10 Advantages of Being a Young Entrepreneur

Starting your own business and being an entrepreneur is a wonderful experience at any age.  However, I often find young people shying away from starting their own businesses because they think they lack the experience required.  Although experience helps, being young still does not limit your capacity to be happy and successful in business.  I have been involved in various entrepreneurial ventures since I was 13 and can say that running your own business is a wonderful experience.  Here are 10 advantages of being a young entrepreneur.

1. Personal growth on overdrive

In order to succeed in business, you must undergo massive personal growth.  You will need to identify, develop, and internalize a large skill-set.  You need to be able to communicate well with clients and employees, make quick decisions, develop the ability to understand your customers' wants and needs, and present your solutions to their desires effectively. 

As an entrepreneur, you have to face a lot of uncertainty. It's not like most jobs where your tasks or projects are given to you and you just do them.  As an entrepreneur, you first have to decide what the projects are.  You have to think about product development, marketing, accounting etc.  There is a great deal of uncertainty in this process and you have to rely greatly on your own judgments.

Success in business is a long-term endeavor.  There are very few quick successes - the businesses that succeed grow consistently for a period of time until they hit their tipping point.  In order to effectively manage this process, you must develop a clear vision for your business, a plan to implement, the flexibility to adapt as necessary and the commitment and persistence to stick with it for the long term.  Few jobs provide or require the same growth as entrepreneurship.

2.  More freedom

Many people seek a job out of the need for security.  They want to have a steady paycheck and the perceived security that comes with it.  This often comes at the cost of personal freedom.  In most jobs, the projects you work on and the hours you work on are given to you.  IF the values of the company you work for and your personal values are not in alignment, you will have a terrible time at work.

When you are an entrepreneur, you are in complete control.  There is a greater feeling of risk but there is also a greater feeling of freedom.  For most young people (and many older people too), freedom is more highly valued than security.  Running your own business affords you the opportunity to set your own hours (although at times you might be working more than 40 hours a week).  You set the projects you work on - the projects that align with your internal sense of value.

Invariably, there will be parts of your business that you need to work on but don't really want to do.  For example, you may find the accounting work for your business to be tedious or there may be some other repetitive task that needs to be done but that you don't enjoy doing.  In this situation, (if it is financially responsible to do so) you can hire others to do the work for you (employees or outsourcing) and go back to focusing on your core genius.  While you need an understanding of all aspects of your business to be successful, you have the freedom to focus most of your efforts on what you love doing.

3. Create more value, make a bigger difference and do what you love

In many jobs, your purpose is simply to make the company more profitable.  There are some companies where a sense of contribution is highly valued but those seem to be rarer.  However, by creating your own business, you have the opportunity to set the vision for the entire company.  If many corporations seem greedy to you, you can choose to create your own business that provides genuine value to other people while simultaneously generated a profit.

You can still make significant contributions to society outside of a job through supporting worthy causes and volunteering, However, you still spend 40 hours or more of your week at your job.  By creating a business that is in alignment with your own sense of inner purpose, you can live your life completely congruently.  Instead of your work being something you do to meet your basic survival needs, it can be something you love and an outlet for self-expression and contribution.

4. Failure is not a big deal

The primary obstacle to starting a business for many people is the fear of failure.  People are afraid of what it would mean to their financial if the business flopped.  This is especially true if they have a family to support.  The risks associated with entrepreneurship and the prospects of financial failure are too much for many to start their own business.  Most people can handle letting themselves down but the idea of letting people they care about down is simply too much.

However, as a young person who has responsibility only to yourself, the fear of letting other people down who are counting on you does not come into effect.  Even if the business turned out to be a total flop, the only thing wasted would be your own time and money.  At the same time, however, you would have been able to experience the tremendous growth associated with becoming an entrepreneur.

So as a young entrepreneur, the downside is your business fails and you are left in a poor financial situation.  It's not the end of world and is something that can be recovered from plus you had the opportunity to grow because of your journey into business.  On the upside, you still get to experience massive growth and you get financial success to go along with it.  It is essentially a no lose situation.

5. There is a lot of support available

There are a lot of resources out there for you if you want to become an entrepreneur.  More people today than ever before are endeavoring to start their own businesses.  As a result there are many entrepreneurial groups you can join, both local and online, for the purposes of mutual support and networking.  Although starting your own business can be scary, you don't have to go at it alone.

