Raising Entrepreneurs

Molin Upper Elementary School Principal Dave Archambault asked faculty and the business community a simple question: “What happens when you inspire more than 75 fifth-grade students to create an invention or new business idea?”

On Friday, Archambault was pleased with the answer.

“This is great — we have a lot of great ideas,” Archambault said.

From eyeglasses fitted with windshield wipers to clear one’s view in a rainstorm to a “sweet flavored gum” that was claimed to have the ability to bring about world peace, the second annual Young Entrepreneurs Contest showcased students’ creativity.

The contest, sponsored by the Newburyport Education and Business Coalition as well as teachers Ellie Bailey, Mary Ann Daley and Carol Snow, included special exercises for students to go along with teaching students about business and sociology.

David Strand, president and owner of Strand Marketing, was brought into the Molin School to assist in creating and presenting the ideas that inspired entrepreneurship and encourage fifth-graders to come up with their own ideas about business.

Read the rest of the story in The Newburyport News.

I love hearing about initiatives such as these.

Gradually, ever so gradually, the traditional education system is being infiltrated by little bursts of entrepreneurial spirit.

These kids participated in simulations, where some of them played the role of bankers, some the rols of suppliers, and others represented retailers. Once a supplier had “won” the business of a retailer, the young retail entrepreneurs then had to persuade the bankers to finance their purchase of the stock.

These simulations are a fantastic way to provide kids with a solid learning experience when it comes to business concepts. We encourage the families in our Cash-Smart Kids program to engage their kids with “mini” business situations and simulations whenever possible.

Kids are remarkably creative - I loved the description of one young inventor’s product, the “my-Cod”. This fish-shaped contraption would allow swimmers to listen to their iPods through a swimming “fish” broadcasting when placed in a swimming pool.

I really think that one would be a goer!

At the age of 18, Jake Lindemann already has a nice start on his lifelong dreams.

He hopes to one day own a nationwide chain of skateboard stores, and he’s got every intention of being involved with stocks. And with a successful run as a Manitowoc businessman already under his belt and money invested in the market, he’s well on his way.

One thing obstructing his path to success was financing a college education. But thanks to a whole lot of determination, this Manitowoc Lutheran High School senior will be attending the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee next year at the expense of the McKelvey Foundation.

He was awarded a $40,000, four-year scholarship last month by the New York-based organization, which gave 100 entrepreneurial scholarships this year to students across the country.

Read more about Jake Lindemann in the Manitowoc Herald Times.

Here’s another bright light - another young entrepreneur whose business activities have earned him a college scholarship. Jake Lindemann and his younger brother opened a retail store in Manitowoc back in 2006, when they were sixteen and fourteen years old. Sales and inventory have tripled at the skateboard store since it opened, but Jake and his brother have wisely been re-investing their profits into the business.

The McElvey Foundation awards 100 entrepreneurial scholarships each year, and receives over 1000 applications. Now, those are pretty good odds, aren’t they? One in ten!

All the more reason to get your kids thinking in business terms from a young age. To qualify for a McElvey entrepreneurial scholarship, the young entrepreneur’s business must be more than a year old, and have at least one employee, so there is no point trying to cobble something together during your senior year in high school. This has to be a real business, which means having a solid business plan in place by the age of fourteen or fifteen.

I am looking forward to tracking down the other winners of the McElvey entrepreneurial scholarships - they are such great stories, aren’t they?

Good news out of the UK - someone is starting to do something about the woeful lack of business education. StartUps.co.uk reports:

Serial entrepreneur and Dragons’ Den panellist Peter Jones is planning to launch a national academy for aspiring young entrepreneurs.

The Phones International Group founder is hoping the academy will create more start-ups in the UK by presenting entrepreneurship as a viable career path for young people.

The academy will cater for entrepreneurially minded 16-19 year olds, who will learn how to turn their business ideas into money-making reality firsthand from entrepreneurs themselves.

“This is going to be one of Britain’s first, what I would call, real enterprise academies,” Peter Jones told Startups.

He added: “I’ve always said that we should take the boardroom back to the classroom, and we should start young. 16-19 year olds will get the chance to be taught by entrepreneurs, not just teachers.”

It has long been a beef of mine that the people who are entrusted with educating the next generation are, almost without exception, career employees. What is worse, many of them go from school to higher education and straight back to school, having almost no real-world experience as employees within a trading business, either.

How can we expect our kids to grow up with an understanding of how to create wealth, when their teachers don’t even know themselves?

Full marks to Peter Jones, and here’s hoping the academy is a raging success!

I was surfing about the net, as you do, and I came across this blog post Teach Our Children Well by Gail Vaz-Oxlade.

Gail talks about the generally poor level of financial education in schools (well, we’re all worried about that), but she gives some really great examples of individual class teachers who are doing some good work in teaching kids about money.

Maybe if we explained the reality of money to kids early enough, we’d have fewer kids dropping out of school. I mean, if you knew that if you settled for making $10 a hour you would have to work 70, 80 or 90 hours a week just to keep a roof over your family’s head and food on the table, maybe then you’d be less willing to blow school off.

My son’s Grade 6 class is learning about money. Ms. Moran has set up a town, Fletchville, in which the kids in her class live. They drew jobs from a jar and have to figure out how to live on their assigned incomes. They started by finding a place to live for the amount they could afford. Malcolm and his friends, Logan and Liam, combed through local papers and the internet to find a place within the geographical parameters set. I heard lots of talk of making sure the rent included utilities because “they can cost a lot of money.”

The project then turned to figuring out a meal plan - based on the food guide - and creating a priced-out shopping list so they would know what their food budget was. Wow! How many of you have done that?

And last week, they had to buy themselves cars. So they had to figure out what they could afford and go shopping for a car that fit their budget.

Doesn’t that sound like a fantastic exercise for 11 and 12 year olds?

Don’t wait for the lottery win that will put your child in a classroom with a teacher like this one - start now, running exercises like this with your own kids. If they have a blog, they can blog their research and results.

I find my kids work better on these things if outside kids are involved - fortunately,my girls have a cousin of a similar age, and her parents are THRILLED that she finds mathematical exercises so entertaining over at our place!

I know you’re busy, I know it’s hard to overcome the moaning and whining when they would rather be on the computer or the phone, I know sometimes it’s easier to put these things off, but hey, we all know it’s important, right? Just make it happen - you’ll be glad you did.

I highly recommend checking out the rest of Gail’s blog, too, because she tells it like it is!

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.