How to Prepare Children to Run a Successful Business
Do these 9 steps to make your kids a business tycoon.
With the 2nd Industrial Revolution, the 20th century saw the rise of family businesses around the world. The founders of today’s large corporations like Tata Group, Standard Oil³, Walmart, LG Group, Reliance Industries, started these companies with their sweat, courage, and iron determination. The founders never imagined that the companies they created would continue to run for decades and have a significant impact on the lives of billions of people and on global society.
Imagining one’s family to drive society and business is more than an overwhelming feeling and is difficult to describe in few words.
The businesses of such families have really grown exponentially with their 2nd generation.
Born with a silver spoon (no sarcasm, their fathers deserved it), these 2nd generation children gained business acumen at an early age.
Growing in business families, children of entrepreneurs got an enriching environment, and developing a business acumen was like learning to eat and drink.
A decision for business directly or indirectly governed children’s lifestyles. In such a process, the kids of such people who run businesses have higher chances of acquiring business intelligence than the children of those parents who work for someone else’s business (employees).
The ongoing fourth industrial revolution, or the rise of Industry 4.0, has created countless opportunities to do business and make money. With this rise, the skills that help people run a profitable business are gaining prominence. Therefore, it is important for people born in the 1970s and 80s to ensure that their children develop such skills for this highly unpredictable world that would offer countless opportunities to make money and do business.
Why Is It Necessary?
Schools, universities, management institutes don’t teach students to start a business. Instead, they teach you to do the job. People prepare for recruitment drives at the end of the curriculum and do not get the funds to start their own businesses.
Institutes do not help kids to imbibe skills they need to start a business: The practical application of how to choose a product, how to assess the potential market, how to create a business model, how to raise funds, how to market, are not in curriculum of engineering, management or other courses.
In fact, a graduate doesn’t know fundamentals of business because the curriculum only includes theoretical or technical concepts. Universities teach them concepts but don’t teach how to monetize them? Institutes leave students with basic knowledge. And the internships that students do in companies make them believe they were born to do a job and not create a company.
Parents, therefore, who wish to see their kids as a successful businessman should work on developing entrepreneurial skills in their children.
Here are 8 ways that would help parents to instill these skills at an early age.
1. Make Children Understand the Value of Money
I saw this interesting concept of teaching money’s value to children in one of my visit’s to the school of needy.
They gave each child a ticket (plastic card) when kids did something good, like cleaning up their stuff, cleaning common areas, and so on. Kids could keep tickets in the lockers of a temporary bank that was set up inside the school.
Now they were to use these tickets to fetch things like pens, pencils, balls, etc. They could only get stuff if they have tickets.
An interesting concept to teach them the value of money. Although it may not be practical for parents to practice it, but one can take inspiration from such concepts and develop own feasible methods to teach kids the value of money at an early age.
2. Create a Library for Them
Create a library and replenish it with age-appropriate books from time to time. Reading plays a very important role here, it develops logical thinking, increases the presence of mind, gives them the ability to decide, keeps their mind active, etc.
Let them read books but also ask them to start the library out of the collection. They can lend books to friends and acquaintances if they get a few bucks in return.
This exercise can help them develop management skills.
3. Prepare Them for Failure
Children need to be prepared to deal with failure. It is becoming more and more necessary to make them understand it is not all about winning and why failures are important too. It will make them emotionally strong if they face it at an early age.
It is better to let them fail in your presence than when they are alone and have to face the world.
4. Prepare Them for Public Speaking and Appearance
Basic technical skills will become common in the coming times, and communication or public speaking skills will help to make all the needed difference from others. Impart such skills by letting them meet with different people. Take them along in your get-togethers, and let them meet people. Create a perception that stage appearance is common and not unique.
5. Make Them Appear in Competitive Exams
By participating in competitions, they learn and realize that getting results is not easy. People need to work hard consistently, only then the results will come.
If you do this, hard work will become a habit for them and then they will develop smart work skills on their own.
6. Let Them Do Small Business in Their Late Teens
Coaching other kids, you tubing, doing internships, especially marketing, will give them these necessary skills at an early age. They will know how one can earn money by selling a product or service.
7. Make Them Fearless
Let them take risks at a young age. They should develop the ability to think through the outcome of the decisions they will make. Don’t decide everything for them, but leave some things up to them.
Businesses prosper when entrepreneurs take calculated risks at the right time.
This will prepare them to take such risks.
8. Include Clarified Butter in Their Diet
Now, this may look surprising. But foods like clarified butter or ghee, helps in the cognitive or brain development of kids.
Eggs, peanut butter, Greek yogurt, nuts are other alternatives that help in the brain development of kids. Regular intake of such foods will enhance their cognitive ability.
9. Never Undermine Their Crazy Ideas
Encourage their unique initiatives. It helps them to build confidence and makes them trust their own actions, and indirectly increases their risk appetite.
Summing up, the way we do our work is changing with the digital revolution. Doing freelancing, side hustles and small business would be at center stage with the current transformation, and hence apart from getting them into good institutes, parents should invest time to instill entrepreneurial skills in their children.
References:
- Organic Facts , Mom Junction, Notes for healthy kids.
- Wikepedia-1,2,3
- Famcap
