Boss babies: Teens take on top jobs
Jupiter landscaper? He’s 15; Boca playground fundraiser? She’s 18
Jupiter’s Austyn Roth runs Lucky Landscaping, attends trade shows around the country, hobnobs with equipment executives and buys state-of-the-art $7,000 mowers.
What many customers around town never quite realize: He’s 15 and the owner, not a tenderfoot assistant.
He can’t legally drive the truck his crew uses. He pays two adult employees.
“A lot of my customers will be shocked when they see this in the newspaper,” Roth said. “I never really get asked my age. I have sold jobs for $8,000 to put in landscaping and nobody knew I was 15.”
Count him among more than a few high schoolers living in Palm Beach County who apparently lack the simple courtesy to wait for a graduation speaker to inspire them to launch meaningful business or charitable ventures.
They’re just jumping right in.
Take Ava Goldstone, 18, of Boca Raton. The Association of Fundraising Professionals just awarded her its top international award for youth philanthropy, and she addressed the group at its meeting in New Orleans.
She won the top $15,000 prize at a junior Shark Tank-style event, the Palm Beach Philanthropy Tank, to raise money for a playground where kids with disabilities and special needs could enjoy baseball and other activities along with others. It flowed from her volunteer work with such kids and she raised more than $200,000 in all. The Boundless Dreams playground is scheduled to open May 19 in Delray Beach’s Robert Miller park.
“I was really humbled, surprised, shocked,” said Goldstone, who attends Pine Crest School in Fort Lauderdale. “But it’s not really about me. I saw a need for something we didn’t have, a barrier-free playground. If I didn’t do it, I couldn’t guarantee anybody else would step up to the plate.”
Good luck pinpointing how many young entrepreneurs and philanthropists are pushing their own ignition buttons in this economy. Roth, for instance, is too young to fit in categories routinely measured by government agencies such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics, though reports do show rising rates of business ownership and employment generally among people ages 16 to 24. If it’s a shadow economy, not all the male participants are old enough to have 5 o’clock shadows.
What does seem clear is the digital age is colliding with the tightest labor market in years, some-
thing close to what economists call full employment. There’s demand out there for services like landscaping from providers who can prove themselves reliable. Online tools to promote and run businesses are opening doors for aspiring moguls who have reached only a fifth or sixth of Warren Buffett’s 87 birthdays. On the internet, a famous cartoon caption observes, nobody knows you’re a dog. Or a business owner who can’t drive.
Here’s what statistics can tell us: Including summer jobs, nearly 55 percent of people ages 16 to 24 participated in the workforce as of last July, the typical annual peak for youth employment. That was up 1.6 percent over the previous year and represented nearly 21 million people, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported.
Census data from 2012, the latest available, showed about 545,000 business owners under age 25, up from less than 434,000 five years earlier, according to research cited by officials with the U.S. Small Business Administration.
Fewer than one of 10 of those businesses with owners under 25 had paid employees, though, which makes Roth’s case a bit unusual.
A freshman at Jupiter High School, he pays two adults as independent contractors to help perform the work and drive the truck. His father Tom said he helps with paperwork such as incorporating the business and arranging licensing and insurance, important considerations for any entrepreneurs under 18. “A lot of times people just think he’s the worker, not the owner,” his father said. “But he’s been doing this since he was 8 years old. He started with a leaf blower and went around the neighborhood. He puts most of the money back into the business to buy new equipment and expand it.”
New gear helps expand his range. A four-wheeler, something he could legally drive, pushed the boundaries first. Now a truck lets him accept clients even farther away, from lawn maintenance accounts to putting in new landscaping, even if he can’t drive it. Clients find him through everything from flyers to websites to word of mouth. Reviews and testimonials are available online.
His website pitches a “smooth and effortless” process: “You pay your bills online with your credit card. There are no hassles or headaches with invoicing and payments.”
Last year the business grossed
about $45,000, he said.
“This year we should double that to about $100,000,” he said.
He even attends trade shows around Florida and in other states to check out lawn and landscaping equipment.
That’s how he met the Wisconsin-based CEO of the company that makes Gravely products, Daniel T. Ariens. Roth bought a $7,000 stand-up Gravely mower, for example.
“Austyn is a tremendous young man,” Ariens told The Palm Beach Post. “From the first time I met Austyn and his mother we were impressed. Austyn had taken his school break to attend the International Power Equipment trade show to meet our team from the Ariens Company, specifically my son Stephen Ariens, who had gotten to know Austyn on social media platforms.”
Ariens called Roth “a refreshing example of a young entrepreneur who doesn’t understand ‘can’t.’ We are proud to know Austyn and proud to know he is making a very nice living using our Gravely products while taking care of the neighborhood.”
Back home, not every client is in on the full story. One customer told Austyn he had texted the owner with special trimming instructions and wanted to be sure the message got through.
He doesn’t always bother to explain the texts go straight to his phone.
“I just go with the flow and say, ‘Yep, he let me know,’” he said.