Teens Are Building Their Own Job Engine
PERIODS of high unemployment tend to be particularly hard on teenagers, who wind up competing for jobs with more experienced, laid-off adults.
When Faith Borden, 16, of Metuchen, N.J., applied for a job in March to be a counselor at a summer day camp, she looked around and saw “all these 30- and 40-year-olds,” she said. “Usually it’s just teenagers.”
Also facing a competitive job market, Max O’Dell, 14, of Cary, N.C., started Smiley Inc., a custom T-shirt design business. He paints shirts in his driveway and hangs them in the garage to dry; revenue so far has been $170.
Unemployment for 16- to 19-year-olds is at its highest rate since 1992 — at 22.7 percent in May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is causing some teenagers to rethink their notion of work and to embrace entrepreneurship.
“This is a generation raised to believe they can do anything, and the first to grow up with entrepreneurial celebrities like Steve Jobs of Apple and Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google,” said Donna Fenn, who interviewed 150 young entrepreneurs for her forthcoming book, “Upstarts: How Gen Y Entrepreneurs Are Rocking the World of Business and 8 Ways You Can Profit From Their Success.”
The Internet may be the most significant catalyst for teenagers’ entrepreneurship. The ability to start a business online has lowered many barriers to self-employment faced by young people — you need only a domain name and a Web site to set up shop and are largely anonymous to customers, who never have to know your age, said Alan Lysaght, co-author of “The ABCs of Making Money for Teens.”
There is also an abundance of information online about starting a business.
Laura Durst, 18, a recent high school graduate in Woodstock, Conn., in the state’s northeast corner, said that there were so few jobs for teenagers there that two years ago she began setting up a Web-based business, WorkInMyRoom.com. It provides teenagers with information and online resources to find jobs that can be done from home.
Ms. Durst said she was inspired by her mother, who also is an entrepreneur. “Seeing her work from home, where she could be her own boss, I liked the idea of that,” she said.
Ms. Durst’s revenue comes from advertising. She uses Google Ad Sense — which displays relevant Google ads on her site — and earns money when users click on them. She says she is making about $250 a month.
Sisters start crime scene clean-up business
Cleaning up a crime scene is a dirty, filthy and potentially hazardous job, but someone has to do it. And in Bozeman there are at least two companies that do.
When Patty Burrows started her cleaning business about 11 years ago, she had no idea she’d be relying on clove oil and Vick’s VapoRub to mask the odors she encounters on her job. She began simply cleaning offices and homes.
But after finally convincing her sister, Bev Paquet, a paramedic from Michigan, to move to Montana, the two combined their interests to start White Glove Bio-Haz – a licensed cleaning service that specializes in mopping up buildings and vehicles after the unthinkable has occurred.
“And we both have strong stomachs, so we just decided to combine our talents,” Burrows said.
The two started the niche business this past fall.
In addition to crime and trauma scene cleanup, the sisters specialize in sanitizing “gross filth” – places where landlords find rental properties left in such nasty disarray that they don’t want to touch anything themselves, for example.
So clean up can cost a property owner from $1,000 to tens of thousands, they said.
Ben and Gail Yanker, owners of Buffalo Restoration Inc., have been cleaning up trauma scenes since about 1990, Ben Yanker said. Their business actually started as Buffalo Painting in the mid-1970s and evolved to include architectural restoration. The trauma-cleaning business “just kind of flowed” into the mix in 1990, after a few employees were trained in hazardous cleanup. Now, four of the Yankers’ 14 employees have the skills and knowledge to tackle such tasks.
Do your homework before applying for federal business loan
The federal government continues to free up millions of dollars for small business. But businesses that want to take advantage of the bounty need to do their homework and come prepared when they apply for a federal loan.
The government’s SBA program introduced the America’s Recovery Capital, or ARC, loan designed to give small businesses suffering financial hardship temporary relief.
ARC loans are a deferred payment loan of up to $35,000 that can be used for principal and interest payments on existing, qualifying debt or loans. They are 100 percent guaranteed and there are no interest charges to the borrower. SBA will pay the current prime rate (3.25 percent) plus 2 percent to the lender on behalf of the borrower.
Under the ARC loan, the borrower has 18 months to make the first payment and pays back only the principal over five years.
SBA even has tailored a loan to help the beleaguered auto industry. Starting July 1, loans for between $500,000 and $2 million will be offered to finance inventory for eligible auto dealers. The program also is available to RV and boat dealers.
Sewing businesses finding niche in midst of recession
McLeod, a seamstress by trade, trims, cuts and tucks old clothes into a better fit at the Rip Club Sewing Center, which she opened last month at 2238 W. First St. in Loveland.
“I call it Rip Club, because you just rip it,” McLeod said. “In times of economic hardship, people don’t want to buy new clothes. It’s cheaper to repair what they have.”
McLeod and others in the sewing business are finding that altering and restoring old clothes is a profitable business in the recession that began in November.
