Young entrepreneurs overcome inexperience and skeptics

AP Business Writer

The age-old issue came up again recently: A potential client asked Nate Hartmann, “Hey, how old are you?”

Since Hartmann founded Yellow Box in 2010 at age 18, he’s encountered skeptics who doubted his company could design websites and create online marketing strategies. Some clients even set out to teach them.

“They tried to run us, instead of working with us to achieve their goals,” says Hartmann, whose company is based in Chicago.

Not being taken seriously is an obstacle many young entrepreneurs face. There are others, like being a boss without experience, or not understanding some legal and financial issues. But being young also has advantages. Though they may still have schoolwork to do, most owners don’t have responsibilities like families or mortgages to distract them. And they bring fresh eyes to creating products and services.

“I didn’t have preconceived notions, didn’t have any processes to shake,” Hartmann says. Many of his competitors worked at larger marketing companies, he says, and therefore “do things that aren’t efficient. But that’s what they do because they did it at the last place.”

Nearly 545,000 companies owned by people under 25 were noted in the Census Bureau’s 2012 count of established businesses, the most recent statistics available. That was 2.4 percent of all the companies in the survey. But it’s certain that thousands of other young people, including those inspired by Facebook’s launch by a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, have started businesses that weren’t counted or didn’t last long.

When Tance Hughes went into business making screen-printed T-shirts and other apparel at age 17, “sometimes my age hindered my ability to secure a deal in the early days because many potential customers simply didn’t trust that I could get the job done,” he says. He sensed that people considered him not only inexperienced, but immature.

His Vidalia, Louisiana-based company, Southern Designs, did get work creating shirts for school sports teams. With momentum building, he left college after six weeks to concentrate on the business. He began to diversify his products, and transformed the company, now a decade old, into a maker of home decor including metal signs.

Although many parents support their entrepreneurial children, they can also be pessimists. Ryan Neman discovered that at age 19, when he and Skyler Lucci started HeyTutor, an online company that matches tutors with students.

“I got a lot of backlash from family and friends,” says Neman. But he says, “I used the doubtfulness of other people to build a fire and prove them wrong.”

Young entrepreneurs are ideal for coming up with products and services aimed at people in their 20s and 30s because they understand the market and how to use social media to reach customers, says Lakshmi Balachandra, an entrepreneurship professor at Babson.