Let's raise kids to be entrepreneurs - Cameron Herold

I would be willing to bet that I'm the dumbest guy in the room because I couldn't get through school. I started a little school, but what I knew at a very early age was that I loved money, and I loved business, and I loved this entrepreneurial thing. I was raised to be an entrepreneur, and what I've been really passionate about ever since—and I've never spoken about this ever until now—so this is the first time anyone's ever heard it, except my wife, three days ago, because she said, "What are you talking about?" and I told her is that I think we miss an opportunity to find these kids who have the entrepreneurial traits and to groom them or show them that being an entrepreneur is actually a cool thing. It's not something that is a bad thing and is vilified, which is what happens in a lot of society.

Kids, when we grow up, have dreams and we have passions and we have visions, and somehow we get those things crushed, and we get told that we need to study harder or be more focused or get a tutor. My parents got me a tutor in French, and I still suck in French. Two years ago, I was the highest rated lecturer at MIT's entrepreneurial master's program, and it was a speaking event in front of groups of entrepreneurs from around the world. When I was in grade two, I won a citywide speaking competition, but nobody had ever said, "Hey, this kid's a good speaker; he can't focus, but he loves walking around and getting people energized." No one said, "Get him a coach in speaking." They said, "Get me a tutor," and what I suck at.

So, as kids show these traits, we need to start looking for them. I think we should be raising kids to be entrepreneurs instead of lawyers, and unfortunately, the school system is grooming this world to say, "Hey, let's be a lawyer; let's be a doctor," and we're missing that opportunity because no one ever says, "Hey, be an entrepreneur." Entrepreneurs are people, and we have a lot of them in this room who have these ideas and these passions or see these needs in the world, and we decide to stand up and do it.

We put everything on the line to make that stuff happen, and we have the ability to get those groups of people around us who want to kind of build that dream with us. I think if we could get kids to embrace the idea at a young age of being entrepreneurial, we could change everything in the world that is a problem today. Every problem that's out there, somebody has the idea for, and as a young kid, nobody can say it can't happen because you're too dumb to realize that you figure it out.

I think we have an obligation as parents in a society to start teaching our kids to fish instead of giving them the fish. No parable: if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. If we can teach our kids to become entrepreneurial, the ones that show those traits, to be like we teach the ones who have science gifts to go on in science. What if we saw the ones with entrepreneurial traits and taught them to be entrepreneurs? We could actually have all these kids sprouting businesses instead of waiting for government handouts.

What we do is we sit and we teach our kids all the things they shouldn't do: don't hit, don't bite, don't swear, right? Now we teach our kids to go after really good jobs. You know, the school system teaches them to go after things like being a doctor and being a lawyer and being an accountant and a dentist and a teacher and a pilot. The media says that it's really cool if we could go out and be a model or a singer or a sports hero like Luongo or Crosby. Our MBA programs do not teach kids to be entrepreneurs.

The reason that I avoided an MBA program, other than the fact that I couldn't get into any, excited a 61% average out of high school and then a 61% average at the only school in Canada that accepted me, Carleton. But our MBA programs don't teach kids to be entrepreneurs; they teach them to go work in corporations. So, who's starting these companies? It's these random few people. Even in popular literature, the only book I've ever found—and this should be on all of your reading lists—the only book I've ever found that makes the entrepreneur into the hero is "Atlas Shrugged." Everything else in the world tends to look at entrepreneurs and say that we're bad people.

I look at even my family: both my grandfathers were entrepreneurs, my dad was an entrepreneur, both my brother and sister and I—all three of us own companies as well, and we all decided to start these things because it's really the only place we fit. We didn't fit in the normal work; we couldn't work for somebody else because we're too stubborn and we have all these other traits. But kids could be entrepreneurs as well.

I'm a big part of a couple organizations globally called the Entrepreneurs Organization and Young Presidents Organization. I just came back from speaking in Barcelona at the YPO Global Conference, and everyone that I met over there who was an entrepreneur struggled with school. I have 18 of the 19 signs of attention deficit disorder diagnosed, so this thing right here is freaking me out. It's probably why I'm a little bit panicked right now, as other than all the caffeine that I've had and the sugar. But, like, this is like really creepy for an entrepreneur.

