7 Tips to Helping Your Child Start a Business at Home
As a parent, you want your child to be financially literate and have strong money management skills. What better way to teach them than encouraging your child to start a business at home?
Getting kids interested in entrepreneurship from a young age can really give them valuable real-world experience of running a small business, thereby developing essential skills like budgeting and planning.
In fact, allowing your child to start a business at home can spark a lifelong passion!
Take Mikaila Ulmer for example, at just 4 years old, she started a lemonade stand which grew into a million dollar lemonade business called Me & the Bees Lemonade by the time she was 10. Or consider Alina Morse, who started making homemade candy at age 7 and went on to launch Zollipops, a million-dollar sugar-free lollipop company, at age 15.
Other young entrepreneurs like Robert Nay, who programmed mobile apps at age 14, and Thomas Suarez, who created mobile apps and founded Carrot Corp at age 12, demonstrate that with passion and perseverance, big business success is possible at a young age.
The key is to start small, find something your child is genuinely interested in, and support their entrepreneurial spirit.
But don’t put too much pressure on yourself – Finabee can help! Our dream is to raise a generation of financially literate and business inspired children with education that they don’t receive in the regular school curriculum. We have designed various interactive courses through our Finabee app, where children can learn the skills that will help them later on in life – all for free!
You even get the chance to earn rewards such as our downloadable digital kids business planners – normally sold from our Etsy store!
Before trying our educational app with your child, this blog post will provide you with 7 tips to helping your child start a business at home!
Let’s dive in!
1. Brainstorm Business Ideas Together
The first step is coming up with a business idea that matches your child’s interests and skills. Make it a fun family brainstorming activity!
Brainstorm business ideas together with your child. Find out what products or services get them excited. Then, help them see if there is market demand for those offerings by looking for products already on the market.
- What is your child passionate about? Animals? Arts and crafts? Cooking? Building things?
- What problems could they solve with their talents?
- What ideas could fill a need in your local community?
To spark inspiration, read books and online stories about kid entrepreneurs. Get them thinking about what business excites them.
Once they have an idea, build excitement by helping them name the business and design logos. Display their creation proudly around the house!
It is also important to make sure there are customers willing to pay for them. After all, no business can survive without sales.
Search online to see if there is existing demand for your child’s offerings. Check sites like Etsy or eBay to evaluate competition levels. Survey friends and family members to gauge interest.
Validating the business concept on the frontend increases the chances of success down the road.
2. Define Roles and Set Expectations
Sit down together and discuss what you both want to achieve, before they start a new business venture at home.
Clarify your child’s role – Will they be baking cupcakes? Making artwork to sell? Coding mobile apps?
Set expectations – How much time will they commit to it? What support do they need from you?
Investment – Do you think the business is going to need some money or equipment to get it off the ground? Agree on business loans from the ‘Bank of Mum and Dad’ and repayment terms. Track hours worked in a spreadsheet along with ‘salaries’ earned.
Being clear from the start prevents confusion. Define what success looks like — is it making their first sale or learning money management?
Running any successful business takes a lot of time, effort, perseverance, and grit. Set realistic expectations so your child doesn’t lose motivation when encountering inevitable challenges.
Openly discuss that most new businesses operate at a loss for the first year or two. Profits typically come after establishing solid processes and building a large enough customer base.
Setting proper expectations upfront creates the resilience needed to push past obstacles that will arise.
3. Handle Legal and Financial Considerations
While tempting to let enthusiasm run wild, don’t overlook legal and financial considerations:
Tax – Speak to HMRC about tax exemptions for your child’s earnings. But registering as self-employed could require tax returns.
Insurance – Consider special small business cover to protect against liabilities or accidents.
Regulations – Research whether your child requires any licenses or certificates to operate, especially for food businesses.
Finances – Open a basic business bank account to teach bookkeeping tracking your sales, returns and cost of goods sold. Use spreadsheet templates to create budgets and track finances. Order supplies wisely.
Equipping them to manage the numbers is invaluable learning! For fun ways to teach financial lessons to your child on a daily basis, see our blog here!
4. Create Structure and Build Accountability
Consider launching your child’s business over the summer period when there is more free time to focus their energy whilst not being at school.
