When Did you First Know You Were an Entrepreneur?
Just about every entrepreneur and small business owner that I’ve talked with has said that these entrepreneurial qualities manifested as early back as they can remember. What was your first entrepreneurial adventure?
Nate Whitehill started an online community of kids at the age of 12. Ben Casnocha started his entrepreneurial career by selling pens and gumballs around his house as a child before becoming one of the youngest Silicon Valley CEO’s ever.
When I was 9, I found a little plastic cigar case on the ground and thought it would be a perfect container for a pencil. With such an important pencil case, I felt I needed to do something important and started a newspaper. With a staff of 2 other kids, we wrote stories about things like some eggs found at the local duck pond, recipes, and poems. We got through about 4 issues before our hands were cramping from handwriting copies for all 9 of our subscribers and we petered out.
Later I found one of my mom’s Entrepreneur magazines on the table and became even more obsessed with the idea of starting businesses. My mom fed my dream and allowed me to order a bunch of random trinkets from a company advertising in the back of the magazine after I went around school with a handmade order form collecting orders.
What about you? How did your entrepreneurial spirit manifest as a child?
I sold basketball cards at a little table on the corner of my street when I was a kid and wrote little books in school and sold them for a few cents. And now of course I do a lot of online business!
What a great story! It’s funny how these qualities appear so early in life. Thanks for sharing Erik!!
When I was quite young, a car accident had occurred outside my house. I wasn’t around during, but later there was crumbled glass from the sunroof on the ground.
You know how that stuff is made to shatter into little pieces? Well, I took some sandwich bags, filled up each one and set up a stand on the street selling them as diamonds.
Didn’t get any sales except my mom’s friend, who just wanted to humour me.
I think this means I’m destined to be a horrible capitalist, profiting off of an accident like that!
And then you have the classic lemonade stand. We modified it, using the much cheaper KoolAid. Once I had sold enough, I’d go to the store, reinvesting my profits into more KoolAid!!
Ah, the old days
After a few years of the corporate life, I realized I wanted more freedom and control over my destiny. Once the Internet matured I really started. I love information.
Terry
I was probably 8 maybe. My grand father told me he had $3K in the bank/stocks for me and he saw how I lit up/got excited and then he said “well maybe more like $3.00″, i knew it was really the first amount. Ever since then I wanted to be in business. And when i was in middle school i would buy huge bags of jolly ranchers at Sam’s Club and Redistribute at school for 25 cents each piece. Or trade for favors, kinda like the mob too i guess. But no more favors these days, strictly on the straight and narrow. I swear!
Wow! While reading, I fully expected you to say that you were traumatized by the car accident - but no! You turned a bad situation into diamonds!
And so smart of you to reinvest your Kool Aid stand profits - geez! Most kids would have taken all of those big-time earnings and stuck them right into the gumball machines at the grocery store. Instead, you were in the Kool Aid isle thinking like a businessman
Thank you for sharing this story Joshua!
$3k! You must’ve thought Grandpa was a high roller! I got $50 once at around that age and thought I was set for life. No wonder this got you fired up!
SMART idea with the Jolly Ranchers! My 6 year old has been begging me to “teach him how to make money” and I’ve been trying to think of a little business for him that wouldn’t tie hime to the driveway. He was selling “beautiful rocks” outside for 25 cents…. Now that I’ve read this, I think I’m going to hook him up with a bag of Jolly Ranchers. If he turns into a mob guy, I’m calling your for more advice!!
I hear ya Terry! Corporate life can definitely do that to you. I thought that was what I wanted but found it to be very infilling too. Congratulations on taking control of your destiny and going in to business for yourself!
wow, what a great question! for me, it wasn’t that i always have been one, it was just that i always knew that i would be one. my father owned his own company from the time i was born until he retired and sold it 5 years ago and i just knew that i would also own my own business one day. that and being an only child; im not interested in having others ‘boss’ me. haha.
working for other people just verified my feelings. inevitably, at some point, i would think about how inefficiently the company was running, but i was never in a position to do anything about it personally or had a boss that was not willing to do anything about it. this drove me NUTS and after three different experiences like this, i decided to stop monkeying around and come up with my own company. although, i did get a lot of valuable experience of what NOT to do in my past jobs. i think that’s almost more important than coming up with the actual business idea. you can learn a lot by seeing first-hand something very simple be handled and run so poorly that it flails unnecessarily. it really puts things into perspective: keep it simple and keep it real.
What good points Erin! Working at a job can definitely give you a lot of pointers on what DOESN’T work as well as some things that do. What you say is so true… “keep it simple and keep it real.” So many companies get bogged down with the details that they forget about the main point.
Thanks for sharing Erin!
Our high school had an annual christmas fun-fair and one year (about 15 years ago) I bought a booth, got several classmates to work for a percentage of the profits, sold advertising, got some food & drinks and made a pretty decent profit.
But I thought of it as an anomolous event until I started investing in real estate 4 years ago. Since then I’ve put together investment packages in an oil drilling project in IL, a gas pipeline deal in TX, a corp to do private funding for various business and an offshore internet telephony company.
It wasn’t until last year I realized how entrepreneurial I had become!
What a great story! Geez - you are certainly an entrepreneur! We all have a lot to learn from you!!