How I Made $3,000 in 3 Days as a High Schooler – Lessons for Student Entrepreneurs
It was my senior year of high school and I was running for Central Region Vice President of DECA (a high school organization for business-ey kids, yes you can tell the nerds early).
I needed to raise somewhere in the neighborhood of $4,000 in order to cover the cost of campaign booths, flyers, giveaways, etc. Both Illinois DECA and some local high school’s contributed to the campaign, but I was left with around $3,000 to raise. The only problem, I didn’t have a job and I didn’t want to ask my parents. I knew that running a regular fundraiser selling coffee or candy wouldn’t raise nearly the amount of money needed. So I launched a different plan.
It was 2015 and portable power banks were all the rage. Everyone now had smartphones, but the battery life on these things was still quite lacking. I realized most stores were selling these things for around $20.
I went to my favorite website on the internet, Alibaba and realized I could buy these things for about $2/piece. I drafted up some flyers and got started. But instead of selling them to students myself I decided to sell them as a fundraising opportunity for other schools.
I made the pitch. I emailed every high school with a DECA chapter and told them my story. Then I offered to sell them chargers for $5/piece and supplied them with all the marketing materials they needed. Then I waited.
It worked. By the end of the week, I had pre-sold 1,000 chargers to different schools around the state. I then went ahead – ordered the chargers and waited. A few weeks later, the chargers arrived and I delivered them to the schools. I didn’t end up winning that election, but it was a great experience none the less.
The story should have ended there, but alas in my foolishness it didn’t. A year later I tried dropping out college to pursue the business full time. I thought maybe I could emulate a company like Popcorn Palace and do large scale fundraisers.
I built out a website. Made lots of calls. And sent hundreds of cold emails. I didn’t get to a point where I made any money. A few months later, I landed an internship at Kammok and shut the whole thing down. Even with all of that, I learned a few lessons.
- Quit while you’re ahead.
It’s important to recognize when it’s time to quit. Sometimes you need to leave well enough alone. I should have left the charger business when I left high school. Instead, I spent the next six months trying to find a way to make that work. On a similar note, after two years of running the sailing club, I knew that it was time to move on. As much fun as it was, I had to pass on the torch. It was tough moving on. But the day after I quit, I ended up landing an internship at Total Men’s. We seem to value not quitting a whole lot, but quitting at the right time is equally important. To this day I have 100 power banks that are sitting around – they are taking up valuable space and time that could be dedicated to something else.
- Scaling is tough.
The way I look at businesses has completely changed since this little venture. It’s easy to make money once, it’s hard to make money consistently. You might have the best cobbler recipe on the block, but once you leave the neighborhood there’s a lot more competition.
I see this all the time. I have friends who think they have a killer idea because they found one customer. The hard part is getting the next 1000 customers. Starting a phone repair business is a great side hustle, but as soon as you start hiring employees and running advertisements, the margins disappear.
- The “why” matters.
To quote Shoeless Joe, the first book I was supposed to read in high school, but never did, “If you build it they will come.” This holds true with many things, but in a lot of situations having a good product isn’t enough. The why behind what you are doing matters just as much. When I was selling chargers to raise money for a campaign, people were more likely to open my emails. As soon as I lost the why, I became just another salesperson vying for the time already busy teachers.
