Forget meager landscaping or babysitting operations. Some teens are creating booming large-scale businesses.
Take Noa Mintz, for example. The 15-year-old entrepreneur established a babysitting agency when she was 12 that has revenues of $375,000, Entrepreneur magazine reported last month.
At some high schools, similarly minded teens are developing businesses while earning course credit through business incubator classes.
“The class as a whole is something that’s beneficial for them, not just right now, not just in college, but down the road in their future,” says Hagop Soulakian, business incubator teacher at Barrington High School in Illinois, which established the course in 2013.
Throughout the year students work in groups to come up with an idea for a business and test the product or service to determine if it can be successful. Along the way they pick up soft skills, such as team work and more technical skills, such as finance.
The final test for students who make the cut is to pitch the business idea to a panel of investors, who might offer real money to fund the students’ ventures — much like in the competition reality show “Shark Tank.” Last year, $80,000 in funding from community resources was awarded to the teen entrepreneurs, Soulakian says.
This year, the groups who received funding are participating in part two of the class, he says, where they actually start the business. His students have created a teen technology tutoring service and a bus locator app, among others.
But Soulakian says that teachers who want to try something similar could definitely replicate the experience without the funding aspect.
Read about [how teens want to become business owners but lack training.]
“I think this is life changing,” says Xanthe Meyer, Spark! Incubator program director for the Parkway C-2 School District in Missouri, a similar high school incubator class.
No matter what the students end up doing, she says, the skills they have developed such as collaborating, networking and identifying when and how to ask for help, will be beneficial.
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“Traditionally, teachers have always kind of said, ‘Here’s what you need and here’s what I’m going to do to help you,'” says Meyer, a veteran educator. “This is more self-driven.”
The recently established Parkway program is similar to the Barrington program — students work together to come up with an idea for a business and pitch the idea to a panel of judges — although the time to pitch is shorter so that the students can spend most of the year actually establishing their businesses.
They work in an offsite business incubator during the school day, a former Pottery Barn Kids in a local mall, and are fully in charge of their businesses — they schedule meetings and make decisions.
Both programs call on community members to serve as mentors to the students.
“The alumni association is huge because that’s where a lot of our mentor base comes from,” says Meyer. That could be a great place for teachers to start if they want to do something similar, she says.
Find out [how teens can incorporate jobs and hobbies into college applications.]
One group at Meyer’s school is working on creating a straw to dispense butter evenly through a tub of movie theater popcorn. Others are burgeoning fashion designers.
In Illinois, the Barrington program attracted so much attention from other educators that a nonprofit organization called INCubatoredu was created to assist other high schools in establishing similar programs.
Soulakian says his students’ passion makes teaching the class easy.
“I don’t have to write any tardies for this class and all these kids work through the bell,” he says.
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Teens Take a Bite Out of Business in High School Incubator Classes originally appeared on usnews.com
