Thinking Teenpreneurship?

Two days ago, precisely on Tuesday 21^st August, was the global celebration of the World Entrepreneurship Day and teenpreneurs, yes teen-entrepreneurs, were a huge part of the commemoration. A teenpreneur is a young entrepreneur under the age of 20 and businesses established by this age bracket (13-19) is rapidly increasing all over the world.

According to the Entrepreneur Handbook, a digital publication with an engaged audience of small business owners, entrepreneurs and professionals, “entrepreneurship refers to the concept of developing and managing a business venture in order to gain profit by taking several risks in the corporate world. Simply put, entrepreneurship is the willingness to start a new business”. Many successful entrepreneurs today began their businesses as teenagers.

Ø  Mark Zuckerberg, as a teenage students at Harvard, created the software that became the popular social networking site, Facebook. Today, he is worth more than a billion dollars with Facebook recording over 400 million users and being one of the most successful Web sites.

Ø  Farrah Gray was a successful businessman even before he reached his teens. At age 10, he’d formed a club that raised $15,000 for financing a lemonade stand. By age 12, he had started a venture capital firm that raised $1 million from investors to help teenagers start their own business. Before he was 16, he had started business ventures that include pre-paid phone cards, One Stop Mailboxes & More franchises and The Teenscope "Youth AM/FM" interactive talk show. He became executive producer of a comedy show on the Las Vegas Strip, and was the owner of a food company that had orders exceeding $1.5 million. He is also a best-selling author and has established his own non-profit, Farrah Gray Foundation, which gives grants and scholarships to inner-city and students with at-risk backgrounds… All these before his thirtieth birthday!

Ø  Jason O'Neill who started making Pencil Bugs at the age of 9. These are colourful pencil toppers made in the shape of bugs.

Ø  Fraser Doherty started making jams at the age of 14 in Scotland. By age 16, Fraser left school to work full-time on his jam business SuperJam. Today, SuperJam sells around 500,000 jars a year.

Is there a particular or right age to start a business venture? Usually, people start when they have a great business idea. But teenagers? Well, more and more of them are manifesting and expressing their entrepreneurial capabilities all over the world today and that’s due to a number of factors, among which are;

Technology is increasing and changing fast and today’s teenagers are so technologically savvy. As such, they can easily and more quickly spot opportunities to add value/provide solutions to people’s needs and that of the society. With their natural curiousity, teenagers can and would test and push their boundaries in order to articulate their potential to impact the world using vehicles like entrepreneurship. They are also open-minded and not afraid to take risks, including dreaming really big dreams.

They may not have a whole lot of resources, especially in skills and finance, but then, many businesses can start small and require a little money. The important focus is to add value or solve a problem out there. With this settled, teenagers can acquire education on entrepreneurship such as technical skills, business management skills, plug into networks and linkages, and work with mentors who can help them with advice from knowledge and experience.

Society needs to sustain the development of this new generation with education, guidance, and community support as the best way to nurture and cultivate the startups of the future. Who knows, the next multinational could be your own teenager… or You, the teenager. Any business ideas running around your head right now? Meditate on it!!!

(Excerpts from www.americanexpress.com)