My son Sky was just 6 years old when he became an entrepreneur.
It happened in May of 2020, at the very beginning of the pandemic. He overheard me and Natalya talking and realized the flower shops were closed. So? He had an idea of how to make some money — to sell flowers that grow in our backyard. Lilies of the Valley.
Natalya made a quick post inside a local Facebook group, and before you know it, we had people pulling up to our house to buy flowers. Sky made $293 in just a couple of weeks.
Then came summer, and naturally he decided to sell lemonade. His first day, he sold out in less than an hour and made $125 selling a large cup of lemonade for $2.50. He also learned that day that some people are very generous tippers — especially when it comes to kidpreneurs.
"Now his brain was churning at full speed. What else can I sell?"
Naturally, as parents we went online and ordered every resource we could find for kidpreneurs to help him learn about business, marketing, salesmanship, influence and persuasion. But everything (and I mean everything) made for kids was so… basic. Like kids aren't capable of coming up with awesome solutions to real-world problems and figuring out how to make them a reality.
We knew different. As lifelong entrepreneurs who had just had a multimillion-dollar exit in 2019, we wanted to create a resource for kids that would empower them to become true entrepreneurs — modern-era kidpreneurs. Not kids who only sell lemonade or homemade jewelry or shovel driveways in the winter.
We wanted to teach them:
- BrainstormHow to come up with a business idea that's actually theirs.
- MarketHow to turn that idea into reality, even at age 8.
- Goal-SetHow to set SMART goals and stay focused on them.
- MindsetWhat an entrepreneurial mindset is, and the importance of habits.
- PossibilityWhat's actually possible for kids today.
- JoyWhy being an entrepreneur is so much fun.
So we put this book together for our own son.
And while we were writing and illustrating it, we tested how well it was understood and applied — on Sky himself. By doing the worksheets, he came up with another idea: how to get kids to wash their hands more often (which, in 2020, every parent wanted). He decided to make soaps with a toy inside. To get to the toy, kids had to wash their hands more often.
The first batch was a failure — he made the soaps white, so kids couldn't see the toy. His marketing idea flopped. But, as he learned in the almost-finished book: failure is just feedback. He made the soaps clear so kids could see the prize inside. And bang.
His first day selling those at an Acton Business Fair for kids, he sold $325 of soap and won the Certificate for Most Original Product.
That's the spirit we wanted to bottle. Frameworks any child can follow to become real-world entrepreneurs.
— Zach Story