You know how it is…an entrepreneur sees things very differently from the average person. Your entrepreneur brain is trained to look for opportunities and to make money everywhere you are.

When you become a parent, you start to look for natural and simple opportunities to help your child to build entrepreneurial skills as well.

However, when you are busy building startups and businesses, this can sometimes be challenging. Not only does your passion keep you busy but the moments that you spend with your child are precious too.

Nevertheless, there are some activities that pay 10x results for the time that you invest doing it with your child.

Here are the 5 best activities to do your kid to help them become an entrepreneur.

1. Create a Vision Board

A vision board is the idea of using pictures and words to describe what you want for your life. It can be a grand, overview vision for your dream life or it can be made up of different goals, all combined together on a single page.

The younger your child, the less likely that he or she will be able to think that far ahead into the future. If so, keep the vision board focused on smaller goals in the near future.

The best way to make this project successful is to involve your child right from the start. Explain to your child that you want to help him or her start designing their future life. Find out what he or she wants to have more of, wishes he or she had or just simply likes.

Take him or her shopping and let him or her choose a corkboard, whiteboard, craft paper or scrapbook.

Go on the internet together and search for pictures that represent experiences, people or things that your child would like to have in the future. It could be pictures of where he or she wants to live, work at, holiday at, buy etc. Make sure you do this together with your supervision as some pictures on the internet are not child-appropriate. Select which ones he or she feels most inspired by and then print them out. You can also include photos of family, best friends, favorite vacations etc.

You can also use colored pens, color pencils, whiteboard markers or crayons to write inspiring words that relate to the vision. This is especially useful for children who are linguistically-oriented.

The treasure in this project is the opportunity it opens up for you to engage your child in thinking, talking about and planning out his or her dreams and goals. If you are not sure what to talk about, we have created a list of questions that you can ask to guide them during the creation process.

Children have a short attention span and you may end up with an unfinished vision board. But that doesn’t matter. The important thing is that you are able to have this opportunity to talk with your child about his or her dreams, what he or she cares about, and help your child plan and take action to achieve it.

Here are links to items that you might find useful for helping your child create their Vision Board:

Online Resources

Fun-Looking Corkboards

Traditional Corkboards

Kids Whiteboards

Craft Paper

Scrapbook

2. Write Action Plans

This activity relates to the one above. If your child successfully finishes the above activity, loves it and is super excited to get started, it’s time to create some action plans!

Action plans are slightly different from a vision board. Vision boards tend to be big, bold, and audacious. Some of them may be mere daydreams. Some may be achievable within a short period of time but some may take decades before they are realistically achievable.

Action plans, on the other hand, are created to make goals and dreams achievable. They tend to be focused on the short term. Action plans are normally focused on what can be done right now to make progress toward achieving the goal.

It’s a good idea to keep action plans simple and easy to do, especially for younger children. For example, if your child has created a goal of learning public speaking, one simple action could be to do research on a topic of interest.

Choose some achievable goals from the Vision Board. Maybe it’s learning a coding language or starting his or her own business or public speaking.

Then start to work out how he or she can take steps to get there. He or she may need your or another adult’s help with certain actions. The action then could be to reach out and ask that person for help and to have backup people to ask if the first person says No. Learning to move past rejection is an important part of entrepreneurial learning.

It’s best to record down the action plan in a journal or notebook so that you can keep track of the action plans. This could be done in picture form with simple words and phrases so that your child understands what the action plan is or if he or she is more literate, in longer sentences.

Try to include a date by which the action has to be taken. Let your child decide when it can be accomplished so that he or she doesn’t feel pressured. Just the simple act of creating an action plan often motivates a child to make progress on a goal. Whether he or she actually achieves it or not by the deadline is not the big deal. The big deal is about learning to create an action plan. Don’t get upset if he or she doesn’t complete the action. At the end of the day, your child needs to learn how to deal with failure, even if it’s something that he or she could have prevented.

You should aim to revisit the action plans on a weekly basis with your child. Analyze what has worked and what hasn’t. Be encouraging and help him or her to adjust them if they are too big or too small and uninspiring.

The choice of which journal or notebook to get is normally based on personal design preferences but below are some of our favorites:

Journals/Notebooks

3. Write A Biz Plan

If your child is serious about starting their own business, why not create a business plan?

If you are not sure what a business plan looks like, here is a one-page business plan example.

You should try to keep your child’s business plan simple and focus on the more important aspects such as vision (see point one above), pricing, expenses and marketing strategy.

Ideally, try to keep it simple enough to fit one page as complicated matters cause procrastination and paralysis (for adults too!)

You could add this business plan into your previous notebook or journal for your action plans.

4. Create and Rehearse Elevator Pitch

How many times have you asked someone about what their business does and they either:

  1. Stammer and only manage about 3 words (normally the official name of their business) and you have no idea what the business does exactly; or
  2. They go into so many details and directions that you end up confused and no clearer at the end?

An elevator pitch is meant to help avoid such problems. An elevator pitch is a clear, concise sales pitch of what you, your job or your business is about, uttered in about 20 to 30 seconds (roughly the time it takes for you to reach your destination in an elevator). It is meant to entice and create interest in the listener to want more details from you.

Help your child to create and rehearse a good, memorable elevator pitch so that when he or she is put on the spot, they are ready to fire.

5. Deal with Rejection

Let’s be honest. We all fear rejection and all of us could do with some help in this area. However, being a successful entrepreneur is all about learning how to deal with rejection in a classy way with no enthusiasm lost.

There are many ways you can help your child deal with rejection.

Here are some ideas:

  • Encourage your child to speak up and ask for what they want assertively and be their encourager if they get rejected.
  • Model to them how they can deal with rejection by allowing them to see how you respond when you experience rejection yourself.
  • Talk to them about what self-confidence and self-esteem is and how they can be responsible for building theirs up.
  • Explain to them the importance of choosing their response.

If you run out of ideas, you can borrow some from this amazing guy who did therapy on himself to overcome his fear of rejection- 100 days of rejection.

If you do these 5 activities with your kid, your kid is 10 times more likely than the average child to desire to become an entrepreneur and make money easily!

If you would love to read about one of our own kid business experiments, we wrote about it here.