This is part two of a series reviewing a lecture by Stephen Beck at the 2011 Family Economics Conference, which will be part of a larger ongoing series reviewing other speaking sessions at this conference and at other conferences.
Stephen Beck is an experienced entrepreneur with a background in farming, construction, and numerous online businesses.
After reviewing the pros and cons of having a family business, Mr. Beck addressed the question:
Can children contribute to a family business?
Children can definitely contribute. Here is a list of numerous examples that Mr. Beck mentioned where they employed their children in their family businesses and cottage industries.
"When our kids were young, they worked in our business Curriculum Connection. They did things like receiving inventory and stocking shelves. They helped create media products like when I would give a talk that was recorded, they would duplicate it to CDs."
"Answer email and phone calls. Your kids can answer email a lot better than you can. And they do a great job on the phone. If you have a business that requires any kind of thinking skills, do not answer your own phone. That is a huge time vacuum. Don't answer your own email. Don't answer your own phone. Let somebody filter that and you answer just the ones that you need to."
- Data entry
- Quickbooks
- Filing "All the things you hate to do that they can do."
- Shipping "My daughter was a shipping queen."
- Updates to the websites
- Audio/video recording
- And the list goes on…
Steve continued with some thoughts on how to employ and pay children.
"It's a great deal, because it's extra money for them, and I can employ some of them part-time and some of them full-time."
"Somebody described to me that automation is anything that you don't have to do. A techie will spend hours trying to figure out how to automate something, when you could pay somebody $5/hr to do it. To me, that's automation. I've got a whole family of magic elves, and things just happen."
"We started when they were 7 or 8, and you can even start earlier – sometimes you just need to be creative. Homeschool families have sometimes gotten a bad rap on paying their kids next to nothing. If you want to turn your kids sour on entrepreneurialism, pay them $2 an hour and say "it's all in the family." I pay my kids enough so that they're not tempted to go work at Subway. We pay them well because we value them highly. However you want to run your family economy – even if you want to pool it all – just make sure they get a reward for their effort. Pay them a percentage, or pay them in dollars, but do something to treat them with respect."
Look for more insights on family business from Stephen Beck's lecture in part three of this series!
