Remember the 1980′s video game "Paperboy?" You moved your bicycling paperboy up the screen and used buttons to make him throw newspapers onto the porches of the correct houses. I just read a very insightful article by Dan Pallotta of the Harvard Business Review entitled "Is the Entrepreneur and Endangered Species?"
In his article, Dan talks about how kids today aren't doing things like running yard work businesses, snow blowing businesses, becoming paperboys, and building hot dog carts or lemonade stands. I realized that he was right. These training opportunities have becomes extinct rites of passage for the past couple generations of American youth.
As an entrepreneur myself, with experience in startup after startup, Dan's article made me think about my own upbringing. I grew up at the right time, but I never had the opportunity to be a paperboy - we moved around a lot growing up and it seemed you had to be well established as a kid in the community in order to crack the inner circle to get a coveted paperboy job.
By the time I was 12 or so, we had moved to a rural area - and no paperboy jobs existed. In fact, we lived so far in the country, that there was no RFD (home mail delivery) in our "town". We had to drive in to the post office every day to get out mail. It was very "Hooterville". We did live in a Country Club for a while, so my younger brother and I would go out early on Saturday mornings and retrieve golf balls from the streams and lakes on the course. The club pro would buy those balls back for either a dime or a quarter apiece, depending on how dinged up they were. He would then sell them as used balls for 50 cents, or paint a stripe on them and turn them into "range balls". It was the 1970′s - things were simpler then.
On a good Saturday, we could make nearly $20 that we would split. Ten bucks went a long way back then, if you remember. Not bad for a startup, board members were 13 and 9. In high school, I had a couple of jobs, but nothing entrepreneurial. I was working for the man. One of the saddest reasons that I believe these opportunities have disappeared is that the current culture makes it a much riskier proposition than ever. I don't think most parents are comfortable letting their 13 year olds run about unsupervised.
Where we live (suburb of Atlanta) there aren't any kids doing lawn work either - it's all done by landscaping companies who employee "people who will do the jobs Americans won't".
P. Todd Kelly is a nationally recognized expert in Sales and Use Taxation. Todd is President of Tax Traxx, located in Johns Creek, Georgia, and found on the web at http://taxtraxx.com. He is also the founder of Big Rock Publishing, found at http://bigrockpubs.com, and is excited about the upcoming release of the Centennial Edition Boy Scout Adventure Series.
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