105. Teaching Kids about Money through Entrepreneurship

Rob Phelan is an entrepreneur and high school personal finance teacher in Maryland. Through his classroom work and Simple StartUp Virtual courses, Rob has helped beginner entrepreneurs form over 250 new businesses, across all different types of industries. On this episode of CFO at Home, Rob and Vince discuss using entrepreneurship to teach kids about money, some of the methods he uses to guide kids through the process of discovering and executing on business ideas, Rob’s thoughts on higher education and entrepreneurship, and more.

Key Takeaways 

• Allowances should be a starting point for kids; enough to buy small things, but leaving the big wants as motivation for kids to discover ways to make their own money 
• Creativity in kids tend to start to wane as they enter the teenage years
• • Collect and Connect - encouraging creativity by listing problems that bother us and brainstorming solutions that we could charge to provide

• The Mini-Experiment
• • Instead of waiting for the one perfect business idea, picks an idea and try it for 1-2 months
  • • Establish a hard deadline for re-evaluation of the idea
  • Teaching kids that an unsuccessful business idea is not a “failure” but simply a part of the process of discovering a successful business idea is a valuable life lesson 

• The Imposter Syndrome
• • The feeling of “who am I to start a business?”
  • • To start a business you only have to be marginally better than (one step ahead of) those who you’re teaching  

• No idea is a bad idea when it comes to a kids business. They should be extremely low-cost and education should be more important than outcome.  

Resources

• The Simple Startup
• The Rebel Entrepreneur

Ways to connect/follow

• FIeducator - Twitter
• The Simple Startup - Instagram
• The Simple Startup - FaceBook

Contact the Host - vince@thecfoathome.com