10 Businesses You Can Start With Your Kids

The greatest sportsmen and women, artists, and creative minds, started honing their talents from childhood. These practices have shown over and over again that anything nurtured and groomed from the early stages of a person’s life, can turn out to be something remarkable. Great examples are Serena Williams, Michael Jackson, Beyonce, and more.

Applying this principle to building a strong entrepreneurial spirit in a person from childhood, can have remarkable effects. Africa and specifically Nigeria, has had its fair share of entrepreneurs who started before their 20’s and eventually became strong entities today.

From the likes of Cletus Ibeto of the Ibeto group starting up his business shortly after the age of 17, Innocent Chukwuma of the Innoson group starting his spare part business at the age of 18, Cosmas Maduka of the Coscharis group taking business trips alone from Lagos to Nnewi as at the early age of 13, Aliko Dangote learning from his grandfather before clocking 20, Bill Gates earning his first $50,000 at the age of 15, and a lot more, starting out early has over time proven that most people who started and failed severally at their entrepreneurial endeavours from a very young age, end up becoming mass suppliers of labour.

If you want to instil an entrepreneurial zeal in your kids early on, getting them involved in a business in a fun or strict (not advised) way, could help them understand some basic business principles like; marketing, negotiation, identifying & exploiting opportunities, and more.

See Also: 10 Profitable Small Business Ideas For College Students

Here are 10 business ideas for kids and teenagers parents can co-get involved with:

1). Social Media Marketing For Small Businesses:

The advent of social media has created a new haven for kids and teenagers to hang out and pour out their thoughts online. Social networks like Snapchat, Twitter and Instagram have gotten many millennials constantly stuck on their mobile phones looking up what pictures or videos people just uploaded, or checking out the latest news trending in their country or locality. Many families have recently started producing Youtube content with variable success.

This addictive spree social networks have on the younger generation, presents a business opportunity a parent worried about a child’s addiction to social networking could exploit.

For parents whose kids have strong social media followings, building a social media marketing brand around the child’s profiles and marketing their services (e.g maintaining social media pages for small businesses, growing their followers, etc) to small businesses that have problems growing or managing their social media accounts, would be a great bet.

This is one of the top business ideas for kids and teenagers, parents can exploit.

See Also: 6 Ways Social Media Will Help Your Business

2). Cooking & Baking:

A lot of female kids love to get into the kitchen with their mothers to play a game of “let’s cook a meal”. These kids usually do this out of excitement or because, it’s important they must always be in the kitchen with their mums. It gets even more interesting for a child or a teenager if they aren’t just cooking, but baking.

By taking advantage of a child’s excitement to bake cakes, doughnuts, and even small chops, you can start up a small business for the kid.

They could wake up everyday by 6 A.M to prepare snacks that someone else would pick up later in the day to sell in strategic locations.

On the weekends, the kids could oversee the business themselves, so they can be involved in the buying and selling experience.

3). Moving Assistant:

If you have a teenage kid that’s both physically fit and strong, you could start up a moving assistance business that helps people move their properties from one location to another.

The primary market for this service are people moving out of their homes to newer homes. By engaging your kids on the weekends to assist in moving people’s properties, they’d start a small entrepreneurial career.

Get a truck they could use and hire an adult to assist them in their venture. Whether it succeeds or fails, they’d learn a great deal about discipline and relating with people (from mastering their emotions based on how people talk to them while at their jobs).

4). Growing And Selling Vegetables And Fruits:

This is one of the most viable small business ideas for kids and teenagers that can be executed alongside their parents in Africa.

In many parts of Africa, most parents own farmlands where they grow several crops for eventual sale in the markets. Setting aside a small portion of land, maybe even your backyard for your kids to plant and grow vegetable crops and fruits, is a mild way to help them become entrepreneurs at a young age.

With the ever-constant demand for vegetable crops and fruits in the market, your kids can know they’d make some profit from their business endeavours.

See Also: 5 Profitable Agricultural Businesses You Can Start In Nigeria Today

5). Printing Business:

You could setup a printing business your kids could handle on the weekends. The prints could range from greeting cards to birthday cards, plastic ID cards, A4 prints, and even photocopying.

These services are easy to offer in any small business setting that’s close to a busy road, and would ensure your kids earn some revenue from it.

During the week, it could run by someone hired to manage the place, but whenever they’re back from school or on the weekends, they could oversee the affairs themselves.

6). Making Crafts And Jewellery:

A lot of ladies have a craving for beads, jewelries, and general crafts. While these ornaments will gracefully beautify the look of any woman, the production process of some is easier than presumed.

The ease of creating beads, especially, has prompted a lot of ladies to learn how it is done. For a child who’s still a teenager or less, learning how to make and sell beads can be a great business to venture into.

See Also: 15 Profitable Small Business ideas for Beginners In 2016

7). Garden And Home Maintenance:

Most homes have no one to take care of their vicinities. Through the week, dirt piles up in various forms, leaving the owners to resort to either cleaning up themselves on the weekends, or mostly procrastinating the clean up time till their compounds are a mess, and they have no other choice than to find a way to take care of it.

Knowing this, you could setup a home maintenance business run by any teenage kid of yours to handle the clean up of the homes in the neighbourhood.

He/she could have people working for them in the process, while they could play a supervisory role.

Either way, offering to help people keep their environments clean every weekend for an affordable price, will get your child’s entrepreneurial journey started.

8). Babysitting:

Babysitting is getting increasingly popular in Nigeria and many parts of the world. Most parents have little to no time to take care of their kids, and a bulk of the time, the people who get the nanny jobs have too many kids to take care of, than they can handle.

Getting your teenage daughter to have a trial at babysitting for parents who are always busy, is a way for her to start earning some income. Through this process, she’d learn patience (because kids could be troublesome), discipline, and how to truly care for people (which could build her customer relation skills for future businesses).

By getting them engaged in the nanny business, they can earn some income and learn from their experiences.

See Also: 6 Profitable Home Based Business Ideas You Can Start Today In Nigeria

9). Juice Stand:

Making fresh natural juice and selling it at a stand (e.g lemonade stand) in a neighbourhood, can be a good way for a child to start making money.

Most people would naturally buy from the juice stand because they see it’s a child that’s running it, find it cute & bold, and also since the child is not running it during the work hours when the child should be in school.

For this to both be safe and successful, ensure the child’s juice stand is in a serene environment and is constantly monitored by an adult.

Whatever is earned or lost from the business will be a life and entrepreneurial lesson for the child.

10). Event Planning:

Planning parties or birthdays mostly gets little girls excited. As for teenagers, most youngsters enjoy storming into parties or throwing one.

Getting your kids to take advantage of this craving amongst the youth to party, by offering event planning services both to parents and their peers, will get them earning their first income as teenagers.

By helping parents organise birthday parties for their little kids and also helping their peers throw the party they crave for, your kids may well be on the track to a successful early business career.

See Also: 10 Businesses You Can Start & Grow Everyday After 5 P.M

What are your thoughts on these 10 business ideas for kids and teenagers? Let me know by leaving a comment below.

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