Childhood Entrepreneurship Quotes

From the time that I was a child, I loved interacting with people. I would go around door-to-door and sell candies and gift-wrapping paper, and it was a great way to interact with people and communicate with people.

I made a penny for each paper delivered every day, plus 2 cents for Sunday papers. I had 120 customers. For a 10-year-old kid in the 1940s, that was a lot of money.

When I was eight, I bought my first puppet. It was a monkey, and I paid five cents for it. I collected some scrap wood and built myself a puppet theatre. I made 32 cents with my first show, which I thought was pretty good, and that's when I knew I would be a puppeteer when I grew up.

I wanted to be in the FBI. I also wanted to be a pie salesman. It was so intense that the studio got the prop department to make a little pie wagon and they filled it with tarts. I wheeled it around the set and sold them to the crew. I was about eight years old. I always sold out and I didn't have to pay for them. It was a great deal.

When I was 8 years old, I sold garden seeds.

I had been playing for about a year and a half when the Beach Boys formed. When our folks went to Mexico on business, we would take the food money they had left us and we would rent instruments.

I'd been working since I was eleven so I could buy my own comic books. I was that kid knocking on your door, selling subscriptions to the paper and crying because I wasn't going to sell that last paper that would allow me to go to Disneyland.

In my early teens, I was working in a Wimpy Bar and delivering cab company cards to make cash. I also ran a tuck shop at school. I struggled academically because of being dyslexic. When I saw other families and what they had, it inspired me. I thought, 'I can get that, too, if I work hard.'

I was trying to be an entrepreneur at seven years old.

Some of our best-known entrepreneurs started their business ventures when they were kids.

I was just a kid selling monster stories to the kids in the projects, complete with a dramatic reading, making the werewolf sounds. My career was aborted early on because one of my main customers started to have nightmares and his mother came to my mother and my mother shut down my whole business.

Well I was a Gerber baby, so probably that was my first money. But in cash, I used to do lemonade stands a lot.

As a kid, I used to take the sheet off of my mother's bed, make a tent and put on a show for the neighborhood kids and charge them two packs of matches. Then, the show got so good I started charging a penny.

From the time I was very young, I was a professional, making money and assuming responsibilities. I didn't live the life of a child. I was living the life of a 30-year-old.

I did not have a lot of spare time after I was about eleven because in my youth, young people used to try to find ways of making money after school. From about age eleven on, I either shined shoes or did something such.

I guess I showed certain signs of being a workaholic in early years; I had a magazine route very early on - I must have been about seven or eight years old or something like that - when I was carrying Liberty magazine, trying to win green and brown coupons; I eventually [won] a pony.