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INNOVATION
& DESIGN Home Page Architecture Brand Equity Auto Design Game Room SMALLBIZ Smart Answers Success Stories Today's Tip INVESTING Investing: Europe Annual Reports BW 50 S&P Picks & Pans Stock Screeners Free S&P Stock Report SCOREBOARDS Hot Growth 100 Mutual Funds Info Tech 100 S&P 500 B-SCHOOLS Undergrad Programs MBA Blogs MBA Profiles MBA Rankings Who's Hiring Grads | | AUGUST 16, 2000 WORK & FAMILY By Jill Hamburg Coplan Teen Dream A 13-year-old salesman looks for tips and guidance
Q: I am 13 years old and working to earn money to buy a drum set. I've started a business called "Brian's Business Cards and T-Shirts," which makes people business cards and T-shirts with their logo or emblem. How can I get people to notice me and take me seriously? --Brian Harnish, Hiawatha, Iowa A: For starters, the unedited version of your letter had some misspellings. You confused "there" and "their" and "to" and "too" and used apostrophes and capitalization incorrectly. That's a problem for someone who wants to go into printing, but the solution is simple: Make friends with the spell-checker on your PC. Then take these tips from Ed Williams. He is an entrepreneurship expert, the author of 20 books, and the Henry Gardiner Symonds Professor at the Jesse H. Jones School of Management at Rice University. At 13, he, too, ran a business -- selling Mexican curios in front of the neighborhood grocery store. "Kids at [13] can be fairly mature," he says. "The problem with it is, you're not going to have much seasoning. You're going to make lots of mistakes." Finding someone willing to invest some time (in advising you) would be extremely useful, he says. "Having support from parents -- or an uncle or a grandparent who's behind you, a mentor, especially if they've been an entrepreneur -- can really help. I had mentoring from the guy who owned the grocery store. He was a retailer. He gave me tips on pricing and markups." And if things really do take off, adult supervision will be necessary. ASSETS. Use what you've already got going for you, Williams advises: Your own expertise and your knowledge of young consumers. "Teens know most about their own interests and tastes. There are a lot of things in their world they know more about than adults do." (Harry Potter and skateboards, for example.) You'll also get more respect if you don't overreach. "Is he thinking he'll become a millionaire? If so, that's not realistic, and people may not be taking him seriously because they think his expectations are so out of bounds," says Linda Dunlap, a child-development expert and the chair of the psychology department at Marist College. As for naysayers, keep in mind that you'll run into them whatever you do, your whole life. The best response is not to argue and just move forward, Dunlap says. Let your success speak for itself. P.S. TO PARENTS: Be cautious if your entrepreneurial son or daughter has rocky self-esteem and acts like business success will make or break their life. That's risky behavior for an adolescent, considering how many startups fail. The business shouldn't interfere with school, isolate the young person from friends or family, or hurt his or her physical development. Not everyone's a jock, but young bodies should be active. There's time enough later to spend the day bent over a keyboard. Send your questions to frontierlife@businessweek.com.  Jill Hamburg Coplan has covered work, family, business, and finance for the past decade as a writer and editor for newspapers, magazines, and wire services. She left Working Woman magazine, where she was senior editor, when her first child was born and now works solo from a home office in Brooklyn, N.Y. You can e-mail her at Jill Hamburg Coplan  | | |
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