Ruby Hageman, a tailor at The Alteration Shop in Fort Collins, has seen that in the recession, more people want their clothes to last longer.
“Clothes are really expensive, so if you can make a pair of pants last another year or two, you don’t have to buy new ones,” Hageman said.
Linda Clason, a Loveland resident who does alterations and custom sewing, has seen an increase in business every time there is an economic downturn.
“People can’t afford to buy new clothes, so they are going to fix up what they have in the closet,” said Clason, also a Sewing Professionals member. “They’re repairing or having repaired things they have in the closet that still fit.”
In most cases, fixing clothes is less expensive than buying new, said Linda Wrenn, owner of Sew Country in Berthoud, where she does alterations and custom sewing.
“The general consensus of our group is that it’s doing much better than normal times. People are getting their clothes fixed and altered instead of buying new ones,” Wrenn said.
Many Moms Scrambling to Make Some Extra Money
In an unusual twist, many moms are finding themselves in a new scenario: seeking work-at-home arrangements driven not by flexibility – think soccer practices and piano recitals – but as the best option to supplement family income.
with four unemployed workers for every job opening, moms like Kim Perez of Pembroke Pines are moving into action. A few months ago, recession reality forced Perez, mother of a toddler, to look for new money-making possibilities when her hours as a retail sales associate were cut in half. Her husband, a builder, has been out of work for almost a year.
Perez considers herself in transition. She has set up a makeshift office in her bedroom and sells glass jewelry. “I’m hoping I can turn this into a full-time arrangement and make good money.”
The numbers are jarring: 800,000 women have lost full-time positions in the past 12 months, and those on payrolls part time grew by nearly 900,000. For the women who work part time, first-quarter median earnings were $269 a week. But men are increasingly seeing their schedules reduced, too. As of March, the number of men working part-time positions increased 14 percent from a year earlier.
Out-of-work student now a green’ entrepreneur
The work is a lot like being a chimney sweep – that is, the only chimney sweep in town, because it had never occurred to any of the neighbors to sweep their chimneys.
The business model invented by Chris King, 19, a freshman at USC living in Huntington Beach, Calif., with his parents during summer break, is pretty simple: extract built-up lint from long, winding clothing-dryer ducts, and charge $39 for the service.
It’s a low-cost way to immediately boost energy efficiency and dramatically cut drying time for clothes.
“One neighbor said it took like an hour and 20 minutes,” King said. “Now it’s down to 20 or 30 minutes, tops. He’s super happy. He said, ‘Call me back next summer.’”
King said he got the idea after trying, unsuccessfully, to find a summer job.
“I started applying everywhere,” he said. “You know, the economic downturn. I got a couple calls back, but it’s hard to get a job right now.”
Instead, he began helping around the house.
“One weekend, my mom was complaining about how long it took to dry her laundry,” King said. “My dad tried to fix it. I was helping him.”
Like many others in his neighborhood, their house has a laundry room in the middle of the house. The duct that releases warm air from the dryer must be 18 feet long to reach an outer wall.
A kind of light bulb, perhaps with a greenish tinge, went off in King’s mind. A lot of his neighbors had the same floorplan.
The cleaning method – King wants to keep it secret for now – works most dramatically on long ducts. In only two weeks of offering the service door to door, he says he’s already picked up about 25 customers.
King, who is planning to be a business major, said he said he hopes to continue the service even after school resumes in August.
“I’ve already started marketing around a couple surrounding neighborhoods,” he said. “If everything goes as planned, I’ll try to expand as fast as I can.”
A Look at the Membership Site Business
Running a membership site has exploded in popularity as an Internet business model. Online business owners are finally recognizing what the “early adopters” discovered years ago: membership sites can be extremely profitable, have a low start-up cost, and can actually be fun to run.
The concept is easy enough. You have some information, knowledge, or passion about a topic that others are interested in, as well. You set up an exclusive community and charge whatever fee you want to allow entry. Your members benefit from having access to, not only very specific information on the topic but also, a community of others who share their interest in that topic.
As an example, RestaurantOwner.com was started by Jim Laube. Jim had 20+ years in the restaurant industry and frankly was burnt out from the long hours.
He charges $99 to join and then under $20 a month to stay on as a member. Jim’s site has thousands of members.
With a normal business, regardless of how good last month was, on the first day of the new month you are basically starting from scratch with revenue. With a membership site, you know that if last month you pulled in say $15,000 for the month that this month is going to be very close to that number. Perhaps even more with a bit of marketing.
Some of the topics of the sites we have may come as a surprise you, including craft sites (embroidery, cross stitching), health, fitness, education, sports, dog enthusiasts, and how to get a cruise ship job.
One of the most consistently successful is the _____owner.com type sites. That is, choose a niche business and provide the tools for people in that industry. The previously mentioned restaurantowner.com is one example but that can be applied for almost any industry: hair salons, gas stations, CPA’s, handy man business, affiliate managers etc.
Everyone has knowledge or interests. Why not consider leveraging it in a very profitable way?
