Raising entrepreneurial children isn’t about grooming them for business. It’s about modeling the realities of creating value in the world, giving them a front-row seat to both the stresses and the satisfactions, and then trusting to them to step out on their own.
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While I was in design school, I also completed most of the courses that our business school was offering in its MBA on entrepreneurship. There was great synergy between what I was learning about design thinking and what I learned there about new venture development.
Dennis Rey taught one of the core courses on entrepreneurial theory. He had spent four years studying what differentiated the most successful entrepreneurs from the rest of the pack. His not-very-scholarly-sounding insight was that most successful entrepreneurs were "likable". This meant that people would go out of their ways to help them.
He also said was that if even one parent was an entrepreneur, it was very probable that a child would follow suit and become an entrepreneur. This was in the days before I had my own two children, but his idea stuck in my brain. Both of my children have started their own businesses and both of their parents are successful entrepreneurs. Am I surprised? Hardly.
One of the reasons I think this might be true, at least in my case, is that when my children were growing up, I (and their mother from whom I was divorced) exposed them to both the stresses of entrepreneurship and the benefits of entrepreneurship. They knew for example that if it had been a few weeks since I'd stopped to make a bank deposit on the ride home from school, that there was no point in asking for anything. My eldest evenutally took to just asking me before asking for some treat, "dad, are you feeling abundant?" This tumultuous ups and down were normal to them and they grew up undaunted by the challenges of forging their own paths through the wilderness of the world–and they got to experience the freedom and other perks that their parents generated when thing came together and worked out.
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Like many families with young children, many of our vacations were roadtrips and tent camping. Given my profession, I subjected my kids to countless hours of "learning tapes" from figures like Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy and Mark Victor Hansen. Most of the leadership content back then was on sales training and they groaned everytime I put a tape in, but both of my childred entered adult life as very capable sales people. In my mind, that was one of the most important of the entrepreneurial skills: if they could sell themselves, they'd always find some way to be all right.
I was a Boy Scout and earned my Chief Scout Award when I was a young teen. One of the precepts of that movement was the "leave no trace" ethos of always leaving a campsite in better shape than you found it. I always disliked arriving at a campsite with wrappers and butts strewn all over the place. Our kids first venture was a campsite clean-up business. We paid them a dime for every piece of garbage they picked up. I kept a tally in a ledger in the truck and whenever we rolled through a small town that had a candy shop, we stopped and they bought whatever they wanted to the limit of their account balance. It was a great lesson in the principles of value creation in business: find a someone who has a problem you can solve and the money to pay for it; make a promise and deliver on your word; take the profits you've earned and purchase what you want. We sold that truck in 2016–they were both in their twenties by then–and I found the ledger in the truck. They had decided not spend everything they made and still had a balance of twenty six dollars.
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I have been coaching long enough now (close to thirty years) that I've witnessed the birth and growth of many of my client's children. The offspring of entrepreneurs are generally as industrious and independent as their entrepreneurial parents and many have gone on to start their own very successful businesses.
The people I coach are solid leaders, spouses and friends, but where they shine brightest and bring out their best selves is as parents. This not true of everyone or even maybe most people, but it is true of my people: to a person they are genuinely great moms and dads. This doesn't mean that they don't have issues and battles with their children, especially when the kids are in their willful teen and young adult years, but it does mean that it is in this role as parents that they are their most conscientous. And what they have mastered and are mastering as parents is available to help them become more effective as leaders in business.
As a practice I often include the children in my coaching sessions with their parents. They are a wonderful source of perspective on their parent's blindspots as they've had a unique window into how they move through the world. I've also had numerous coaching interactions with the kids of my clients who have started their own business, independent of their parents.
Even though my clients are great parents, there kids often don't want business advice from them. They want to learn things on their own. This is always funny for me, as I will say the same thing their dad or mom would have said, but they'll hear it from me. I never really asked my own parents for business advice and even though my kids have a business coach for a dad, they don't come to me for advice either. (Interestingly my kids take advice from my clients.)
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I've long thought that spirited children, starting at about the age of seventeen, have to throw off the shackles of their parent's operating regimes and go out into the world alone to discover what kind of people they are in the sunshine outside of an imposing entrepreneurial shadow.
A parent, who until that time enjoyed an intimate and connected relationship with their teen, might have a difficult time with this process of separation and differentiation. It is easy for us parents to feel insecure and threatened as the distance increases. At the very least we might wonder what kind of support is really appropriate.
If our children get the space and support they need to explore some part of the world, they'll return some time later as more complex adults ready for a stimulating relationship of entrepreneurial equals. The same is probably true for the members of our teams. It's easy to forget how imposing we can be to someone younger. If we don't let them go, they might never really come back.