This summer, rather than allowing my 14 year old to spend his holiday on TikTok, Insta and co, I helped him – along with 2 friends - set up a bike rental business in the holiday village in Suffolk where we spent July and August. It was great for them all. They learned plenty of business basics: assets, cashflow, P&L, back office/front office, staff motivation, legal liability, marketing, operations, fixed/variable costs, the difference between debt and equity, and more. Ollie built lots of self-confidence through dealing with customers and acquiring skills in bike maintenance that he never thought he was capable of. He had fun doing it, earned some proper money (they made c £2k profit) and discovered that there is a certain caché in being a young entrepreneur. Ollie, if you’re reading this, I was super proud of you.
As I watched them, it was fascinating how many well-established business truths came to the fore. Here were a few that I noticed:
Focus on your core business.
The initial idea was to buy old bikes, do them up and then rent them. But the ‘doing them up’ part proved harder than they imagined, and they realised quickly that they made money from renting not from ‘doing up’. So they sold off a number of junk bikes and reinvested the cash into a small number of better bikes, so they could spend less time in the workshop and more time with the customers. Nice pivot, team!
The customer experience really counts.
In part because they were so keen to impress, they completely overdelivered on customer service. Customers loved it.
Optimise continually.
Despite their best efforts – and even with some help from me – the proposition was strong, but was not as clear as we all thought. They naturally spotted this, using both customer observation and Google keywords, and adjusted the website and social media language repeatedly through the summer.
Play to your strengths.
Initially they had a bit of imposter syndrome, afraid that they’d somehow be found out as fakes. However hey quickly worked out that, as their customer base was largely families on holiday, the fact that they were 14 year olds was more asset than liability. Any parents were by and large hugely supportive of the notion of schoolkids running a business, and they realised this gave them scope to upsell, cross-sell as well as license to make a few mistakes.
People are strange.
One of the biggest learnings was that adults are not always as sensible, patient, intelligent and rational as they were used to….and that being frustrated by this was unhelpful. By the end of the summer they had definitely matured in this regard.
Colleagues matter.
There’s no way Ollie would have been able to do this by himself. When he lost momentum, his friends buoyed him up. Where he was reticent, they were often more confident. Together they were a team, and achieved so much more than they could have done separately.
Business can be fun.
Given my son is 14 year old boy who normally communicates with eye rolls and monosyllables, it was a joy was to witness his emotional highs. They were properly nervous before the first customer, and then shrieked with delight when that first customer rode off having paid. They relished the negotiation with the guy that tried to haggle with them for the junk bikes. They fist-bumped each other when the business hit its first £1000.
It’s about more than the money.
Curiously, the earning of money was never a motivator (although it was a good KPI and it made the business real). They seemed comfortable with the fact that if they did a good job, the money would take care of itself. The very fact they were doing it and succeeding was reward enough.
It wasn’t all plain sailing. A couple of bikes broke down in awkward spots, they didn’t handle one tricky customer particularly well, and they weren’t strong enough with some customers who refused to pay deposits. I thought that heavy breathing had gone out of fashion along with space invaders, leg warmers and streaking, but clearly not (amusingly one of Ollie’s friends suggested that the caller might have Covid and should see a doctor immediately). Ollie’s exploitation of his little brother would have contravened most businesses’ anti-slavery policies. And our garage looked like a junk yard for most of the summer, much to the disappointment of the neighbours.
But, given my primary objective was that they had a positive experience and learned something that they would take into their adult lives, these were small prices to pay, and by and large they nailed it. So now we’ve got the tricky discussion of what to do next year. They’re already talking about another round of fundraising, employees and possible franchises.