[Atlantic]

I have had little money schemes since I was about 13.

I used to copy 3 new skate videos onto one VHS tape and then sell them to kids in the nearby city. The tapes were super cheap and as long as I sold 4 I was making profit.

Over the years I have had many others. Some worked, some didn't. Buying and reselling cars paid for a lot of holidays during University. Had a good run making and delivering fruit and veg packets in my final year.

For those of you who are reading the Canadian Oil Sands thread I have secured the first very well paying job I have ever had thanks to the information Scotian provided. I enjoy my new job but already I am thinking about an exit strategy down the line.

Next year I am going to start my first ever proper business and hopefully another one soon afterwards. I know the idea, have the staff and co-owner lined up and even where the business will be based.

The point of this tread is I would like to see what age people where here when they set up their first proper business or started investing. I am hoping to see how fast peoples businesses grew or how much profit they made.

Example:

-First year 20 k invested, turnover 30k, profit 10k, expanded 30%

These figures are super basic and just for setting a tone for what I am looking for.


I am planning on starting off at around a 50k-60k investment. This should cover everything. I front the money, someone else runs it for me (someone I know very well and can fully trust) and we spilt the profit at a prearranged percentage between us. The business deals with a lot of cash and doesn't need too much to set up.

I know there are a lot of starting businesses treads on here but in particular I am looking for peoples set up costs, how fast they grew and how much they reinvested/profited. Also what areas they found profitable or otherwise.

I am not to keen to post up the idea here but PM me and if you seem like legit I am open to discuss further.

Thanks

[void]

i think there has been a thread about this strategy here. invest and let the other person do the work, the conclusion was: why should the partner hand over his money to you longer than 2 years, if all the skills needed to run the business are his own. he can leave and pull off the same business with more money for himself

[RichieP]

^ yeah this is an unforseen problem from what I hear.

Say you even put in 10%, and the guy grows it really well in 2 years. then you ask for your money back...he's like "this guy wants x hundred k, and all he did was put in a few grand at the start??!?"


Can be a problem I hear. In theory a watertight contract will sort it, but in practice there's often a difference between theory and practice...

[Atlantic]

It is someone pretty close to me so that will not be a problem. That being said once my initial investment is recovered plus some then I will change the percentage split to reflect their effort. I have a long history of successful deals with this person and know I can trust them fully.

[pitt]

I have been money focused my whole life. I remember when my parents bought me my bike when i was 8 and after two days, i sold it. They bought me a new Nintendo one year after and after few weeks i sold it. i was more interested in having money in my pocket.

I also sold cars as an adult and did other shit that i prefer not to say on here.

Anyway, one thing i have learned in business is that you cant really trust anyone. Even people who are really nice, they will always steal something from you (if not all). I would never again let anybody else have control of my money, it doesn't matter how much i trust them, its just not smart to do so.

If i were you, i would continue on saving my money and after few years i would retire and open up my own business. You making good money, take your time, unless you don't mind losing 50,000 dollars and a friend. I have lost really good friends for small money, i don't know what these guys would do if the amount was 50,000 dollars.

[Beyond Borders]

I was an elementary school hustler when I was a kid too, starting from as early as 3rd or 4th grade. Some of my business schemes:

Sell used toys and other items in front of the local market. This always went over well until I got a bit older and some guy accused me of a radio I was selling being "hot." Didn't even know what the word meant and had to ask my brother.

Sell "art" in front of the local market. lol

Remember those bags of individually-packaged candy they used to sell? Some that come to mind were butterscotch, root beer barrels, etc. I'd buy bags of those at the store and then sell them at school for 5 - 10 cents a piece. This business did very well - I'm sure the parents were on the hunt for my candy-slangin' ass.

Around Christmas, I'd climb trees for bushels of mistletoe. Wrap little red ribbons around it and sell it in front of grocery stores and local markets.

Pick and sell jugs of blackberries.

Once I hit about 12, I babysat the shat outta younger kids. Wasn't really a guy's job, but I was a charmer, so all the parents loved me, and I realized after a while it was a pretty cush gig because you were just sitting there all night anyways, and they usually gave you free reign of their cupboards and all the dank grub. I came from a poor family, so it was nice to kick back in someone's nice pad, have cable, etc, and get paid.

