Meet the teen entrepreneurs juggling homework with running a business

Avoiding school work, playing loud music, hanging out with friends or running a profitable business – which of these sounds most like a typical teenage pastime?

It’s obvious which category 17-year-old Ollie Forsyth, who springs out of bed at 5am every day to work on his business empire, falls into.

Forsyth’s entrepreneurial talent became obvious when he was six and began charging his parents 20p for a cup for tea or coffee in the morning. “If they wanted it re-heated, it would be a further 20p – this happened most days,” Forsyth says. And his parents were right not to quibble about the price. At just 13, Forsyth launched his first proper business, online gift shop Ollie’s Shop, making around £5,000 in the first few months.

He took success in his stride, but couldn’t resist making the odd strategic investment. “I had never really spent money, and now I always wanted to make more,” he says. “I bought a classic car from Belgium with my brother and my dad. It just sat in the garage doing nothing, but it is going up in value.”

Now Forsyth is adding to Ollie’s Shop, his flagship venture that he runs with help from his mum, with a raft of new business ideas. He recently launched an online magazine, and plans to start a digital marketing agency for startups in September.

His ambition is to emulate his role model Richard Branson, and one day create an international group similar to Virgin. Speaking about entrepreneurship, he says: “You can choose when to work and you get to meet some pretty amazing people,” he says. “It is going really strong. I thought I was a failure at school, and I was quite badly bullied. It feels pretty good to be where I am right now.”

Forsyth is by no means alone in his decision to start a business before he hits his twenties – there has been a marked increase in the number of young entrepreneurs starting up in recent years. However, most research does not take teen business owners into account, lumping those of school age with the under 30s.

Bill Morrow, co-founder and director of Angels Den, an angel-led crowdfunding platform, says that out of every 100 pitches he hears, about five tend to be from teenage entrepreneurs. Their relative scarcity means they tend to stick in investors’ minds, Morrow says, but teens may struggle to win over angels who are after a proven business model.

“You can be in your teens or 50s but if you haven’t proven the business model then that is a black mark,” he says. “The bad news is because they haven’t got the networks and the experience to do the market research to prove there’s a demand, and they haven’t got the sales people on board, [teenagers’] products will be seen as slightly more naive.”

However, it isn’t all bad news for the under-20s – sometimes a lack of experience can work in your favour. Young entrepreneurs will try things that more seasoned workers dismiss, says Morrow, and this can lead to brilliant results.

James Anderson, 18, is the co-founder of Space Lounges, a collection of “next generation coffee lounges”. Anderson was sitting in a chain coffee shop when he had his lightbulb moment. “Suddenly I realised how dreadful the experience was. You enter, you queue for 15 minutes to place your order, you go upstairs. There are dirty tables, rubbish WiFi and sometimes impolite staff. I wrote down all the problems I had on that day.”

Anderson’s answer, along with 15-year-old co-founder George Streten and 18-year-old director of finance Alex Waterhouse, is to use a mobile app in self-contained pods to banish queueing and allow customers to access menus and interact with one another.

“We have been working on it for the past 18 months,” he says. “We were all still at school when we started – I was halfway through my A-levels and then I decided to drop out.” It took several months of persuasion for Anderson – who learned to code at the age of seven – to persuade his parents that leaving school was a good idea. Co-founder George is still balancing the pressures of revising for GSCEs with running a startup. On top of this, Space Lounges has just been accepted into tech startup incubator JLAB, which is run by John Lewis.

“The biggest challenge for us is actually managing our time. We don’t have all the pressures of things like a family but we have a lot of other pressures,” Anderson says. “I have no regrets at all [about starting the business]. You are never going to be fully ready and the best way to start is to get yourself out there. I have made a lot of mistakes and have learned from them.”

“The reception from the public has been amazing – we have had hundreds of positive comments on social media,” Anderson adds.

Most teenagers have grown up with social media and smartphones, and some young people are turning their knowledge of the latest technologies to their advantage.

Sarah McBride, a student in her first year at Bath University, started doing freelance work in May last year after an election candidate asked her to run their social media campaign. “It was then that I realised I could do things for myself, and it was really good fun as well,” the 18-year-old explains. “Our generation has grown up with a smartphone attached to our hands, so social media is second nature to me. I realised the gap in the market – there’s not many people my age that realise they can turn their ability to use social media into a business.”

Currently doing an internship at the Navada Group, McBride is cultivating a list of clients to help her finance her time at university studying international management with French. She says the startup world is “very accessible” to young people, and her age hasn’t held her back.

“I wouldn’t shout about my age when I am looking for clients because I don’t want to put them off or make them think it’s not a serious business,” she says. “I have always tried to find different ways of doing things – I always like to not follow traditional paths.”

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