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3 Pieces of Advice for Teenage Entrepreneurs
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Article written by: Jason Kenner from onparparent.com
3 Pieces of Advice for Teenage Entrepreneurs
If you thought entrepreneurship was just for adults, think again. Mark Zuckerberg was only 19 when he and a group of college friends came up with the idea for Facebook, while Fred DeLuca was just 17 when he launched Pete’s Super Submarines — which later became Subway. Additionally, Michael Dell (of Dell Inc.), Matt Mullenweg (of WordPress), and Mike Kittredge (of Yankee Candle) were all teens when they launched their hugely successful businesses.
Chances are, you’ve already dabbled in entrepreneurship if you’ve ever set up a lemonade stand, tutored other students, or washed your neighbor’s vehicles for cash. But if you’re ready to officially enter the world of business ownership, Tech Ed 4 Kids shares three pieces of advice in the sections below.
1. Develop Entrepreneurial Skills
There are so many benefits of starting a business while you’re young, as teenage entrepreneurship teaches you how to manage your time and money, solve complex problems, network with others, build resilience, and express yourself creatively. However, there are several skills you’ll need to develop in order to reap the many benefits of business ownership.
Here are a few ways to develop these entrepreneurial skills:
- Find a mentor.
- Volunteer in the community.
- Join an entrepreneurship program for youths.
- Take courses in economics, personal finance, psychology, communications, ethics, and leadership.
There are also lots of books young entrepreneurs can read to develop business and leadership skills, as these cover topics such as business strategy, finance, marketing, and more.
2. Choose a Business Idea
In addition to developing entrepreneurial skills in finance, communications, networking, and leadership, it’s important to choose a business idea you’re passionate about — and preferably one that fulfills a desire and/or solves a problem. Some examples of business ideas for teens could include child care services, handmade products, blogging or vlogging, photography, lawn maintenance, or t-shirt design.
3. Follow a Few Best Practices
After choosing a business idea, there are some best practices you should follow when launching your startup. These best practices include:
- Choosing a business structure. How you choose to structure your business plays a role in how you’ll pay taxes and protect yourself from personal liability, so it’s important to choose the right legal entity right off the bat. A limited liability company (LLC), for example, is a safe option for many businesses — as this type of legal structure offers personal liability protection, tax benefits, and a simple filing process. But since minimum age requirements and other LLC regulations tend to vary by state, be sure to review your local laws before proceeding.
- Setting up a business bank account. While you may need an adult to co-sign on your bank account if you’re under 18, you’ll want to separate your business finances from your personal bank account when pursuing entrepreneurship. Jennifer Brozic of Credit Karma shares seven of the best checking accounts for teens.
- Looking for funding. If you’re launching a business that requires startup capital, crowdfunding websites like GoFundMe, FundRazr, and Kickstarter will be your best options for raising money as a teenage entrepreneur. Or if you have one or more trusted adults in your life, you could ask them for a personal loan.
Don’t Let Your Young Age Hold You Back From Entrepreneurship
If you’re passionate about launching a startup, you shouldn’t let your young age hold you back from pursuing your entrepreneurial dreams. You could certainly put business ownership on the back burner until after you’ve graduated from high school or college, but why wait when you already have the drive and passion to succeed as a teenage entrepreneur?
By pursuing your business goals as a teenager, you’ll learn essential skills that’ll look great on your resume and college admissions applications — and you’ll set yourself up for future success in entrepreneurship. Mark Zuckerberg, Fred DeLuca, Michael Dell, and many other teenage entrepreneurs have done it, and so can you!
Tech Ed 4 Kids is a blog offering educational tools, tips, tutorials, and tech-related resources for school-aged learners. Visit teched4kids.com or contact info@teched4kids.com to learn more.
Flocabulary
Flocabulary is a site that has a lot of cute catchy videos for kids to learn – songs, videos, and activities are all included. The site says it’s for grades k-12, but I’m not sure how well a 12th grader would enjoy the songs, or at least I don’t think a high schooler would allow themselves to be seen enjoying the songs. A few years ago while my son was in 4th grade he loved the site and I’m fairly certain it’s the site we used for math and fractions in the 7th grade while I was coteaching. The catchy phrases helped the students learn and remember the concepts.
Facebook Cloning
Government officials, government officials, politicians and business leaders become easy targets of Facebook cloning scams when attackers create a duplicate of the original user’s profile and seek money from users’ friends through Facebook Messenger app. Scammers fake legitimate Facebook accounts using the names of victims and steal photos and personal information from their accounts. If scammers trick some people into being their friends, they can use fake accounts to send scam messages to their new friends.
They copy social media accounts using all of your public photos and information, making a copy of your existing account and then adding your contacts, steal your Facebook name, add your friends, and use your photos to clone your account, they will remain outside of your Facebook, however they can use a fake version of your account to trick your friends into giving them important information.
