Young Entrepreneurs

I started my first business shortly after turning 19, and my business partner had just turned 18. We had grand visions of making it big and building a skyscraper to hold all of our employees. Our dreams quickly became grounded (in a good way) when we started planning, but dreaming is what it's all about.

While we never really did make all that much money, it did occupy us for a good time and provided us with an extremely valuable life lesson, and showed both my partner and I what we wanted to do with our lives.

At the time we started our first business, we were by far the first of our friends to do anything entrepreneurial. This has changed, and now a good number of my friends are running their own businesses:

• Josh: Ice Cream Igloo in Saskatoon
• Chris: Flat Out Performance in Saskatoon
• Noel: Cubed Productions in Regina
• Chad, Aaron, Brennan: Cab Clothing in Yorkton

I'm actually quite surprised to see all of them (I think) succeeding in Saskatchewan. The SK government needs to do a lot more to promote youth entrepreneurship. Come up with a better grant system, or make it easier for young people to get loans. Even if they lose some money it will promote to the group of people coming up that they want to keep them there, and are willing to help them. This will at least help keep them in the province when they want to start up a business as a more mature adult when it will have a better chance of succeeding.

By offering someone a chance to fail at a young age, it provides them with experience that will make it less likely for them to fail again when they have got more money at stake as an older person. It will create excitement for the high school and university group about owning their own business and when they remember how friendly the government was to them when they were 17 or 21 or whatever, they may be more likely to stick around later.

On another note, the business that myself and my partner are currently developing would be impossible to execute in Saskatchewan due to the government's monopolistic control of liquor sales. Once we get ourselves set up in Alberta, we are going to try to make an inroad into Saskatchewan but I really don't see it happening. I'll let you guys know more about this venture at a later date.