Friday, October 30, 2009

Teaching Children How To Start & Manage A Business

Tomorrow is enterpreneur's day at Baby' school, so she's going to run a jewellery stall for a day. Essentially, the kids choose the merchandise they want to sell, borrow money from their parents to buy stock and pay R10 for the stall, develop promotional materials like posters and invite the general public to attend their fair.

On the day, the kids sell a variety of goods including curries, burgers, hot dogs, cakes and drinks, as well as jewellery and many other things primary school kids find interesting.

As far as I'm concerned, buying stock is the hardest part of the job. We visited a number of wholealers, argued about whether the stuff she wanted could be sold at profit, discussed the profit margin we wanted and calculated it, then had to work out if we would pay that amount of money for cheap jewellery.

The selling part will be easier: last year Baby showed me that she did have the makings of a good salesperson. She had no qualms walking around the "fair" hawking stuff and encouraging students to go to her stall. I even heard her negotiate for a discount to encourage a mother to buy 3 pairs of ear-rings, instead of one. I was so proud!

After the fair, the kids who made a profit are upposed to pay back their parents their seed money and donate 10% of their profits to charity. I can't think of a better way to teach children about how to start and manage your own business.

3 comments:

po said...

That's pretty awesome. That kind of thing was seriously lacking in SA schools when I was small, we were taught to obey, not to be entrepreneurial.

Tamara said...

I remember our entrepreneurship days. I used to sell these butterfly fridge magnets. They were always popular. It use dto make me bleak that all our profit went to charity ;-) It was a good way to teach us not to be selfish either, especially when we were read the thank you letters from the charities in assembly.

Damaria Senne said...

Baby's school has a questionnaire at the end of the event, where they ask the kids if the event was worth it. The interesting thing for me was that she didn't even eem to think about it - she had fun selling and socialising and buying junk from friends, and still made money. Of course it was worth it.

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