10 Reasons why all Teens Should Become Entrepreneurs before the age of 18.
We all have heard of Facebook, Dell, and Subway, but do you know that the CEOs of these business enterprises all founded their companies before reaching the legal drinking age?
Did you know that one of the best things you, as a teenager, can do for your future is to start a business?
Well, the answer is yes. Starting a business as a teenager can significantly support your personal and professional development, financial independence, pathway to college and set you on the path to having the career of your dreams.
Before diving head-first into your entrepreneurship journey, it must be noted that, while being young may provide you with endless energy and fresh perspectives in the business world, it’s not always an easy and glamorous path to take. While networking, you may come across older professionals who doubt the credibility and sustainability of your business. And without hands-on experience, you will undoubtedly confront complex problems for the very first time, and often without any ideas on how to solve them.
Nevertheless, with an abundance of information available on the internet and various ways to meet potential mentors, you can always find solutions to the most challenging problems. However, the challenge in most cases is not just knowing the answer but executing the solution.
With the right resources, work ethic, and tenacity, you can get a head start and be far ahead of your peers. If you’re looking to start now, you have come to the right place. Stick around and learn the top 10 reasons why you, as a teenager, should start your business today!
10 Reasons to Learn Entrepreneurship
1. Future-Proof Yourself - The world is changing:
The future of the job economy is ambiguous and in flux.
It’s difficult to predict what types of occupations will be available when a teen is grown and ready to enter the job market. While companies are scrambling to meet the demands of an upsurge in the population of new young workers, it’s critical for you to future-proof yourself with entrepreneurial skills. Not only can entrepreneurs create jobs, but they also have access to an inventory of skills that will help them navigate their career paths.
2. Monetize Your Hobbies:
There’s one thing in life that we’re never able to reacquire once it’s gone. It’s not money nor material items. It’s time.
Time, when utilized correctly, contains the ingredients to success, happiness, growth, and prosperity. But at the same time, if neglected, it will leave us with very little. By learning entrepreneurship, one can build life-long habits like working smart, setting goals, and planning strategies to maximize time. What if getting up an hour earlier on a summer day could earn you some extra spending money? What if those hours of playing video games could be exchanged with creating something you could monetize? What if you could do the things you enjoy day-in, day-out while being profitable?
Entrepreneurship shifts your mindset on the concept of time and allows you to transform your passion into something meaningful.
3. Master Finance Management:
Whether it be a successful athlete, lottery winner, or entrepreneur, you can lose it all within a few years by immaturely blowing away your money.
It is therefore important to learn the ways to effectively manage money at a young age. And no, topping one’s piggy bank with spare change does not teach kids how to manage money. However, and as you may expect, entrepreneurship does. From learning how to increase revenues and lower expenses to tracking purchases and planning monthly budgets, entrepreneurship can teach teenagers life skills that will be applicable throughout their everyday life, as well as within the business world.
4. Adopt an Entrepreneurial Mindset :
Regardless of whether you work for yourself and start a business, or work for an employer, a strong set of entrepreneurial mindsets is critical for success in our rapidly changing world.
As the founder of Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford, put it, “whether you think you can or you think you can’t - you’re right”. Anyone can develop the mindset of a successful entrepreneur. And not only can an entrepreneurial mindset be nurtured, but it is also important to start young.
Opening a teenager’s world to entrepreneurial experience not only helps them discover entrepreneurship as a possible career option but also helps them realize that there’s more potential for them as young people than they might think. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, an entrepreneurial mindset helps teens discover their inherent passion and that they can utilize it to make the world a better place.
5. Serve Your Community:
As a young person, entrepreneurship is one of the most impactful methods of giving back to your community.
Young people rank among the most impactful and successful social entrepreneurs. Fostering your entrepreneurial drive has the potential to create value for many individuals while also creating opportunities to explore your interests and passion at the same time - a win-win situation.
6. Expand Your Network:
You need your community as much as it needs you.
From gaining new business perspectives to raising your profile, building an entrepreneurial network of connections provides a plethora of benefits. Perfecting the art of communication, both verbal and nonverbally, can purposefully transform your image as reliable and clear - an essential skill in today’s work environment where effective interpersonal skills are a requirement for strong teams and good relationships You will learn to build not only business relationships but also meaningful, long-lasting friendships; ones that can develop into future job opportunities or connections to projects.
7. Get Real-World Experience:
Learning by doing - a hands-on approach to educating - has been known to prepare teens for the real world.
As a teenage entrepreneur, you’ll work with real clients and will have the opportunity to develop strong communication, presentation, public speaking, and strategic thinking skills, placing you miles ahead of your peers and competitors. From pitching compelling ideas to investors to acquiring customers through effective marketing strategies, entrepreneurship teaches you skills through hands-on experience that cannot be found in boring textbooks.
8. Learn From Setbacks:
There are several defining traits of a successful entrepreneur, but there is always one integral experience that unites them all: setbacks.
Success isn’t a paved path of roses, but rather one filled with mountains and jagged edges that requires practice to maneuver. You can only be successful when you are willing to view your setbacks as a temporary bump in the road and strive to reflect on it to better yourself. You will organically develop this mindset through your entrepreneurship experience, allowing you to resolve conflict effectively, apply feedback receptively, and maintain resilience actively.
9. Become a Leader:
The world needs more superheroes. Superheroes are leaders.
They are those that can direct a team towards clear goals. Being a teen entrepreneur requires you to take on the role of a founder, who needs to recruit and train team leaders. Taking on this level of leadership is a transformative experience that will allow you to hone your strengths and improve your weaknesses. As difficulties arise along the way, you must learn to negotiate terms that benefit all employees: a skill that not all teens can develop.
10. Understand the Business World
The business world is a vast place of experienced sharks. Traversing and understanding the business world as a teen is a gateway to future success and fulfillment.
There is so much to learn, from business models to marketing strategies; these all require years of knowledge—the number of competitors and level of risk rise every day. As a teenager, you have limited responsibilities and fewer economic pressures, all while being allowed the opportunities to take risks and experience failure, and there is no better time than now!
Your Solution: 24/7 Teen Bootcamps
In the past decade, the number of successful teenage entrepreneurs has grown exponentially, taking the business market by storm. They’ve been awarded money, recognition, and connections for their entrepreneurial pursuits.
Although the time is now for teens to start materializing their ideas, there are inevitable barriers to success: lack of hands-on experience, networks, and credibility. In a sea of experienced adult entrepreneurs, even the most ambitious, talented teens can get lost in its tides. But, we have a solution: our 24/7 Teen Bootcamps. Our programs equip passionate teens with career skills in several different areas, from financial literacy to digital marketing - lessons that school cannot teach you. Upon completing our programs, you will build the hard and soft skills necessary to drive right into any industry.
Don’t let a lack of knowledge and experience prevent you from living up to your full entrepreneurial potential! Let us guide you to success.