Usually, they can simply collect information from Facebook users who have accepted a friendship request or use a cloned account to send spam or malicious links to those who have accepted a friendship request. Knowing how the scam works is the best way to protect yourself, because now you know that if you receive a friend request from someone you are already friends with you, it can be a cloned account trying to deceive you.
If you’re worried that you’ll fall victim to Facebook cloning, check for other versions of your account and report duplicate Facebook profiles ;. If you find another account with your name and photo, it’s time to report it and delete it.
We all know how secure Facebook is today, so when this tool clones Facebook accounts, it will tell you to log in after 24 hours. There are many clones on Facebook but we recommend you make sure that no one else but you own your profile. If you would like to significantly reduce the risk of your Facebook account being cloned in the future, follow the steps below, according to the device that you are using to hide your friends list from the public.
It will however be more difficult for scammers to find your friends who fall into their traps if your friend list is hidden. Anyone who clones your account will use your friend list as a target list, but if your friend list is private, it is much easier for them to find someone to fall for their scam. Scammers will use your friends list to cheat money and perform other manipulative actions.
Fraudsters cannot use your information to defraud as long as you keep your accounts and information protected. Unlike a hack, your account was simply backed up using information on public social media accounts or on the internet.
A cloned account is a copy that uses your profile photo and other public information to trick your friends into providing their information. A cloned account can convince your friends to send money, steal passwords or other information or trick them into committing another scam. Account cloning is not a hack or exploit – it is simply the result of experienced scammers using your public information to trick your friends.
By pretending to be you, the cloned account can send a message to your friend stating that he needs money to deal with some emergencies like a robbery and the need for funds to get home. If you are cloned, you may receive messages from friends asking you to know if there is something strange on your account.
This means that someone has copied your current account and is contacting your friends The most obvious sign that you have been cloned is if a friend contacts you to ask if you’ve created a new account. The first sign is that a friend asks you if you have created a new account.
But you are much more likely to discover that your account has been cloned ex post when your friends notice strange behavior on your part on Facebook, which just triggers a fear of Facebook in the people to whom you are sending messages, which may or may not be the case, but it probably isn’t.
Vulnerability exploits are usually successful because many unsuspecting friends just accept the scammer’s request, which indicates that the actual user created a new account for some reason or forgot that they are already friends of that person. This type of scam involves using cloned accounts to send phishing links or trick your friends into providing information, or even worse, sending money. By creating cloned pages, scammers want to steal money or other valuable information from your friends.
Account cloning isn’t confused with hacking – it is simply the result of public data theft – used to trick your family and friends. Facebook cloning does not involve logging into your account with credentials they may have obtained as the result of a data breach or other phishing attack.
If you are unfamiliar with account cloning, here the scammer creates a completely new Facebook account in your name and fills it with photos and personal information that they copied from your real account. Facebook cloning is a scam in which an attacker copies an authorized user’s profile picture, creates a new account under that person’s name, and sends friend requests to people on the user list.
Advocacy (IEP)
Here in Illinois there are a few places you can turn to find advocates. When making an IEP for school generally the parents and teachers get together to discuss goals and set up supports and services for the year. Parents can also call meetings throughout the year if anything may need to be revised. The school will ask the parents to sign the IEP to agree to the changes. Advocates can attend the meeting at the request of the caregiver. Their place in the meeting is to help the parent advocate for what their student needs.
Resources for find an advocate in Illinois:
- https://www.illinoislifespan.org/special-education-advocacy
- https://www.isbe.net/Pages/IEP-Facilitation-System.aspx
- https://www.isbe.net/Pages/Special-Education-Parent-Advocates.aspx
Additionally an abstract about the benefits of an advocate can be found at https://experts.illinois.edu in publications -The efficacy and impact of a special education legislative advocate
Gifted Education
One of the school districts near us just voted to remove gifted education and combine it into classrooms that are meant to teach at every child’s own level. I can see a LOT of problems with that, starting with the teachers are already overworked. The school district argued that the gifted classes in the district are lopsided with a top-heavy amount of Asians in the classes, then Caucasians coming in second. Black and other people of color came in last with a very (and I really mean very) low percentage. I do think that’s an indication something is broke in the system. The district originally was working to increase participation (2004), then built a magnet school (2019), and now is phasing out its a gifted program completely planning to integrate gifted education into the classroom?
Issues I see with this include:
- Teachers are already overworked trying to juggle new forms of teaching, keep up with remote and in class students with an environment that is changing all the time.
- Students that are gifted in a subject may be asked to help with or tutor the students that are behind, taking from their own instruction time and also creating an uneven power dynamic in the room and also anyone remember ‘teacher’s pet’
- Students become bored without new information, just reviewing information they already have learned in the past.