People who start companies create jobs so there are many government programs designed specifically to help new entrepreneurs get on their feet.  There are also opportunities targeted specifically at young people.  For example, the Canadian government offers the Summer Company program which is targeted at the 14-25 age group.  By writing a detailed business plan and presenting your idea to a group of older business professionals, you can receive a government grant for your business. 

When I was 14, I participated in this program.  The government grant provided $3000 (a lot of money when you are 14) to start a software company.  In addition, the program provided biweekly mentoring sessions with successful professional including entrepreneurs, executives and bankers.   Overall, having this experience at a young age was a wonderful opportunity.

With some online research, you could easily find some groups or programs that could support your business success.

6. You have a lot of time and energy

As a young entrepreneur, your passion for your work is one of your greatest strengths.  You don't have a lot of responsibility in terms of a family to take care of so you can really pour yourself into your work.  If you ensure that you work is something you love, it will feel like play and you'll find yourself effortlessly pouring massive amounts of energy into it. In some cases, this effort, energy and passion can more than make up for your lack of experience.

An interesting trend I have found in my life is that young people tend to be more enthused about their careers than many older adults I have spoken to.  Many of the older adults seem to have had their spirit broken by working at a job they hate for many years.  Unfortunately, these same people are afraid to leave their jobs out of fear for their financial situation. 

7. You are naïve

Although inexperience can be weakness at times because of your inability to accurately predict how your decisions will turn out, your lack of experience can be beneficial in other ways.  Often, people who have a lot of experience in a certain area develop a model of how things work.  Although these mental models can be quite useful in some situations, they can be massively limiting in other situations. 

Since you do not have these mental models, you are not subject to the same limitations as others are.  This means that you have the ability to see things that the others cannot.  You have far greater potential for creative output and the likelihood of generated innovative ideas is far greater.  Knowing this, as you gain experience, you can allow your judgment in business to develop while consciously choosing remain as open-minded as you can and therefore, getting the best of both worlds.

8. Leverage technology

Now this is a gross generalization, but young people tend to be more technologically savvy.  Having grown up with the computers and the internet, you tend have a far more intuitive grasp of technology.  This can be a definitive competitive advantage as you move forward into business.

With the Internet, you can take advantage of many technologies that many older people do not yet understand.  You can use the internet to create highly passive income source.  If you sell digital products, existing technology can handle all of the order processing and product delivery for you.  You can also use Web 2.0 technologies to market your product.  This includes blogs, social networking, article marketing, search engine optimization etc.

9. Better understanding of the youth market and emerging trends

Being young makes it easier for you to understand what the youth market desires.  If you are targeting a product towards the youth market, it is far easier for you to understand the customers' wants and needs (a necessity for marketing success).  Having this intimate knowledge of your market makes it far easier for your business to connect with its customer.

Consider, for example, the success of social networking sites in the last few years.  Facebook and MySpace were both created by relatively young entrepreneurs.  The sites are successful because they appeal to the need of young people to connect with one another easily.  While older people are typically more concerned with their families and married life, the younger generation's primary focus is socializing and connecting with friends.  By being a vehicle for socializing and connecting, social networking sites have been massively successful.

10. There are many mentors willing to help you

People like helping others.  Knowing that you have had a positive impact on the life of another person makes you feel good. As a result, there are many older entrepreneurs who are eager to share their knowledge with someone who is intelligent and enthusiastic.

There are a few keys to developing a relationship with a mentor:

1. Be respectful of their time - A lot of entrepreneurs are busy people. Know that their time is valuable and don`t ask them a question when you can easily get an answer by doing some of your own research.
2. Add value - Make your relationship mutually beneficial. Help them out with their business (perhaps through your knowledge of technology and understanding of the youth market). If you can`t help them with their business, simply offer to take them out for dinner.
3. Implement their advice quickly - They want to know that the time they invested in you had a positive impact. Implement their advice quickly and report the successes you had back to them. This is where the real value of being a mentor lies: knowing that they helped you.

To find someone to mentor you, join a professional association or simply begin approach local businesses that you know are successful.  It may take a few rejections but you will eventually find someone who is more than willing to help you.