Entrepreneurs spring up out of high school
Jeff Ayres • jeff.ayres@jackson.gannett.com • August 1, 2010
The path to Essence Wallace's college education can be found in dozens of boxes' worth of coffee and other samples she hands out.
Wanting to be her own boss and have more control over earning a living, the 18-year-old Murrah High graduate for the past several months has given away samples and placed larger online orders of coffee, tea, hot chocolate and other Organo Gold products containing Ganoderma lucidum, a herb purported to keep a body's pH levels healthy.
"People who drink coffee are going to drink coffee," Wallace said, ensuring a readymade customer base that likely would be willing to try her products.
Other teens in Mississippi are following Wallace's lead in learning how to start their own business and see it thrive.
In the process, they're avoiding, at least for now, a job market that's become unusually crowded during the recession as older, displaced workers compete with high school students for work.
An exact number of teenagers with their own businesses is hard to come by, especially if those ventures aren't started as part of a school, government or nonprofit program.
But there seems to be plenty of people who are interested. The National Federation of Independent Business has awarded 2,095 Young Entrepreneur scholarships nationwide since 2003 to high school students starting their own businesses.
None of those scholarships was awarded in Mississippi this year, but two high-schoolers in the state received them in 2009.
Ron Aldridge, who heads the federation's Mississippi chapter, says teens have unprecedented opportunities to take their ideas beyond "the traditional lemonade stand" to something more long-lasting and more profitable.
At 19, Forest resident Adam Grace already is a veteran entrepreneur, having started an online business four years ago that sold candles, soaps and lotion.
But the recession and its impact on non-essential spending prompted the University of Mississippi student to set that aside and focus on starting a second business, Graceful Hosting.
It offers software co-written by Grace to businesses so they can start their own websites. Grace won't say what he's earned from the venture but adds his customers stretch to as far away as Australia, New Zealand and Singapore.
"I make more than what I would earn working a full-time job," he said.
Different approaches are used to get these ventures going.
Grace combined money earned working at a grocery store with savings to start each of his businesses.
Madison resident Shane Waller had a $3,500 bank loan in hand to start Shane's Lawn Service when he was 15.
The soon-to-be junior at Madison Central High School has operated the company for two years and says he's on the verge of repaying the loan.
Along the way, he's learned important money management skills. Waller, 17, says he uses much of the money he earns to pay off the loan and cover repair and maintenance costs while trying to save toward college.
"I knew going into it that it wasn't going to be easy," he said. "But if I put my mind into it, I knew it would be easier.
Wallace is putting a lot of what she earns toward college, too. She plans to study drama at Spellman College in Atlanta.
In seeking the loan, Waller had a detailed business plan in place, including projected revenues, expenses and work volume as well as his ability to repay the loan in a timely manner.
He says he averages about 10 jobs per week during spring and summer, the peak time of his business, with slower periods of leaf-blowing and other tasks when temperatures drop.
While Waller prefers tried-and-true methods like passing out business cards and posting fliers to promote his business, people his age going into business these days have an advantage previous generations never had, Aldridge says: the online world and social networking.
"The Internet has opened up possibilities," he said. "They're so much further ahead in the use of technology (at their age) than we are at 30, 40, 50 years old."
Graceful Hosting has a Facebook page and Twitter account, but Grace says much of his business has been built through word of mouth.
The effort to spur entrepreneurship is reaching increasingly younger audiences.
Brent Hales, a professor of economic and work force development at the University of Southern Mississippi, teaches entrepreneurship skills to high schoolers throughout the state and has created a pilot program for middle school students.
On the high school level, students spend a semester learning basic skills in formulating a mock business and the next semester learning finance skills to keep those businesses thriving as part of the Southern Entrepreneurship Program.
What started in 2007 in four high schools is expected to reach 20 to 24 schools this fall, Hales said. The number of students taking the courses has grown from 70 to 220.
"(Many) of these kids don't start a business, but we've taught them business skills," Hales says.
Students who have completed the program have opened formal-wear, jewelry and other types of businesses, he said.
The new middle school program runs two years. In the first year, students form stationery businesses and develop marketing plans. The second is spent selling their goods to actual businesses in their communities.
"We're teaching them accounting skills, the process of making and selling the paper," Hales says.
An increasingly interconnected business world means students need to learn at least basic business and money skills at an earlier age through "grade-appropriate" curriculum, says Pam Smith, director of the nonprofit Mississippi Council of Economic Education.
"Kids are extremely enterprising. Kids love to make money," she said. "It will expand."
From clarionledger.com published on Sunday, August 1, 2010