A site member posted this.
We live in small town in the mid-west, population under 1200. This is something that we've done that I thought I'd pass along for kicks.My wife and I have 6 kids, oldest being 11. Our oldest has a lawn mowing business that just entered its second year. Yesterday afternoon, we went door to door passing out flyers (I was going to upload a picture of one, but don't think that I can here) to every house in town advertising his lawn mowing company for the upcoming summer months.
Our flyer has a picture of our son wearing the local public school shirt (we homeschool) standing by his mower with a smile on his face. We also offer that he'll mow your yard for free the first time, "so you can see that I'll do a good job for you." And at the bottom are three references from some of last year's customers with their first name, last initial, and address so that people know they are legit.
As I suspected, last year, none of the customers would allow him to work for free and they all gave him a "signing bonus" or "a tip" of some kind so he never lost a dime with the offer.
Our town is small enough that he doesn't have much in the way of competition from any professional companies and no other kids would even want to do something like this if they knew how because they are playing video games.
It's also small enough that we let him go 2 blocks away and mow without an adult using a walkie talkie.
We pass out flyers in the fall, to sort of fertilize the ground so to speak and we do it again in the spring -- like we did last Saturday.
We make him pay us $2 per lawn for gas/oil/weed eater string, etc so he understands gross v net. Of the remainder, he tithes 10%, saves 65% and gets to spend 25%. He's a natural saver and doesn't even spend the full 25% so he ended up saving more like 75%.
Anyway, last year, net of tithe and expenses, with 5 customers he saved $950 and we got skunked in June with no mowing because we had no rain. I keep him at about the $25/hr rate when bidding on a new customer's yard and no one even blinks.
This year he's hoping to add in another 2-3 customers and he's 'sub-contracted' out the sidewalk sweeping to his 9 yr old sister and 7 yr old brother. :)
In a small town like this, with these kids getting more and more known as the ones who will work, I told them they could have dozens of customer when they are older and be able to save a lot of money -- something they are all excited about.
Just thought I'd pass that along in case you need some ideas with your kids.
The job described here is a lot more than just lawn mowing. This has to do with marketing. It is not just grunt labor.
When I was a boy, and even when my father was a boy, the standard job for young men was to deliver newspapers. It took a lot of work, and it took a lot of discipline. A young man received a stack of newspapers, usually delivered by a truck, and he had to fold them, put them on the back of a bicycle, and toss them onto lawns in local neighborhoods. He also had to collect the money for the newspapers once a month.
I never had any interest in that job. I did know one young man who did it. I was happy not to do anything like it.
It took capital: a bicycle. It took a lot of time. He had to do it in terrible weather. When it rained, he had to put the newspapers into waterproof baggies. It did not pay well.
That was a kind of job I decided early that I was not going to take. My parents never mentioned it, for which I was thankful at the time.
It was grunt labor. Therefore, anybody with a bicycle could do it. Therefore, I understood early, you were not going to get much money for your labor. I always thought it was bad idea to work long and hard at a job that didn't pay well. I realize that in the Great Depression, teenagers had to do it, but I did not live in the Great Depression. My generation was the first generation in history ever to grow up with significant disposable income to spend. We spent it. Rock 'n roll stars and movie stars made a lot of money because of us.
Another job was lawn mowing. Prior to power mowers, that job made no sense to me, either. There was too high a labor input for the money you made. I would do it once in a while for spare change, but I never liked to do it.
I was not lazy. At the age of 14, I got a job selling records in a record store. I worked 20 hours a week. I worked indoors. I got to meet people. I had to learn sales skills. I learned a great deal about the record business and popular music generally. I was paid a dollar an hour. That was minimum wage. I was able to get my homework done, and I had money to spare. In retrospect, I remember far more about that job than I do about my first three years of high school. I am confident that I learned more of marketable value from that job than I learned at any time in high school.
There was a third job for young people in their teens: babysitting. That was a much better job. I did that on occasion. I provided a useful service. I made decent money. Babysitting gave a teenager some skills in dealing with small children. It interfered with their social life, but a lot of teenagers did not have much social life. Usually, it is a task for teenagers before they get their driver's licenses. It tended to be dominated by girls.
Babysitting is another job that can teach marketing. I think any job for teenagers that requires basic marketing skills is a good job. They should be involved in distributing the marketing materials, and in some cases, they should even be involved in creating the marketing literature. They should possess some idea of what kinds of advertising motivate adults to turn over their money to teenagers.
That was why I never had any interest in delivering newspapers. It took no marketing skills. I knew from an early age that if there was no marketing involved, it was grunt labor. I never had any interest in performing grunt labor at low wages. I knew that was not going to do me any good as an adult, and I always regarded my time as valuable. I did not waste it, except for a few television shows.
As long as a young person is involved in the marketing side of the business, I think it is a good idea to get teenagers working in their own small business. The other option is to get an apprenticeship at a local business that is reasonably successful. Here, the teenager may do grunt labor. He is going to be paid minimum wage, and if he keeps his eyes open, he is going to see how a successful business is run. That can be motivation as an adult. It also teaches basic employment skills. The teenager has to show up on time every day, perform predictably good service, and interact well with other employees. These are skills that usually must be learned on the job. It is best to learn them in a business, which is a noncoercive environment, rather than a public school, which is a highly coercive and highly bureaucratic environment.
In terms of return on invested hours after the age of 13, preparing for CLEP exams is a far better investment than anything else. It is great for the parents, but it is also great for the student. The student may be able to quiz out of the first two years of college by age 17, which will get him or her into the real world of adult salaried income faster than anything else the student can do. If a student at age 19 is earning $30,000 a year in a regular college-degreed job, and can do this for two or three years before his peers enter the labor market, this is a significant head start in life. As long as a student understands the economics of early college graduation, his time as a teenager is best spent taking CLEPs. If he can also do a lawn mowing job, or something equivalent, that is even better.
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