To be young and in business - includes related article on Association of Collegiate Entrepreneurs

Nation's Business, March, 1988 by Nancy L. Croft, Dan Dickinson

To Be Young And In Business

When ComTel, a telephone-services company, decided in 1984 to close its Terre Haute, Ind., office, its employees tried to find someone to buy the business and save their jobs.

They discovered Brett Gibson, a free-lance telephone installer who had already proved to be a tough competitor in the Terre Haute telephone-installation market. Gibson agreed to the deal on two conditions. First, a bank would have to provide financing. Second, his grandmother would have to agree to drive him to his business appointments. Gibson was 15 years old at the time.

Gibson's conditions were met, and he joined the growing ranks of very young entrepreneurs.

All over America, young people are building sizable enterprises their own way--from lawn-care businesses to doll factories to exporting. Young entrepreneurs --those under age 30--generated more than $2.5 billion in gross revenues last year, according to Doub Mellinger, national director of the Association of Collegiate Enterpreneurs.

ACE, headquartered in Wichita, Kans., is an international organization of young entrepreneurs. A sign of the explosive growth of youthful interest in entrepreneurship is ACE's growth--its membership has doubled in the past two years alone--to 8,000. It now has 300 college chapters nationwide as well as chapters in 56 countries.

These young entrepreneurs are succeeding. Several months ago, 19-year-old Teen Care President Gary Goralnick became the first teenager to sell a business to one of the 500 largest industrial companies. Colgate Palmolive bought his service for cleaning dental braces.

Young entrepreneurship isn't new. Thomas A. Edison, for example, went into business when he was a teenager. And for decades groups such as Junior Achievement, based in Colorado Springs, Colo., and the Distributive Education Clubs of America (DECA) have taught economics by helping teens set up classroom businesses after school. Yet only in the past decade have large numbers of youths started concerns that are "strictly business," with real products, employees, headaches, valuable lessons--and profits.

One reason is a new attitude of many teens toward enterprise. Students are increasingly interested in business careers. Another factor is the success of some youthful executives. "Guys like Steve Jobs (founder of Apple Computer) and Bill Gates (founder of Microsoft Corporation) have shown that young people can have an economic impact," says Vern Harnish, national director of the Young Entrepreneurs Organization, an extension of ACE for entrepreneurs recently out of college.

Economic reality also has come into play. "Many kids are wondering whether the big corporations will offer that much opportunity in the future," says David Hollingworth, 19-year-old president of Turf Greens, an Atlanta-area landscape company. "They're beginning to see small business as the field where the real opportunities are."

This logic has motivated many teens. But others have started businesses as a natural outgrowth of a special ability.

Gibson, for example, became interested in electronics at age 10, when he began repairing and installing telephones for his own amusement. His hobby grew into installing phones for his parents' friends. By the time ComTel learned of him, he was earning $5,000 a year for his after-school efforts.

Running ComTel--a $200,000 business, which he renamed Mid-American Telephone Supply--proved a more challenging task. First there was the matter of age. "All of my employees were much older than me," says Gibson. The age issue extended outside the company, too. "Most of our clients at Mid-American Telephone are executives, and 15-year-old salesmen are not persuasive," says Gibson.

Then there was the bureaucracy. Gibson was moving along nicely in his business until Terre Haute passed an ordinance requiring all telephone installers to have a license and be at least 18 years old. "I still don't know whether the law was aimed at me, but I knew I had to beat it or I was out of business," he says. After failing to convince the town fathers, Gibson took his case to the press. "And the newspapers ate it up," he recalls. After a two-week brouhaha, Terre Haute relented.

While the business world gave Gibson some problems, it also had its rewards, such as recognition. He has won national awards from DECA and was recently honored by President Reagan as an outstanding young entrepreneur.

Just as sweet has been Mid-American's success. Its revenues and staff have doubled in three years. And, naturally, there is the satisfaction that Gibson has derived from the business. "I know what I want to do with my life, and I'm doing it," he says. "How many people can say that at 19?"

Young entrepreneurs are not afraid to look beyond national borders. Audie Cashion, president of TradeEast Horizons in Chapel Hill, N.C., says, "My goal is to reduce the trade deficit with Japan."

Cashion's company exports everything from pickles to early American furniture to Arizona Indian jewelry; the products are sold in Japanese department stores. Cashion, 23, founded the company last May with University of North Carolina classmate Nancy Milliron. She works in Japan to find contacts interested in their products, while Cashion works in the United States to find new products to export.