Steve Mariotti - The Young Entrepreneurs Guide to Starting and Running a Business: Turn Your Ideas into Money!

Copyright 1996, 2000, 2014 by National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship, Inc.
All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mariotti, Steve
The young entrepreneurs guide to starting and running a business: turn your ideas into money!/Steve Mariotti with Debra DeSalvo. 3rd Edition.
pages cm
1. New business enterprises. 2. Small businessManagement.
3. Young adultsEmployment. I. DeSalvo, Debra. II. Title.
HD62.5.M357 2014
658.1141dc23 2013048822

ISBN 978-0-385-34854-6
eISBN 978-0-307-81551-4

Cover photography: Benjamin Franklin on $100 bill and Ulysses S. Grant on $50 bill Randall Fung/Corbis

v3.1

To Karen Pritzker, John Whitehead, and Diana Davis Spencer of the Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation

I encourage you to memorize the poem Invictus by William Ernest Henley. It expresses, better than I ever could, my belief that learning to create and operate a small business will make you master of your own fate.

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

T he Young Entrepreneurs Guide to Starting and Running a Business is for the young entrepreneur looking for a field-tested guide to starting and running a successful small business. The Young Entrepreneurs Guide will teach you how to become an entrepreneur and will walk you step-by-step through writing a detailed business plan that you can use to raise money to launch your own small business.

You will learn how to negotiate with a wholesale dealer, open a bank account, register your business, create a marketing campaign, develop social media profiles and use them effectively, and sell your product or service for a profit.

The book youre currently reading is a significantly updated new edition of the original Young Entrepreneurs Guide to Starting and Running a Business, a top seller in the field first published in 1996. With so many people struggling to find work since the global recession that began in 2008, this significantly updated edition of The Young Entrepreneurs Guide is more relevant and necessary than ever. Whether you are still in high school or are graduating from college and looking for your first professional job, this is a challenging time to be young and starting a career.

The Young Entrepreneurs Guide includes fascinating profiles of young entrepreneurs who started businesses whose products you probably use, such as Craig Newmark (Craigslist), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), and Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake (Flickr). Amazon, Apple, eBay, and Facebook all began as tiny entrepreneurial companies. Youll read their stories in The Young Entrepreneurs Guide to Starting and Running a Business.

In addition, The Young Entrepreneurs Guide profiles young people who studied entrepreneurship through my nonprofit organization, the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, and are now running their own successful businesses, such as Jimmy McNeal of Bulldog Bikes and Robert Reffkin of Urban Compass.

The Young Entrepreneurs Guide also lets you in on the latest in business technology and communication, explaining tools and concepts from cloud computing to project management software. The new edition features significantly beefed-up chapters on Internet marketing and social networking, and shares the most current methods for using social media and blogging to brand and market a small business.

The book also explores socially responsible business and green business. Well look into the growing field of social enterprise, including new business legal structures such as the benefit corporation and the flexible purpose corporation, which give companies more flexibility to pursue social and environmental goals. The books glossary has been updated to include new terms relevant to entrepreneurship today, such as greenwashing and cause-related marketing.

I began my entrepreneurship career as a public high school teacher in some of New York Citys most disadvantaged neighborhoods. At first, I didnt know how to get control of my classes. They were pure chaos! But I quickly discovered that whenever I talked about business, my students were riveted. They wanted to learn how to make money; they were eager to understand our economic system and participate in it.

Even my most difficult studentsthe ones instigating fights and yelling insults at me in classwere excited by the prospect of owning a small business. I taught them to buy low, sell high, and keep good records. My students started a wide variety of simple enterprises, such as selling candy or other items they bought wholesale, painting nails, or silk-screening T-shirts. Once they caught on to entrepreneurship, they found a concrete reason to improve their math, reading, and writing skills, and to stay in school, so they could run their businesses successfully.

Discovering entrepreneurship gave these young people the feeling that they could take charge of their future. Owning a business gave them pride and self-esteem, and they began to achieve goals they had never imagined possible beforesuch as going to college, getting great jobs, and giving back to their communities.

They discovered that ownership is power. Once you understand that, your life will never be the same. You will never feel powerless over your circumstances because you will know how to create better circumstances for yourself.

When I saw how much learning entrepreneurship increased my students self-esteem, confidence, math and reading skills, and prospects for the future, I wanted every young person to have the same experience. So, in 1987, I founded the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship. Today, NFTE teaches entrepreneurship to hundreds of thousands of students in the United States, Europe, Africa, China, India, and the Middle East. Visit our website at www.nfte.com to find a NFTE program near you.

There are many NFTE success stories, but weve had terrible losses, too. Fourteen of our students have been murdered, and Ive attended too many funerals. This has only strengthened my commitment to teaching entrepreneurship as a path out of poverty.

The idea that teaching people about ownership and entrepreneurship is key to eradicating poverty, crime, and violence is gaining momentum. In October 2009, finalists from NFTEs national business plan competition were invited to meet President Obama at the White House. On January 24, 2010, New York Times op-ed columnist Tom Friedman wrote: The president should vow to bring the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship to every low-income neighborhood in America.