5 Benefits of Teaching Young Children About Entrepreneurship

Think for a moment how much you would have benefited from being exposed to entrepreneurship at a younger age. If you actually were exposed to it, think about how much it has shaped your life. There can be tremendous value in being involved in entrepreneurial activities during your formative years, so you’d be doing your children a favor to bring them in. Here are a few potential benefits they could garner from the experience.

 1. A better work ethic

It should come as no surprise that young children develop a better work ethic when they’re surrounded by entrepreneurship. This happens in two ways. First, they experience business operations first hand. Whether they’re filing papers and stuffing envelopes or cutting grass and pressure-washing driveways, you quickly understand the value of hard work if you’re thrown into the middle of it.

Second, and perhaps more important, children develop a positive work ethic when they’re exposed to yours. There’s something powerful about seeing a parent - the most influential person in your life - treat hard work as a normal state of affairs, and that’s seriously lacking in today’s culture.

2. Stronger appreciation for money

One of the biggest benefits of teaching your children about entrepreneurship is that you’re able to give them a stronger respect for money. Some children might believe you if you told them money grows on trees, but kids who are exposed to business operations know better.

“What helped me most is that I was always making my own money somehow, pretty much since I was 10,” says Fiona Kirkpatrick Parsons, a marketing professional who benefited from being exposed to entrepreneurship from a young age. “The message I received as a kid was, if you want something, you have to get busy and figure out how to do it for yourself. I never expected my parents to provide more than the basics, really. Learning self-reliance, trusting in your creativity and developing courage is a great gift.”

 

3. Creative thinking

Starting and expanding a business isn’t easy. Problems inevitably arise, and it’s up to you to fix them, and keep the firm moving in the right direction.

Instead of hiding challenges and even setbacks from your kids, you should expose them directly to what’s happening. Not only will their unique input help, but you’ll show them what it looks like to think creatively.

 

4. Improved people skills

Certain kids are outgoing and gregarious, but most young children tend to fall toward the shy end of the spectrum when faced with interacting with adults or people with whom they aren’t familiar.

The beauty of working in a small business is that you’re forced to interact with unfamiliar individuals on a daily basis. This will significantly foster a child’s people skills and, in most cases, turn him or her into a better salesperson down the road.

 

5. Better goal setting

The value of setting and achieving goals isn’t something that easily registers with many children. Kids are notorious for starting something and then moving on without finishing it. Somewhere between the excitement of embarking on an adventure and the pleasure of arriving at the finished product, the average child gets bored and loses his or her sense of purpose. Fortunately, research shows that regular conversation and interaction between parents and children actually helps to shape a child’s “academic socialization.”

As a result, they’re better able to draw connections between their current behaviors and future goals. So if you spend extra time with your children in an entrepreneurial setting, where goals are clear and courses of action are constantly being developed and pursued in order to reach those goals, you can accelerate the rate of academic socialization and give your child a head start.

The challenge many entrepreneurs encounter is finding age-appropriate ways to involve their children. Very young children obviously can’t be handed many complex and constructive tasks, but they can benefit from just being near you and feeling as if they’re involved.

As they get older, you can give them more responsibility and even begin to prepare them to enter the business -- if that’s something you and they desire. You don’t need some master plan, though. The best education you can provide your children simply entails exposing them to the duties you handle on a daily basis. This will provide them with life skills their peers won’t encounter for years to come.

Teach them about entrepreneurship, and they’ll make you proud.

Original

7 Kids Who Have Founded Incredibly Successful Businesses (Video)

They're signing licensing deals, launching video series, and collecting big checks on Shark Tank - and they're not even old enough to drive yet.

Entrepreneurship since childhood: How did the forum of startups in Kakhovka

Kakhovka hosted the first Startup Forum. The purpose of the Forum is to identify and support innovative and socially useful business projects for children aged 6-14 years. The mission of this event is the development of the Ukrainian economy through support of business initiatives for children and youth.

Young businessmen, representatives of Kakhovka and Nova Kakhovka schools, students of the international educational network MiniBoss Business School, throughout the year studied the basics of economics and entrepreneurship, ingenuity and project management. The children presented their first real business projects.

The Startup Forum was held at the Park Avenue restaurant. Young speakers had the opportunity to present their critical and perspective ideas for consideration by jury - entrepreneurs and top managers of companies, representatives of government bodies, in order to get an objective assessment of projects and investments for their development and implementation.

In total, 4 projects were presented. The smallest participants presented a draft of the preparation of sweets on the basis of natural ingredients. The middle group shared the idea of ​​making soaps with toys inside (in order to motivate kids to wash their hands). The next project is the production of screens for the home puppet theater. And the older participants proposed a social project "Clean City", which involves the manufacture of underground trash tanks, which will eliminate many problems with garbage in the city (this proposal was of particular interest).

The jury had an opportunity to evaluate the prepared projects (some even to taste), express their impressions, comment, ask a question. After all, for children, recognition, objective judgments and constructive comments are very important. As well as members of the jury provided partial financial support, grants for a total amount of UAH 4860 for the implementation of start-ups.

By providing support, everyone participates in the formation of a new, powerful generation - a young generation who can think big, make important decisions. This is sure of the Mayor Andriy Andriyovych Dyachenko, who urged children "not to be afraid to make mistakes, because every mistake is an experience", which will help in the future.



Beginning to create something at 6 years old, there is a chance to avoid many mistakes and risks at an independent age. By creating their own projects, children acquire experience and motivators of life.

