I can easily say that I’ve known today’s guest longer than any guest that’s been on the How to Sell Online podcast so far.
In fact, no one in the world has known this teenpreneur longer than I have. I’m super excited to introduce you to my daughter and teenpreneur, Makayla Prince.
You might already know about her from reading this blog or seeing her on stage at Funnel Hacking Live in front of 5,500 people. By the way, I have no idea where she got her confidence because there is no way that I would be on stage at 19 years old in front of all those people. Nope.
I often tell the story of how she and her sister made their first 6 figures when they were just 10 and 13 respectively. But when she stood on stage in front of those 5,500 people, she shared that I’d been telling the story wrong the whole time.
Makayla's Story of Becoming a Teenpreneur
According to Makayla, the part I was getting wrong the whole time when I told this story was why she started the business. She said it wasn't her desire to be a teenpreneur at the time. As she puts it, “I was tricked”. You see, Makayla was in the habit of staying up all night reading and then sleeping until noon. In the Prince family, this can only go on for so long.
As she tells it, I gave her 3 options.
– Move out of the house
– Do more chores
– Or start a business
She was 13, so she wasn’t moving out of the house, and she wasn’t opting for more chores. That left one option: start a business. That’s why she says I tricked her into starting a business. Now, whether that was my intention or not, I’ll never tell.
Getting The First Sale
After I tell this story there is always someone who says “yea, that’s cool, but I’m sure you built and ran the business for them”. As Makayla says here, that’s not the case. We just gave them the blueprint, and then they executed the whole thing.
Like you, their first step was finding the product. So, they did exactly what we teach in the 0-$100k system and found a trending product that they had an interest in. For them it was scarves. Nothing revolutionary. It wasn’t new. It was an age-old product that was in style.
Once they had their products decided and their store built, they began reaching out to influencers using a lot of the same tips and tricks discussed in this episode. They didn’t have money to spend on ads so they had to bootstrap it from nothing. And once they got going in the outreach process, they found what surprises many people, influencers are actually real people. And most of the time they want to really help you out.
Challenges of Running a Business As a Teen
Remember, this wasn’t something that the girls only did on summer break. They had to fit in running the business with their day-to-day school schedule and social time with friends.
To make it all manageable they chunked their shipping into two main days Tuesday and Saturday. On those days they would pull out all the boxes, products, and supplies, and get to packing. Batching the work like this made it possible for them to manage it all.
But, don’t think it was some magical adventure. It doesn't matter if you are a 13-year-old or a 30-year-old, you run into the same challenges.
When they got a surge of orders on Black Friday, it was a great and equally scary moment. They had to figure out how they would manage to pack and ship all the orders without the customers getting upset. Good problems, but problems nonetheless. So, they bundled up (in their own scarves) and packed orders in the garage during the Utah winter.
She even got some HR experience at 13 years old. As she tells it, a friend came over twice to help them pack up orders, and after each time they would get unhappy customer emails. The customers were complaining about receiving the wrong scarves. Makayla put the pieces together and saw the pattern of the errors happening only when he was there. So, she put on her big girl pants and let him know that he was “fired”. Of course, they were still friends.
Learning The Value of Money
So, what did a teenager and a pre-teen do with the money that was coming in from their 6-figure business? Well, maybe to their dislike, it went into a college fund. Not all of it though. To show them the value of money, they earned an hourly rate of $10, which isn’t too bad for a teenager. I sure know I wasn’t earning that much when I was their age.
Underwear, school, housing, and food. After the age of 13, those were the things that Jared and I would pay for. Anything else that they wanted was on them to earn the money needed to purchase it.
As you can imagine, this doesn’t go over well when you tell your teenage child that anything that isn’t a necessity will have to be purchased by them. Teaching them to earn for the things they really wanted and then to protect, respect, or earn to replace their personal belongings came with a tad of resistance.
I’m not going to lie, there were many times when I questioned if I was doing the right thing or not. But after going through this with both Makayla and Bridges, I know the importance of having them understand and value money is critical. The boys, who are 11 and 12, are about to go through this process. Keep your fingers crossed for me that it goes as well as it did with the girls.
3 Tips For a Teenpreneur Starting Their First Online Business
Tip #1 Keep it simple and find one product and get confident in that one product before overwhelming yourself.
Tip #2 Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there on social media.
Tip #3 Let yourself be bad so you can be good.
If you want to hear 3 tips that she gave to parents for getting their kids to become a teenpreneur and build an online business, what it’s like to have entrepreneurial parents, and why being around entrepreneurs helps her gain confidence in her goals, then you’ll need to click play above and listen to this episode.
