That attitude drove him to sell his first business for $1.5 million, when he was still in high school. Fazal earned a Master of Business Arts degree just after completing high school.

Fazal’s business ambitions started early in his hometown of Vancouver and have always involved his best friend, Husein Kaba. The two started off with the smallest of jobs: selling hockey cards at flea markets, helping to set up computers and, one year, a topsoil delivery outfit.

“I’ve always been very entrepreneurial,” says Fazal.

These small projects piqued the two boys’ interest in business and would lay the foundation for much bolder plans in the future.

The first came in 1997 while the two were in high school. They worked at a company called Internet Direct, which provided web connection and hosting. While balancing the rigours of the International Baccalaureate program at school, Fazal worked nights and weekends on the business.

By 1998 their new site, MailBC.com, allowed small businesses to create basic websites and e-mail programs. Started with a $500 investment, within a year it had 25,000 customers. “Eventually it took on a life of its own,” Fazal says.

The demands of the growing business meant Fazal had to carry a cellphone and pager, and was constantly being called out of class to provide customer support. “My teacher actually thought I was a drug dealer,” he says.

Fazal had kept the business a secret from his parents, knowing they would force him to shut it down and concentrate solely on school. When a meeting was called with his parents and teachers to discuss his possible “drug dealing,” Fazal had to pick the lesser of two evils: he pretended he was dealing. The sacrifice meant the business could survive.

In 2000, while still in high school, Fazal and Kaba sold their business for $1.5 million. After losing a second business to the tech crash, the two went to college – and Fazal was granted entry into the MBA program at Ivey without having an undergraduate degree, a rare privilege susally only granted to much older people with many years of business experience.

After completing his MBA, Fazal is once more running a tech business, this time with Noah Horton.

Recognizing an opportunity to help companies improve their online marketing capabilities, Fazal and Horton developed a video technology platform that allows companies to build and easily distribute video campaigns to massive audiences on social networks and across the Web. Involver’s technology gives companies the tools to increase customer engagement by having them physically interact with the video campaign, rather than be passive viewers.

“Our goal was to try to create video that really encouraged participation, by building in a call to action,” says Fazal. Recent Involver clients include Puma, which launched a video campaign during the Olympics to support Jamaican sprinter and gold medalist Usain Bolt, as well as microlending site Kiva.org.

“The true entrepreneur is a doer not a dreamer,” Fazal said, concluding his Extreme Entrepreneurship Tour session.

Source: Inc.com, RahimFazal.com, The Online Reporter

Young entrepreneurs, Carley Polk and Brooke Walz

Governments looking at ways to stimulate the economy could do well by harnessing the business smarts, creativity and enthusiasm of middle school students.

Last week, Port Coquitlam’s Kwayhquitlum school did just that when it held an entrepreneur fair for Grade 6 and 7 students.

Teacher Sam Hauck said 120 students sold products they researched, designed and made during the Young Entrepreneur Show, a program created by PowerPlay Strategies Inc. and sponsored by Westminster Savings Credit Union.

“The big motivation is that the money goes in their pocket at the end of the day,” Hauck said.

But it wasn’t all gravy. Ten per cent of the profits had to be donated to either the SPCA or the Gaby Davis Foundation, charities the students chose as their way of giving back to the community.

The young entrepreneurs also faced some of the debt issues facing many larger corporations, such as the automotive and media industries. Any loans they incurred during manufacturing had to be paid back and students had to have a written agreement spelling out lending terms.

It was an eye-opening project for many students, Hauck said, as they came to grips with the realities of running a business. The students couldn’t just sell anything — they had to do market surveys to find out what products to make, do detailed cost analyses and write business plans.

Source: Tri-City News

Held on the first Sunday of May every year since 2007, Lemonade Day (www.LemonadeDay.org) offers young people the opportunity to savor the sweet taste of success that comes with setting up, owning and operating their very own lemonade business.

Lemonade Day has gained considerable momentum, growing from 2,600 stands in 2007 to 11,200 in 2008 – an impressive 400 percent growth! With significant backing from Imperial Sugar and thousands of other supporters, Lemonade Day 2009 is destined to be even greater this year with an expected 25,000 lemonade stands staffed by as many as 75,000 eager young entrepreneurs.

