Growing up CEO: parents can nurture a child's entrepreneurial spirit

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At age 12, Leanna Archer heads her own haircare products company, which she founded at age 8.

While most children are listening to their iPods and focusing on homework (Leanna has to finish her homework before she conducts business), the precocious preteen was developing an idea to manufacture and market a hair pomade recipe that her great-grandmother formulated.

"She asked us if she could start the business," says Leanna's dad, Gregory, a computer engineer. "After a year [of asking], her mother and I gave in."

What a difference a year makes. In that time, Leanna's hairgrowth product business started to, well, grow.

She is now CEO of Leanna's Inc., which has a line of five hair care products. Last year her business made $100,000 profit. Not bad for a seventh-grader.

The money will go toward Leanna's college tuition to Harvard. She also makes time to be a motivational speaker and encourages other youngsters to go into business for themselves.

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"I motivate them," says Leanna, who recently spoke to a group of fathers and their children in Long Island, N.Y., where she lives. "If they want to do anything positive, I tell them to reach for the stars and don't give up."

"She's ambitious," Archer says of his daughter, who already has successfully tapped into the multibillion-dollar Black hair care industry. To help keep up with the demands of Leanna's growing business, Gregory resigned from his job in Manhattan. "I told them I was Raving to go and work for my daughter," says Archer. "They said, 'Wait a minute. We know your daughter. She's only 12!'"

It may appear to be unusual for a child as young as Leanna to start a business, but actually it isn't. Other successful entrepreneurs started off as youngsters in business. One of them is Gladys Edmunds, who writes the Entrepreneur Tightrope column for USA Today and is the author of There's No BusinessLike Your Own Business: The Six Practical and Holistic Steps for Entrepreneurial Success. Edmunds started her own business at age 12 in the 1960s.

She remembers making cold calls to businesses about using a fictitious cleaning service. Using her best grownup voice, she signed up several of the businesses as her clients. She persuaded her parents to work the cleaning jobs. Her ultimate goal was to get a pair of Buster Brown shoes that her mother said was too expensive. She eventually got the shoes and something far more valuable: Young Gladys received her first taste of entrepreneurial success.

When, at age 15, Edmunds found herself pregnant and unmarried, she decided not to marry her child's father. Instead, she launched a new business. "I started Edmunds Travel Agency with $9," recalls Edmunds. "I turned it into a multimillion-dollar business before I mined it over to my daughter some 30 years later."

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Edmunds is forthright about the success she had at such an early age. "No 15-year-old has the technical knowledge of how to start a business," she insists. "Everybody is an entrepreneur. It's innate. It's not really about teaching your child to become an entrepreneur. It's really about ensuring that you don't stop the gift that he or she came here with."

Typically, parents condition their children to go to school, get a college education and then get their dream job in corporate America. Few parents encourage their children to become entrepreneurs. However, children learn very early how to exchange goods for money just by observing everyday occurrences such trips to the supermarket, a church bake sale or a neighborhood "candy lady."

Children have a natural ability to be keen observers of their surroundings, and that is helping to fuel the KIDBIZ Entrepreneurial Concepts, a program that helps youngsters develop their ideas into money-making business ventures. KIDBIZ is sponsored by the Minority Business Alliance of Southwest Michigan in Kalamazoo, Mich.

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"Kids are already doing business on the streets," says Erma Jones Gordon, director and creator of the 33-week program, which teaches life skills, including anger management and abstinence, and business-development techniques to at-risk children. Gordon says that children pay particular attention to what they see. Therefore, it's the job of parents and teachers to offer them career options. She points out that the state of Michigan has a 7.7 percent unemployment rate, the highest in the country, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

"We start taking students at age 9," says Gordon. "Sometimes a child is at risk due to peer pressure, and the parents don't even know it ... We try to involve the parents in the program."

Ollie Barnes IV, 12, a participant in the program, plans to open his own art studio one day. In the meantime, Gordon and her group of teachers are showing the youngster how to develop his ideas for animated coloring books and put a business plan in place. "He has business cards and his company's projections too," she says.