- Students that do need extra help are left behind while trying to meet the needs of the students that are so far ahead of the rest of the class.
Education in general does end up skewed toward the students that receive more resources and support at home. Students that lack even such basics as nutritious meals on evenings and weekends will fall behind their peers. Frequently left to care for younger siblings, parents with different priorities, no role models in the home, and more can all affect how students score when being tested for gifted programs.
Even stereotypes can play into who gets into programs. I remember when my youngest first started school he attended for speech delay. We knew he was bright and good at math and science even before school started. As he reached first grade we started to noticed that he would never get a grade of Excellent on anything. His score was always marked as Satisfactory. Items like counts to 100 for a child that could count over 1000 were being marked as Satisfactory as opposed to Excellent and when we questioned this, the remark was that he didn’t improve at it or something like that…. We had many more instances like this to come throughout our time there. Finally after relocating, grades suddenly turned to straight As – immediately.
We also had noticed that during the time we were at the school that my son had started with an IEP, he was never chosen as student of the month, yet he was chosen at the new school soon after we moved. We’ve seen student of the month a couple times since then for his class as well as him winning the highest score for math and reading in his class during testing.
There is no simple solution to gifted education. I’d like to say that students that are gifted are more likely to find a way to succeed if they do not face challenging material in school. In reality I personally think that students that face a challenging home life and come to school to be bored are more likely to start acting out as they reach higher grades and then start falling behind, treated as the troublemaker in the classroom. As opposed to cutting programs, providing programs for early intervention and recognition. Improving detection methods as well as resources to make sure younger changing have tools to be successful early.
It’s hard for parents to be concerned about signing their young children up for resources like Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library to receive free books when they are homeless and trying to figure out where their next meal will come from. Students that go from home to home or are living in a domestic shelter, or even worse, still in an abusive relationship. There are so many issues to take into account.
Additionally I’ve seen some schools choose to keep sports programs over academic programs. Sports programs garner the publicity. Recently during the pandemic I noticed a post by a parent suggesting that students had to be allowed to play sports because it was risking them their chance to go to college – as if the only way those students would be able to go to college was on a sports scholarship. As a parent of children that all went on academic scholarships, that just boggles my mind. What if your child gets an injury that disqualifies them from sports permanently?
Gifted participation grows | News | news-gazette.com (news-gazette.com) (2004)
Culver: Gifted education won’t be eliminated | News | news-gazette.com (news-gazette.com) (2019)
Recently parents wrote in to the paper voicing thoughts about why the program was cut, some thought it was reverse racism which I don’t think applies – what I do see is a money decision with academics coming out at the bottom again…. And if any racism is involved, it’s really the fact that the effort isn’t being put into the younger grades to make more effort to find, identify, and supply resources to minorities.
Math: Life of Fred?
One of our choices for math this year was Life of Fred. Really we are using a few things, but we all love math! We have the Art of Problem solving (Prealgebra), the Go Math 6th grade book that the local school uses – (we have the 7th-grade book also), and we are using IXL. Life of Fred was the choice that came with our boxed curriculum choice for the year We are adding a lot to it, but it’s so nice to have a set path with materials to work through.
Our Life of Fred prealgebra came with three books and we added a book with Zillions of Problems to help practice. Originally we had no clue what to expect, but the Life of Fred program turned out to be a math textbook that read like a book. It’s about a teacher at Kittens University that has to solve problems to complete tasks and walks through experiments to solve the problems that he runs into. The first book focused on physics and started with a safe that was too heavy to move being dropped off in the hallway. Fred had to find a way to get the safe moved down a hallway and into an office. Force, mass, coefficient of fiction all came into play in the calculations. There was even an accident that Fred had to work out that left the reader feeling for Fred. After physics, we’ll work through economics and biology with Fred.
We enjoyed making it more interesting by trying some of the experiments. Our table was soon covered with all sorts of interesting sets to measure resistance and calculate force! White boards were hung on walls to leave up formulas and words like potential and kinetic were thrown around…. We are also including the other math books and we are including a lot of experiments, so three months in we are still on the first of the three Life of Fred books… but so far we like it. In my opinion the books the books are also working toward answering that popular question of why do I need to know this? and what will I ever use this for? Most people would never actually take the time to calculate the exact force needed to move a safe, but it good to know that it’s possible.
Pre-Algebra Life of Fred With
Biology
About Me
I am a SAHM/WAHM of three boys ranging in age from 13 to 29. We are working on saving enough for college at the same time as dealing with school and our older independent kids. I author a few blogs, including http://teched4kids.com. I have in the past taught computer information technology classes for the local university and taught workshops for kid's in technology education besides being the Kentucky State FIRST LEGO League Championship Coordinator from 2005 to 2008. I now work as a computer consultant, run a handmade home business, and am available for workshops. Life here is always an adventure!
