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When The Folks Give You The Biz
Watching fellow college students working for $7.50 an hour after graduation, Tana Walther, a fashion-design major at Kent State University in Ohio, snapped up an alternative offered by her father—to run a Pita Pit restaurant franchise he would buy. “I guess I bought her a job,” says her father, Jan Walther, of North Canton, Ohio.
According to The Wall Street Journal, parents often say they would do anything for their child. Setting a child up in business is surely one big test of that bond. A lot is at stake: Small-business failures are common, and parents risk losing their entire investment, their life savings, or more. They also risk straining their relationships with young-adult children intent at this stage on independence.
Still, many parents see business ownership as a better bet for their kids’ future than a graduate degree. And in this era of renewed interest in entrepreneurship, some parents I interviewed described it as a way of recapturing for their children a stake in “the American dream”—the opportunity to control their destiny and have a chance at gaining wealth.
Many parents choose franchises for their kids because they seem to offer marketing, branding and management support. While no data on failure rates is available, a study by the Small Business Administration’s Inspector General in 2002, the latest available, said there was no evidence that franchises succeed any more often than independent businesses.
Start-up costs, including leases for space and equipment, range from roughly $5,000 to $10,000 for such low-cost operations as cleaning franchises, to $1 million or more for popular fast-food restaurants. Information on risks and legal pitfalls for franchisees can be found at BlueMauMau.org, an online trade journal.
Photo by carlsbadistan.com.
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Maxwell Garner on July 31st, 2010 10:29 am
I could see the benefit in this. Parents might save the first 18 years of their child’s life for college, but what if their child would rather enter the business world? Instead of paying the tens of thousands of dollars to go to school, that money can be put into starting a business which really has just as much potential as succeeding as a young adult has in succeeding in school.
Angela Shupe on August 1st, 2010 3:32 pm
I can see it. Even if the kids end up not really finding an interest in business at least they gave it a try. I think finding the right path really is about doing the research and simply trying.
electronic security alliances on August 1st, 2010 6:26 pm
It’s good to start from the very least and learn experience from there. If you just graduated and work at that hourly rate, it’s not bad at all. Having a business is much better.
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