How Young People Can Leverage Youthfulness To Become Successful Entrepreneurs

Young entrepreneurs need to know that being young is the best advantage they have, if only they know how to use it.

The reality of becoming a seasoned entrepreneur is far more complex than the media sometimes makes it out to be. Presently, many young-generation entrepreneurs have been made to believe that being an entrepreneur, means minimum work and maximum financial benefits. Unfortunately, the reality of being a young entrepreneur is often far less exciting.

If statistics are anything to go by, then the average founder of the fastest growing tech startups is about 45 years old; and 50-year-old entrepreneurs are almost twice as likely to have a runaway business success as their 30-year-old counterparts What this means, in simple terms, is that research has proven that it is very difficult to become a successful young entrepreneur.

But this is not to say that becoming a successful entrepreneur at a young age is impossible. If anything, Bill Gates, Larry Page and Steve Jobs started their companies at ages 21, 24, and 20 respectively and now, their companies combined are valued at a whooping $2.7 trillion.

So, our focus here is to try and understand how young people leverage on their youthfulness to increase their chances of becoming successful entrepreneurs rather than being made to believe that entrepreneurial success is a preserve of the older, more experienced generation of entrepreneurs.

What Do Young Entrepreneurs Need To Know To Become Better Entrepreneurs?

“Never forget what you are. The rest of the world will not. Wear it like armor, and it can never be used to hurt you.” Tyrion Lannister, Game Of Thrones.

With great caution not to mix business with pleasure, we must say that these words depict exactly what young entrepreneurs need to have in mind to help them grow into better, more successful entrepreneurs.

In a world where millennial and Gen Z entrepreneurs are facing a myriad of challenges such as stereotypes that make it hard for them to gain trust from clients and even funding from entrepreneurs, they may wish that they were older and hence more suited for the business environment. But we don’t believe that should be the case. Young entrepreneurs need to know that being young is the best advantage they have, if only they know how to use it.

What Are The Benefits Of Being A Young Entrepreneur?

Despite being thought of as less capable than older entrepreneurs, young entrepreneurs have a lot of advantages in their favor. Being aware of these advantages and working towards making them part of their entrepreneurship culture can go a long way towards making young entrepreneurs just as skilled and capable as older ones to start and run businesses that thrive. Among the benefits of being a young entrepreneur are:

Young Entrepreneurs Have The Ability To Break Undesirable Habits.

As a young entrepreneur, among the greatest advantages one has is that they still have time to unlearn things that can hinder their growth in entrepreneurship. Millennial founders are more open minded because they have not yet been deeply rooted in some of the societal practices and beliefs that negatively affect entrepreneurship.

When introduced to some alternative thinking, for instance through entrepreneurship education and training, young entrepreneurs are more likely to abandon practices such as the propagation stereotypes, or social exclusion, because they have not participated in these practices long enough to consider them as the norm.

They are also more likely to challenge and even abandon some of the ideas generated by modern-day education and employment systems. Ideas such as employment should be one’s key focus after school, or that internalised knowledge is more important than hands on skills, or that jobs must be done physically are some among the many ideas that young people can break free from and by doing so, increase their chances of being engaged in entrepreneurship, and possibly even becoming good at it.

Young Entrepreneurs Have More Time In Their Hands

It is true that young entrepreneurs suffer greatly from lack of resources to start their entrepreneurial activities. But it is also true that one resource that they have in abundance, even though they may not realise it, is time. Young entrepreneurs often have fewer engagements and fewer responsibilities to take up. This means they have a lot of time in their hands to learn, come up with, and experiment on great ideas that may have higher potential for success than those of their older counterparts.

Should young entrepreneurs spend their time taking up entrepreneurship training, using technology to conduct research on the markets they want to venture into, learning more about sources of funding and how they can access them, understanding how to pitch investors, and building a knowledge base for their entrepreneurial activities, then they stand a high chance of being just as, if not more skilled and knowledgeable in business, than their older competition.

Young Entrepreneurs Are More Tech Savvy

Unlike older entrepreneurs who may struggle with building businesses online, or simply getting and giving information through electronic platforms, younger entrepreneurs know the nooks and crooks of the internet like the palm of their hands, and this is a huge advantage for them. With almost every sector transitioning into the digital space, young entrepreneurs have an upper hand when it comes to setting up less costly, more efficient businesses by leveraging the Internet of Things and technology at large.

They, for instance, can find more timely, relevant, information for their business through a service like ours. This saves them the time they would have taken to find scattered, and perhaps less relevant content online. They can also find more friendly sources of funding, such as crowd-funding, by being members of certain online communities. They are also better placed to find platforms where they can gain the much needed entrepreneurship skills. Simply put, young founders are more capable of merging digital resources with entrepreneurship and the result could make them become better and hopefully just as successful as older founders in as far as business is concerned.

What Is Edventures Doing To Help Young People Become Better Entrepreneurs?

We believe that young people, just as much as older people, deserve a chance at becoming entrepreneurs. With this in mind, we have created a space where young entrepreneurs can get the knowledge, guidance and skills that can level the playing field for them when it comes to leveraging entrepreneurship as a means to provide for oneself.

We offer young founders a chance to grow their ideas, learn new skills and get as much knowledge as they can to help them transform these ideas into what can one day become successful businesses. At Edventures, we leverage AI technology to give timely, relevant information that can help young entrepreneurs remain knowledgeable in matters of entrepreneurship. We also offer entrepreneurship learning which ensures that they gain the skills that older entrepreneurs have gained through years of experience. We ultimately test these skills using gamified learning to make sure that young founders are just as equipped in their entrepreneurship ventures as are the older entrepreneurs.

At the end of it all, we envision having a world where no ideas are inhibited, and especially not on the basis of age. Do you have any young entrepreneur in mind that you believe would benefit from this? Because you need to let them know that we would love to have them join our journey and sign up to our waitlist! 📝