I love this story of a teenage micro business owner took a simple idea, screen printing T shirts, and made himself unique by putting catchy sayings on the T-shirts.
The T-shirt reads “Caution: Educated African American Male.” Kalief Rollins thinks it will be his next best-seller.
The 17-year-old from Carson, Calif., near Los Angeles, took home a $10,000 grand prize from the National Youth Entrepreneurship Competition this week for his business selling custom T-shirts with inspirational designs. Rollins competed against 27 finalists and 24,000 initial high school entrants for the award, given by the nonprofit Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship. (read the rest…)
There are a couple of things that micro business owner, Kalief Rollins, said that I think are worth noting:
Kalief has a business plan. He started small and manageable and is now expanding his business one step at a time:
In the next year, he says, “we plan to get our shirts into events like fairs, swap meets and farmers markets. … We want to get our shirts into different stores
He didn’t go into debt to upgrade his business. He waited until the money came in-in this case, $10,000 from an entrepreneur contest!
With the $10,000, Rollins says he plans to make some business upgrades, including stepping up from a heat press to a silk-screen machine to improve the shirts’ quality.
He got professional help from his mother, an accountant. Smart guy!
“I hired my mom as my CFO,” Rollins says. “She worked as an accountant, so she’s good in that field of work.