I can almost gaurantee there were others I'm not remembering...

[thebassist]

Made some great cash as a kid growing up in Singapore, where selling gum in shops is illegal.

I had bought a large amount of those cheap shitty packets of wrigleys (in Malaysia during the holidays with my parents): the ones in peppermint or in tutti frutti with 5 sticks per pack.

I could sell these packets for 5 singapore dollars, or just one stick for a dollar. The dumb rich kids were always my favorite customers.

Shit was ballin.

Too bad I spent all my hard-earned cash on lego

[A CLOCKWORK TRADER]

I had a little sneaker scheme when I was in elementary school. The name of the company doesn't matter but anyone who was part of the sneaker culture in the 90s and 2000s in a major city in America, you probably knew about it or knew people who did it for sure. They used to have this thing where you could return 'defective' sneakers back for credit at their website. I would send plenty of sneakers back; I would pop the bubbles, tear off the midsoles, anything to make it look defective. They would send a voucher immediately to your email address with the full retail price of the sneaker. You could then use that voucher to order sneakers or sporting goods at their website.

That's all I did during elementary school and my first half of high school. I would ask everyone for their old sneakers. I used different return addresses on the box I would send to the company. It worked like a charm. Send the sneakers to the company, get the credit, ask anyone in my school if they need new sneakers, order it for them and sell it to them. I started when I was about 12. At the peak of it I was making about $1200 a month. Not so bad for a 14 year old kid.

The scheme came to an end when a reality show investigated it. The morons of that show actually asked a representative of the company point blank if it's true you can do this. As if they expected an honest answer from them

By the way, I used the return addresses of other students in the class and sometimes the company would reject a sneaker. It happened very rarely in the early days of the scheme but I would send so many sneakers that a few of them of course would be rejected. When they rejected a claim they would send back the sneaker to the return address. So half of my classmates had old used sneakers sent to them and they had no idea why they hell they received them. We would talk about it during lunch:

Student 1: Xyz company sent me some used fucked up sneakers.
Student 2: Wtf? Me too man.
Student 3: Bro I swear it happened to me too.

I always had to turn away when I heard it, I could barely keep myself from laughing.

[Atlantic]

(12-15-2012 01:58 PM)A CLOCKWORK TRADER Wrote:  

Student 1: Xyz company sent me some used fucked up sneakers.
Student 2: Wtf? Me too man.
Student 3: Bro I swear it happened to me too.

That's hilarious hahaha.

Okay lets take the co-owner thing out of it because that seems to be the focus. What I was looking for was what age and background had people when they stared their first business. Was it a success/not a success and why? Just real life stories to give me a picture of what to expect/prepare from.

I am defiantly enjoying these young hustling stories though. Funny stuff.

I remember when these Livestrong bracelets got real popular at school. They were real hard to get, only maybe 10 people had them, but everyone wanted them. I ordered a box of a couple 100 online and sold out a few days later. I single handedly managed to flood the market with some people wearing 5 at once. Within a week they were uncool because they were so common. I made a killing but managed to kill the trend pretty fast too. haha

[xsplat]

At nine I used to buy wafer chocolate bars for 5 cents at the drug store and sell the door to door for the cost of a regular chocolate bar: 25 cents. At ten I would make home made candles and sell them door to door for a donation to "charity for cancer". Some people thought a ten year old boy collecting for cancer to be irresistable. At 16 I had a crew of kids going door to door selling chocolate bars to "help send a kid through college". At 17 I bought cabbage patch dolls from the store I worked at at an employee discount for $28, during the craze where they were rationed out and in short supply, and sold them for $100 each. At 22 I started street vending jewelry, and in two months grew the business up from about a hundred dollar initial investment to $4400 profit for the month of December. After that I was into retail of imports at universities and festivals, then electronics manufacture and sales, then the supplements industry, then software and website creation and sales, domain development and trading, bootleg dvd and software sales, health care product development and sales, and several other ventures. Haven't had a paycheck since I was 21. Never went to college, unless it was to vend to the students.

[jmoney29]

I was in middle school when burning CD's started popping off, circa 2000. We had one rich kid with a CD burner making discs with Nintendo 64 and Super Nintendo ROMS(+emulator) that we sold for $5-10 a piece. Not big money, but enough for snack money every now and then.