Attention deficit disorder, bipolar disorders—you know that bipolar disorder is nicknamed the CEO disease? Ted Turner’s got it, Steve Jobs has it, all three of the founders of Netscape had it. Like, I could go on and on. You can see these signs in kids, and what we're doing is we're giving them Ritalin and saying, "Don't be an entrepreneurial type; fit into this other system and try to become a student." Sorry, entrepreneurs aren't students! We fast track; we figure out the game.

I stole essays; I cheated on exams; I hired kids to do my accounting assignments in university for 13 consecutive assignments. But, like, as an entrepreneur, you don't do accounting; you hire accountants. So I just figured that out earlier; at least I can admit I cheated in university; most of you won't. I'm also quoted weird, and I told the person who wrote the textbook I'm now quoted in that exact same university textbook in every Canadian university and college studies in managerial accounting. I'm chapter eight. I open up chapter eight talking about budgeting, and I told the author after they did my interview that I cheated in that same course. She thought it was too funny to not include it anyway.

But kids, you can see these signs in them. The definition of an entrepreneur is a person who organizes, operates, and assumes the risk of a business venture. That doesn’t mean you have to go to an MBA program; it doesn’t mean you have to get through school. It just means that those few things have to feel right in your gut. And we've heard those things about, "Is it nurture or is it nature, right? Is it thing one or thing two—what is it?" Well, I don't think it's either; I think it can be both.

I was groomed as an entrepreneur when I was growing up. As a young kid, I had no choice because I was taught at a very early young age, when my dad realized I wasn't going to fit into everything else that was being taught to me in school, that he could teach me to figure out business at an early age. He groomed us, the three of us, to hate the thought of having a job and to love the fact of creating companies that we could employ other people.

My first little business venture, I was seven years old. I was in Winnipeg, and I was lying in my bedroom with one of the long extension cords, and I was calling all of the dry cleaners in Winnipeg to find out how much wood the dry cleaners would pay me for coat hangers. My mom came into the room and she said, "Where are you going to get the coat hangers to sell to the dry cleaners?" and I said, "Let's go and look in the basement."

We went to the basement, and I opened up this cupboard, and there were about a thousand coat hangers that I'd collected. When I told her I was going out to play with the kids, I was going door to door in the neighborhood to get coat hangers to put in the basement to sell because I saw her, a few weeks ago, a few weeks before that, taking— you could get paid; they used to pay you two cents per coat hanger. So I was just like, "Well, there's all kinds of coat hangers.”

So, I'll just go get them, and I knew she wouldn't want me to go get them, so I just did it anyway. But, and I learned that you could actually negotiate with people. This one person offered me three cents and I got him up to three and a half. I even knew at a seven-year-old age that I could actually get a fractional percent of a cent, and people would pay that because it multiplied up. At seven years old, I figured out I got three and a half cents for a thousand coat hangers.

I sold license plate protectors door to door. My dad actually made me go find someone who would sell me these things at wholesale, and at nine years old, I walked around in the city of Sudbury selling license plate protectors door to door to houses. I remember this one customer so vividly, because I could never understand some other stuff with these clients. I sold newspapers, and he wouldn't buy a newspaper from me ever, but I was convinced I was going to him to buy a license plate protector, and he’s like, “Well, we don’t need one.” I said, “But you've got two cars.” I’m nine years old! I said, “But you have two cars, and they don't have license plate protectors!”

And I said, “I know.” And I said, “And this car here's got one license plate that's all crumpled up.” And he said, “Yes, that's my wife's car.” And I said, “Why don't we just test one on the front of your wife's car and see if it lasts longer?” So, I knew there were two cars with two license plates on each; if I couldn't sell all four, I can at least get one. I learned that at a young age.

I did comic book arbitrage when I was about 10 years old. I sold comic books at our cottage on Georgian Bay, and I would go biking up to the end of the beach and buy all the comics from the poor kids, and then I would go back to the other end of the beach and sell them to the rich kids. But it was obvious to me, right? Buy low, sell high. You got this demand over here that has money; don't try to sell to the poor kids; they don't have cash; the rich people do. Go get some! So that's obvious, right? It's like a recession. So, there's a recession; there's still 13 trillion dollars circulating in the US economy; go get some of that, and I learned that at a young age.

I also learned don't reveal your source, because I got beat up after about four weeks of doing this, because one of the rich kids found out where I was buying my comics from, and he didn't like the fact that he was paying a lot more. I was forced to get a paper route at ten years old. I didn't really want a paper route, but at ten, my dad said, “That's going to be your next business.” So, not only would he get me one, but I had to get two, and then he wanted me to hire someone to deliver half the papers, which I did.