Lesia Jozhikova, director of the branch, says: "Our mini-bosses turn knowledge acquired into a business school into successful projects and, most importantly, these projects are useful for society."

Deputy Mayor of the city of Nova Kakhovka, Volodymyr Nikolayevich Syryvatka thanked the organizers for a wonderful project that "teaches children to think logically, ask questions and answer them, have their own opinions."

The West gave a lot of pleasant moments. So, Olga Sergeyevna Rzhanova, the manager of the Privatbank department, invited the children to visit their department. He also promised to take 8 free lessons at the Business School to provide practical assistance in setting up future business projects. Olga Sergeyevna presented an invitation to the "Quest-room", which is located in Kherson.



There were still many good words addressed to the organizers and forum participants. Lunaela was convinced that parents made the most important investment in life - an investment in their children. All members of the jury presented the certificates of members of the council of businessmen for the support of the young entrepreneurial elite and assistance in the creation of social projects.

The forum is supported by the city of Kakhovka. School pupils plan to take part in the championship of Ukraine, which will be held in June and in the World Cup, which will be held in Bulgaria in August. So luck and new creative ideas for young businessmen!

Elena DEMCHENKO

Great founders lead with product strategy

In the beginning, it was just you and your founders. In order to raise capital, you had to not just know the problem you were solving intimately but you also had to be deeply passionate about it. You are the expert. You are the solution. You are the vision for the future.

The wonder of this early entrepreneurial environment is that it’s easy to respond to new information and bring expertise to every problem that comes up. But it doesn’t stay this way forever.

If you’re really onto something, you will need to scale fast. Scaling means bringing people onto your team with expertise in other areas. They’re not like you. They don’t know your problem inside and out. Instead, they maintain functional expertise. Your new hires might be God’s gift to DevOps or data science… but they’re not going to be steeped with your passion and background in whatever problem you’re taking on.

And that’s the point of stress. Until this point, you never needed to make your product strategy explicit. You and your cofounders could maintain a level of shared understanding. You could argue about the minutiae of a feature and how it was implemented. You didn’t argue over the general direction of the whole product.

That shared understanding starts to disappear as you start to expand. And I’ve seen this as a make or break moment many times for young teams. For the founders who are able to confer their wisdom, passion, and product strategy onto their team, the sky is the limit. For the founders who struggle to create that common ground, the struggle to keep everyone aligned can be insurmountable.

This might be confusing. After all, you’re the founders. Not everyone on the team needs to have all the pieces of the puzzle. As long as they trust you and you know your stuff, you should be good to go.

Unfortunately not.

Your Role Changes as You Scale

Things change as your business scales. More than anything, you’re not always accessible. Sometimes you have customer meetings and escalations that take precedence. Sometimes you find yourself in endless cycles with board members and investors. Sometimes you simply can’t find enough time in the day to meet with all the members of your team that are interested.

As your business scales, you’re not as accessible. And you have a few options. Your first option is to stay the course; ask your team to rely on your expertise. Now you go from being the rockstar savant on solving your problem to being the single point of failure. You’re the insurmountable bottleneck that is keeping your wonderful business from having the impact it could have on the world. This option sucks.

Your second option is to trust your team to figure it out. You hired great people. You know that they can’t come to you to answer every question. You empower them to make their own decisions. And you let them execute. You’re the type of boss you’d want. One filled with implicit trust. Unfortunately, this option isn’t much better than the first. You can’t win a relay race if everyone is running a different track. It doesn’t matter how fast your sprinters are. Regardless of how smart your team is, unless they have a shared understanding about what they’re trying to accomplish, they won’t be able to make uniform enough decisions to deliver an earth shattering business. This option also sucks.

Your third option is the tough one. You hired great people. But you now understand your job is to lead them towards solving your big, hairy, audacious problem. And that means spending less time doing the problem solving yourself and spending more time educating your team. Every hour you spend getting your team running in the same direction is an hour that you multiply their effectiveness. You save them from having to backtrack. You improve the quality of their conversations. You keep them motivated and empowered. You arm them with the tools to make the right decisions — quickly.

Your best option requires you to put your product strategy on paper, and talk about it regularly.

Your New Job: Chief Strategist

If you’re able to clearly articulate three things, you’ll be forever benefited by it. First, you need to articulate a clear understanding of your customer and how your customer uses your product today. What are the features that they require? What are the features that delight? If they weren’t using your product, what would they be using? This is a humbling exercise. At the beginning of any journey, you can’t do everything. Be open about that. Where are you starting and what problem can you solve today.

Then, you need to offer a clear vision for how your addressable customers and users evolve over time with the addition of new features and capabilities. What is it that you’re going to start building into your product to grow access, usability, and use cases? This articulation should be staged over time. Your product will have to evolve over time — your strategy has to take that evolution into account.

Finally, you need to give your team an understanding of why your solution is differentiated from a field of competitors. With that clear differentiation in tow, your brilliant team will be able to prioritize the features and functions that they want to concentrate on building. They’ll know the things that help drive them towards parity but don’t ultimately fit in with your positioning. And they’ll also know those capabilities that will reinforce the differentiation that you’re aspiring towards.

The way you get leverage as you scale is by codifying your vision and sharing it. As your team grows, you can’t assume that they’ll understand each other and the problem you’re addressing the same way you and your fellow founders did. To get everyone moving in the same direction, your product strategy needs to become your teams holy document — and you need to be its chief evangelist. Without it, you’ll be wasting your time and your team’s brainpower.

[Maxwell Wessel - Investor]
Origin