“Lemonade Day is a recipe for helping kids become more successful in life,”  said Michael Holthouse, co-founder of Prepared 4 Life and the inventor of Lemonade Day. It’s about engaging our entire community to help teach our youth the business skills and character traits they will need to become successful leaders and entrepreneurs. As the old saying goes: when life gives you lemons, make lemonade! We are teaching kids how to make lemonade in more ways than one.”

Holthouse reports that, last year, the combined youth of the Greater Houston community sold over one million cups of lemonade and, with their profits; they contributed more than $200,000 to local charities.

“This is an amazing example of how everyone can get involved – on Lemonade Day everyone has a job: it’s either buying or selling lemonade. With the simple act of purchasing a cup from one of our youth, we are demonstrating that we care about their future,” Holthouse added. “The success of Lemonade Day has caught the attention of many other cities around the nation, so this year we have added two additional cities and plan to add 10 more next year. Our goal is to reach 100 cities over the next five years and train over one million youth in the process.”

Once children are registered, Prepared 4 Life – along with its many partners – provides all young entrepreneurs with free yellow backpacks filled with the educational materials they need to start their own successful lemonade business. The educational process for youth centers on the pairing of the child with a caring adult who serves as a coach to help him or her get the most out of their experience. The backpacks include an Entrepreneur’s Workbook and a Caring Adult Guide with proven step-by-step strategies that make the experience fun and rewarding. Children learn many important life skills including: setting goals, business planning, finding an investor, selecting a site, advertising, purchasing supplies, developing and pricing their products, serving customers, making a profit, basic accounting, opening a bank account, and ultimately giving back to the community. All materials are available in English and Spanish at www.LemonadeDay.org.

Source: PR Newswire

It sometimes seems hard to escape people selling Girl Scout cookies. Your co-workers hit you up. Your neighbor knocks on your door. Girl Scouts set up shop outside supermarkets.

But one eight-year-old from Asheville, N.C., found that there are limits to where you can sell the cookies. Her dream of selling 12,000 boxes of those cookies to send her entire troop to summer camp has been dashed by a technicality that’s left a lot of people scratching their heads.

Earlier this year, Wild Freeborn (yes, that’s her real name) posted a YouTube video, with the help of her dad, with an enthusiastic pitch: “Buy cookies! And they’re yummy!” They set up an online order system where customers in their area could purchase Tagalongs, Thin Mints and Samoas. Within two weeks, 700 orders came in.

But Wild Freeborn’s e-commerce plan hit a major snag. The Girl Scout Cookie Program, which according to Newsweek “bills itself as the largest program to teach entrepreneurship to young girls,” says it prohibits all online sales of its cookies — primarily because of safety reasons. Its guidelines state that Internet use should only be for advertising. “When we sell door to door we always have adults accompanying girls,” Denise Pesich, spokeswoman for Girl Scouts of the USA told the “Today Show.” “In this case, we have a very concerned father overseeing the process, and we know she’s relatively safe. But not in all cases is that true.”

As a result, the Freeborns had to take down their advance-order site and the YouTube video as ordered by the Girl Scouts’ national organization. Bryan Freeborn, chief operating officer of Web-design company Top Floor Studio, says that Girl Scout’s policy sends mixed signals and is confusing. He told Matt Lauer of the “Today Show” last week, “We knew there was a policy that it wasn’t OK, but we thought we were taking orders and promoting the cookies and we seemed to think that was within the spirit of the rules. The whole intent was to help my daughter meet her goals, utilizing up-to-date marketing principles.”

Those principles are something that the Girl Scouts have known and encouraged in recent years – but only to a point. A New York Times article two years ago told the trend of some Girl Scout troops all over the country setting up so-called cookie academies and cookie colleges to teach marketing, selling and business skills to girls 11 and over. One 14-year-old in Chicago used email messages to snag cookie orders, selling 1,510 in 2006.

Seems like Wild Freeborn’s just ahead of her time. She even has a Facebook group with 280 members: “Help one girl sell 12,000 Girl Scout cookies in Asheville!”

Does the current rule go against its mission to encourage Girl Scouts’ entrepreneurial spirit? Or do you think the safety concerns are legitimate and trump marketing online efforts?

Source: Wall St Journal