And then I realized that collecting tips was where you made all the money. So, I would collect the tips and get payment, so I would go and collect for all the papers. He could just deliver them, because then I realized I could make the money. By this point, I was definitely not going to be an employee. My dad owned an automotive and industrial repair shop, and he had all these old automotive parts lying around, and they had this old brass and copper in them.

So, I asked him what he did with it, and he said he just throws it out. I said, “But wouldn't somebody pay you for that?” and he goes, “Maybe.” Remember, at 10 years old, 2-3-4 years ago, I saw opportunity in this stuff. I saw there was money in garbage, and I was actually collecting it from all the automotive shops in the area on my bicycle, and my dad would drive me on Saturdays to a scrap metal recycler where I got paid.

And I thought that was kind of cool. Strangely enough, like 30 years later, we're building 1-800-GOT-JUNK and make money off that! I built these little pin cushions when I was 11 years old in Cubs, and we made these pin cushions for our moms for Mother's Day, and you made these pin cushions out of wooden post pins we used to hang clothes on clotheslines outside. You could make these chairs, and I had these little pillows that I would sew up, and you could stuff pins in them because people used to sew and they needed a pin cushion.

So, what I realized was that he had to have options. So, I actually spray-painted a whole bunch of them brown, and then when I went to the door, it wasn't, "Do you want to buy one?" It was like, "Which color would you like?" Like, I'm 10 years old; you’re not going to say no to me, and especially if you have two options: you have the brown one or the clear one. So, I learned that lesson at a young age.

I learned that manual labor really sucks, right? Like cutting lawns is brutal! But because I had to cut lawns all summer for all of our neighbors and get paid to do that, I realized that recurring revenue from one client is amazing. If I'm cutting—if I land this client once and every week I get paid by that person, that's way better than trying to sell one clothes pin thing to one person because you can't sell them more. So, I love that recurring revenue model; I started to learn at a young age.

Remember, I was being groomed to do this. I was not allowed to have jobs. I would caddy; I'd go to the golf course and caddy for people, but I realized there was this one hill on our golf course, the 13th hole, that had this huge hill, and people could never get their bags up it. So, I would sit there with a lawn chair and just carry up all the people who didn't have caddies. I would carry their golf bags up to the top, and they'd pay me a dollar.

Meanwhile, my friends were working for hours to haul some guy's bag around and get paid ten bucks! I'm like, "That's stupid!" Because you have to work for five hours; that doesn't make any sense! You just figure out a way to make more money faster. Every week, I would go to the corner store and buy all these pops, and I would go up and deliver them to these 70-year-old women playing bridge, and they'd give me their orders for the following week.

Then, I just deliver pop, and I just charged twice, and I had this captured market. You didn’t need contracts; you just needed to have a supply and demand and this audience who bought into you. These women weren’t going to go to anybody else because they liked me, and I kind of figured it out. I went and got golf balls from golf courses, but everybody else was looking in the bush and looking in the ditches for golf balls. I'm like, "Screw that! They’re all in the pond, and nobody's going into the pond!"

So, I would go into the ponds and crawl around and pick them up with my toes. You just pick them up with both feet—and you can't do it on stage—and you get the golf balls, and you just throw them in your bathing suit trunks. When you're done, you got a couple hundred of them. But the problem is that people didn’t all want all the golf balls, so I just packaged them. I'm like twelve, right? I packaged them up three ways: I had the Pinnacles and DHs and the really cool ones; back then, those sold for $2 each. And then I had all the good ones that didn't look crappy; they were $0.50 each, and then I'd sell 50 at a time of all the crappy ones, and they could use those for practice balls.

I sold sunglasses when I was in school to all the kids in high school. This is what really kind of gets everybody hating you is because you're trying to extract money from all your friends all the time. But it paid the bills, so I sold lots and lots of sunglasses. And then when the school shut me down, the school actually called me into the office and told me I couldn't do it.

So, I went to the gas stations, and I sold lots of them to the gas stations and had the gas stations sell them to their customers. That was cool because then I had retail outlets, and I think I was 14. Then, I paid my entire way through first year university at Carleton by selling wineskins door-to-door. You know that you can hold a 40-ounce bottle of rum and two bottles of coke in a wineskin, so what, right? Yeah, but you know what? You stuff that down your shorts when you go into a football game; you can get booze in for free! Everybody bought them; supply-demand—big opportunity!

