New Venture Lab: Equipping Christian Entrepreneurs

A few weeks ago, I wrote about an exceptional young man I had met that stepped in to run a family business brokerage/mergers and acquistions business at only 18 years old (click here to read the post.) 

Since many of you may want to know more how this young man's faithful father and mother prepared him to be an entrepreneur, I asked him for more details.  What follows is this young man's testimony about his entrepreneurial preparation...

My parents had a vision to teach us practical business skills. It all started with our wholesale tree nursery when my sister and I were 10 and 8 years old respectively. We planted over 3,000 seedling trees as part of a multi-year plan to financially profit and grow in entrepreneurial skills. As a family we learned how to work hard, serve customers, close sales, and many other practical, hands-on business skills. It was a family project whose demands quickly outgrew all of our expectations, considering that none of us knew anything about tree nurseries. We mostly sold to local landscape contractors along with some retail sales to homeowners. My father helped with our sales effort to the Costco national purchasing office, which helped us land an order for a couple of hundred trees for Costco Wholesale. We needed some extra help during tree digging season, so we hired home-schooled friends who worked with my sister and me for a few weeks each spring. We made colossal mistakes in our tree nursery, but it was a fabulous learning experience and we came away with some profit in later years.

My father and mother specifically wanted to impart practical experience to us. Although most of that business mentoring came from my father, my mother was highly influential in supporting and training me in indirect ways. While my father desired to bring me into his business, he did leave it completely open if the Lord led me in another direction. He encouraged me that I could go pursue another vocation, but he wanted me to start working with him in his business brokerage/M&A advisory practice in my early teen years. His view was that I should work with him for a little while even if I was planning to move onto another vocation.

To give some background, my father was 38 years old in 1991 when he was the vice president of a bank. He wanted freedom and increased opportunity that would be afforded by being a business man instead of a corporate manager. He had become disenchanted with the bank’s changing culture as the organization became highly centralized. My father decided to start a business on his own by starting a business brokerage practice. This profession was chosen partially because my grandfather was a business broker for a few years after his corporate career, which makes me a third generation business broker. He started selling small businesses and slowly moved into larger businesses as he gained experience. My mother and sister were a part of the business in limited support capacities.

Since I was home educated, it was a natural extension of my studies to get some “real world” experience by being my father’s shadow when he worked. It started with him taking me traveling with him to business meetings around the state. Of course I was right by his side in the meetings which were usually with company owners who were selling their business. I didn’t understand it all, but I started to understand more and more as I learned his professional demeanor, business protocol, and terminology. Then as we drove, he would explain to me about the meeting and “debrief” from the mission. It was an incredible experience for a 14 year-old to sit at a closing table by his father as a dozen attorneys and accountants were finalizing documents on a multi-million dollar acquisition by a public company.

The next stage included working in the office doing general office administration, research, and preparing business reviews. A business review is the thorough documentation of all aspects of a business including financial analysis, company history, products/services, and industry review, among other things. He felt comfortable giving me free reign to work on projects because he would be reviewing the work before it was released to clients. It was a safe environment to make and learn from mistakes.

Starting when I was about 15 years old, I would attend to professional educational conferences with my dad. We traveled around the country to take educational classes and workshops. I soon became endeared to many of the gray-haired professionals who would see me in classes each conference. Now many of those same men offer advice when I encounter a difficult situation on a business deal. I highly value the networks and relationships with older men that I started to develop under the wings of my father.

Business brokerage is an exciting and challenging profession and I found that I quite enjoyed it. At some point I decided that I liked the business and wanted to go into business with my father for several years at least. From the opportunity of being part of the family business, I met the requirements for becoming certified in the business brokerage profession and became the youngest person to ever hold that designation. I want to interject here that I say this not out of boasting, but rather to encourage other young men and women that many things can be accomplished at a young age that are contrary to the status quo. As I Corinthians 4:7 teaches, we cannot boast because we don’t have anything that we have not received.

About this time I was finishing up my high school curriculum and started looking at various options for gaining a business degree via distance learning which would allow me the time flexibility to still work in the business. Soon my education plans were put on hold, when my father was diagnosed with cancer. I was almost 18 years old when he died only a couple of months after discovering his illness. After finding out about his cancer, he told me that I was not obliged to operate the business, but if I wanted to I was ready. I realized that I might fail, but I had some projects to finish out so I went to work. Some new projects were landed and solely by God’s grace, I am still here today. Some told me I would probably fail, but I am very grateful for those who encouraged me. My mother was especially encouraging when she saw I was having a tough day. The first couple of years were incredibly profitable, mostly because of the carry-through momentum of some projects. This carry-through momentum is what got me through the first year. It is still a learning curve as I have built a pipeline of business. By God’s grace, business is good and cash flow has been strong. Our family has other sources of income that could have been tapped if the business wouldn’t have been profitable. In retrospect, that was a great mercy that I didn’t have a pressing need to reach a certain profit level to support the family.

I have continued pursuing professional education courses, but I found myself wanting a better foundation in finance, accounting, economics and general business. A very young professional without a college degree poses quite a hurdle for many prospective clients. I have reached the point that most don’t ask my age or about my formal education, but there are still the doors that close because I don’t have a degree. So I started researching many different options and found that Heriot-Watt University/Edinburgh Business School (Edinburgh, Scotland) will allow individuals without an undergraduate degree to enroll in their MBA program on the condition that they can maintain their grades. This school was founded in 1821 and has a large distance learning program in addition to 7,000 students on campus. This distance learning program brings an MBA degree program across the Atlantic to my home and office with the flexibility to fit my schedule. The program fit my goals very closely, so I enrolled this past summer. Lord willing, I hope to graduate in about two years depending on the course load.

It would be nice to share with you that my introduction to business was a perfectly planned training process by my parents, or that I have some fabulous story about starting a company. But it wasn’t and I don't. It is about Godly parents who were making mistakes and learning along the way, yet had a heart for training their children. Much of the training from my parents was just spending time with them. It wasn’t a highly structured plan, but it was more a vision for practical learning. As a family we ran a political campaign, managed the construction of six houses, and operated a bed and breakfast, which are a few more examples of practical learning experiences that we were part of.

A couple of things my father always said to me about business were, “never let your age hinder or restrict you”, and “you can afford to take a higher risk of failure when you don’t have a family”, so he urged me to push myself in my early years.

- A grateful son