Carve out structured blocks for them to work on the business each week. Even if only for 1-2 hours on weekends initially. Praise and reward them for sticking to the routine.
Slowly increase business hours to mimic real-world demands of managing an enterprise. Establish standard operating hours or have them pitch why they need time.
Building business rhythms teaches strong time management skills.
Hold your child accountable to business responsibilities by:
- Creating a tasks list together
- Setting enough time for daily priorities
- Enforcing work hours (no phones/games if time is allocated for business tasks)
- Following up at the end of each week on what was completed
- Celebrating wins!
As the business matures, you can explore more advanced tracking, like revenue goals, profit margins, and KPI dashboards with your older kids. This can improve their research skills, thereby creating a structure that lays the foundation for diligent work ethics and business success.
5. Let Them Make Business Decisions
As parents, your instincts will be to fix problems when issues emerge or make key decisions on their behalf. Avoid that temptation!
The goal is to step back and let your child learn through their own decision making. Mistakes made early on provide powerful lifelong lessons.
Offer guidance when asked, but let your child choose the direction of the business. Allow them to own both the victories from good decisions and setbacks from bad ones.
Empower your young entrepreneur to:
- Pick branding like logos and colour schemes
- Decide what products or services to create
- Set competitive yet profitable pricing
- Determine optimal sales and marketing avenues like social media
- Select tools and apps to manage orders and handle payment processing
- Control budgets, inventory, and expenses
Let your child gain first-hand experience balancing various trade-offs entrepreneurs face daily. Making business judgements teaches how to calculate risk, manage resources, and deal with uncertainty.
The most valuable lessons happen when given the autonomy and trust to chart their own path. Guide them to make informed decisions, but let your child ultimately drive key choices.
6. Promote and Sell Like an Entrepreneur
Unleash your child’s inner entrepreneur by teaching them about sales and marketing and build their confidence by getting them to put their skills into practice.
- Unique selling point (USP) – Help them define what makes their offer special. Is it speed, quality, good value?
- Pricing – Find the sweet spot between affordable and profitable using round numbers.
- Sales channels – Consider stalls at school fairs, local markets, or online platforms like social media.
- Marketing – Design professional branding and advertisements for their target customers.
- Networking – Introduce them to family, friends, and local groups who could support their venture.
Equip them with business cards to make sales pitches. Step back and let them practice being independent!
Why not try our kids’ business fair and pitch deck digital products from our Etsy store to help them think how they would pitch their business out in the real world?!
7. Reflect on Lessons Learned
Just as important as starting their childhood enterprise is reflecting on what is going well or badly.
Ask questions – What are you learning from the experience? Would you do anything differently if you were to launch a new business or can you still pivot your business to go in a better direction? How have your money management skills improved?
Highlight positives – Praise successes like creative problem solving. Show pride when they worked hard or skillfully handled a difficult customer.
Evaluate together – Examine the business financials. Discuss how performance could improve. Should they expand into new products or services or focus on making their existing products better based on feedback received?
Don’t worry about failure! In fact there is a term in business called ‘Fail fast!’. This way you get to learn quicker from your mistakes and work towards improving sooner. We think each business should have a ‘Chief Failure Officer’ to be honest!
The objective is gaining a hands-on understanding of how to run a profitable business. These lessons will serve them well in future careers.
Final Thoughts
Helping your child start a business at home is an incredibly rewarding experience for the whole family. Applying the tips in this blog post sets up their initiative for the best chance of sustainable success.
More importantly, it teaches core skills in financial literacy, strategic thinking, and self-reliance. Nurturing an entrepreneurial mindset from young inspires creativity and confidence that will benefit them for life.
Here at Finabee, we are aiming to fill the void in the current school curriculum with finance and entrepreneurship education for children. Read a bit more about us here and how we plan to raise a generation of finance and business-savvy children for the future.
You can signup to the waiting list here for our app too to be one of the first to use it and be in with a chance of winning a £50 voucher!
Now that’s a savvy investment!
Empower your child to start turning their interests and passions into a small home-run business today! Support them in unlocking their enterprising potential.
Who knows, maybe your child will go on to become the next young startup founder like Fiona Frills or Mikaila Ulmer!
What business ideas is your child excited to start? We would love to hear their ambitions in the comments below!
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