Too Young to be an Entrepreneur? What can be learned here.

Is there such a thing as being too young to be an entrepreneur? I have seen this question tossed around from time to time and wanted to add my two cents.

I have read several articles and they all seem to come to the same conclusion, you are never to young to be an entrepreneur. As much as this question is about being an entrepreneur I think it is more about how a parent chooses to teach their child about money. I mean when a child is young they have  characteristics most commonly found in an entrepreneur. A child is creative, passionate, open to risk, and full of curiosity. These are the ultimate qualities of an entrepreneur, no matter what the age. So if this is the case why would we not want to use these qualities while they still exist. It is my opinion that some of these qualities tend to go away as we use them less throughout our schooling. Our school system is poor at harbouring these qualities and we need to improve upon that.

I want to briefly touch on some of the skills learned as an entrepreneur, in my opinion of course and see what you guys think about them. Please comment to add or disagree to my list. Now all of these depend on what kind of business the child created of course but staying consistent with some of the others I have mentioned in this article I think that the biggest is salesmanship. The ability to close a sale, to overcome a rejection, deal with rejection and ultimately read people I think has to be the top skill learned and necessary by an entrepreneur. I mentioned reading people but to expand on that what I mean is the ability to listen to a person and put yourself in their shoes. This is a quality necessary in all aspects of life but especially in sales.

The next major skill learned is time management. As a child the world is at our feet and at this point we still have all the options in the world as far as what we want to do. We have friends to play with, sports, TV, Internet, video games and on and on. With school and all of these other activities they learn to balance their schedule and give time to the appropriate tasks.

Another major skill to me is marketing. Similar to sales you simply have to put yourself out there and knock on doors, but more then that there are numerous types of marketing and more specific to this generation will be web marketing. Maybe it's Craigslist, eBay, amazon or a host of other sites but again numerous ways to get exposure online.

The final skill learned would be budgeting and learning about cash flow. I think ultimately this may come down to decision making but in finance and accounting, there are more critical decisions to be made. You have to learn how to budget and again another skill set in life is managing and understanding cash flow.

I think when you put these four things together and add in managing employees and creating a chain of command and you have some absolutely key parts to running a business and lessons that can be learned even as a kid should they fully invest themselves in a business.
Like I said I really am not sure what the downsides are to being a young entrepreneur but I will take a couple stabs at them. The first possibility is that there is a lot of responsibility that comes with being an entrepreneur. I would understand if a parent said I don't want my child to have that responsibility just yet. They have all their life to take on as much responsibility as they would like but while they are young I want them to be a kid. The only other downside that I can think of is that there comes risk with being an entrepreneur. In my opinion this is where the parent has to step in. An 8 year obviously doesn't have the skill set or maturity to put together a growing company but there is a lot that can be learned from lemonade stands, mowing yards and maybe creating a website for a slightly older crowd. At the same time it isn't likely that an 8 year old create a sophisticated company.

While I didn't intend for it to be this article turned out to be just as much about the different skills learned/needed to be an entrepreneur as it did about young entrepreneurs. The bottom line to me is that you are never to young learn and especially learn how to be your own boss. I recently read a quote that I think is very fitting to end this article with and that is; "you are either working for your own dreams or working for someone elses." Learn, as early as possible, how to make money work for you and not work for money!