A few months ago, I'd written a post about the team of teens I was mentoring in presenting their business plan. A quick recap: these are under-resourced high-school students who get substantial support and guidance in making it to college, along with hands-on lessons in entrepreneurship. They're supported by the non-profit BUILD and you can read my previous posts on these teen entrepreneurs here and here. Those 9th-graders have now moved on to 10-grade and have opted to continue with their business idea (and more importantly, high-school - yeah!) and I'm back to mentoring them in their trek from plan to product and having a lot of fun in the process.
So, we're picking up where we left off before summer started - the team had pitched their idea (personalized clip-on charms - no IP to protect here), their differentiators and their business plan, and it all looked viable, so come fall, they were green-lighted to start their business as long as they kept up their academic commitments. But, the three months between summer and fall is a long time in the life of a teenager, and many things changed. Most dramatically, the team's CFO and CMO dropped out of the program and the rest of them were not confident about the product/process anymore.
Surprisingly, this did not cause them to doubt their ability to start their company. A while ago, I'd written about how startups have to be flexible to survive ('The Adaptive Startup') and it is so refreshing to see how these teens are re-shuffling their plans with alacrity. They are not stuck on their old plans and show no inertia or resistance to change. They got two more kids to join their team, reassigned roles, got inspired by one of the newcomers' football charm and are re-doing their 'manufacturing' plans. My co-mentor and I are amazed at how quickly they dropped the one-off, custom-everything approach they were leaning towards when they figured out how much time (and money) that would take and are now measuring everything on a feasibility scale. They're energetically trying to balance practicality with coolness (essential to teendom) and us mentors cheered (silently) when they dropped the idea of buying their own $1000 metal engraver in favor of outsourcing but kept their original designs. Another familiar startup lesson here - focus on your value-add and get others to do the routine/commodity stuff.
As these teens are reminding us, life, and startups, can be unpredictable, and resilience and adaptability seem to trump conformance and control in bringing success - and satisfaction.
No comments:
Post a Comment