I also branded it, so I sold them for five times the normal cost; I had our university logo on it. You know, we teach our kids, and we buy them games, but why don't we get them games if they're entrepreneurial kids that kind of nurture the traits that you need to be entrepreneurs? Why don't you teach them not to waste money? I remember being told to walk out into the middle of a street in Banff, Alberta, because I'd throw in a penny out on the street. My dad said, "Go pick it up. I worked too damn hard for my money. I'm not going to see you ever waste a penny." I remember that lesson to this day.

Allowances teach kids the wrong habits. Allowances, by nature, teach kids to think about a job. An entrepreneur doesn't expect a regular paycheck. Allowance is breeding kids at a young age to expect a regular paycheck. That's wrong for me. If you want to raise entrepreneurs, what I do with my kids now—I’ve got two, 9 and 7—is I teach them to walk around the house and in the yard looking for stuff that needs to get done.

Come to me and tell me what it is, or I'll come to them and say, "Here's what I need done," and then you know what we do? We negotiate! They go around looking for what it is, but then we negotiate on what they're going to get paid, and then they don't have a regular check, but they have more opportunities to find more stuff, and they learn the skill of negotiating, and they learn the skill of finding opportunities as well! You breed that kind of stuff.

Each of my kids has two piggy banks. Fifty percent of all the money that they earn or get gifted—50% goes in their house account; 50% goes in their toy account. Anything in the toy account they can spend on whatever they want. The 50% that goes in their house account, every six months, goes to the bank; they walk up with me. Every year, all the money in the bank goes to their broker. Both my 9 and 7-year-olds have a stock broker already.

But I'm teaching them to force that savings habit. It drives me crazy that 30-year-olds are saying, "Maybe I’ll start contributing to my RSP." No! You’ve missed 25 years! You can teach those habits to young kids when they don’t even feel the pain yet! Don’t read them bedtime stories every night. Maybe four nights out of the week, read them bedtime stories, and three nights of the week have them tell stories.

Why don't you sit down with kids and give them four items: a red shirt, a blue tie, a kangaroo, and a laptop, and have them tell a story about those four things? My kids do that all the time! It teaches them to sell; it teaches them creativity; it teaches them to think on their feet. Just do that kind of stuff and have fun with it. Get kids to stand up in front of groups and talk, even if it's just stand up in front of the friends and do plays and have speeches. Those are entrepreneurial traits that you want to be nurturing.

Show the kids what bad customers or bad employees look like. Show them the grumpy employees. When you see grumpy customer service, point that out to them; say, “By the way, that guy's a crappy employee,” and say, “These ones are good ones.” If you go into a restaurant and you have bad customer service, show them what bad customer service looks like, right?

We have all these lessons in front of us that we don't take those opportunities. We teach kids to go get a tutor. Imagine if you actually took all the kids' junk that's in the house right now—all the toys that they’ve outgrown two years ago—and said, "Why don't we start selling some of this on Craigslist and Kijiji?" And they can actually sell it and learn how to find scammers when they get email offers come in.

They can come into your account or sub-account or whatever, but teach them how to fix the price, guess the price, pull up the logos, look at the photos. Teach them how to do that kind of stuff and make money. Then the money they get—50% goes in their house account, 50% goes in their toy account. My kids love this stuff!

Some of the entrepreneurial traits you go to nurturing kids: attainment, tenacity, leadership, introspection, interdependence, values— all these traits you can find in young kids, and you can help nurture them. Look for that kind of stuff.

There are two traits that I want you to also look out for that we don't kind of get out of their system. Don't medicate kids for attention deficit disorder unless it is really, really freakin’ bad! The same with the whole things on mania and stress and depression—like, unless it is so clinically brutal, man, bipolar disorder is nicknamed the CEO disease.

When Steve Jurvetson, Jim Clark, and Jim Barksdale have all got it, and they built Netscape, imagine if they were given Ritalin; we wouldn't have that stuff! Right? Al Gore would have really had to have invented the internet! These skills are the skills that we should be teaching in the classroom as well as everything else. I'm not saying don't get kids to want to be lawyers, but how about getting entrepreneurship to be ranked right up there with the rest of them as well? Because there's huge opportunities in that.

I want to close with a quick little video. It's the video that was done by one of the companies that I mentor, these guys Grasshopper. It's about kids; it's about entrepreneurship. Hopefully, this inspires you to take what you've heard from me and do something with it to change the world. Thank you very much for having me!