Billionaire Mark Cuban was just 12 when he started his first side hustle, so he knows what it takes to start a business at a young age.
And he says there’s one simple thing you need to keep in mind if you’re going to do it too.
“The key to starting a business when you’re young is doing things you can do yourself — things you can do with your own time,” Cuban recently told a group of high school students from Lewisville High School in Texas.
That means starting with what you know, he noted.
“If it’s a product, do something that’s easy to get and easy to sell,” Cuban said, adding, “It really comes down to one simple thing. The best companies are things you can control and do yourself. That’s what it means to be an entrepreneur.”
The Cuban famously learned early how to run his own business as a teenager, selling garbage bags door-to-door in suburban Pittsburgh. He later sold a variety of collectibles, from baseball cards to coins and stamps, and said the proceeds helped pay for his college tuition.
In each of these cases, Cuban used household items and collectibles accessible to a child and sold them for a profit—following his own advice to today’s teenagers.
Similarly, as a college student, he worked as a bartender and taught dance classes to earn extra money. Cuban later showed his dancing skills publicly by appearing on “Dancing With the Stars” in 2007 and placing 8th in the competition.
“I was a hustler … I was always selling. I always had something to do. It was just my nature,” Cuban said in 2016 during an episode of ABC’s Shark Tank.
Now Cuban says he regularly tells kids and teenagers who want to start their own businesses to do what he did. Build around “something they can make, or some service they can offer to friends, family and neighbors,” he told CNBC Make It in September.
Of course, that’s easier said than done: Starting and expanding your own company successfully is an incredible challenge. According to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, around 20% of new businesses fail within a year of inception.
“Being an entrepreneur and starting a business doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy and suddenly you’ll make a lot of money,” Cuban told students at Lewisville High School. “Being an entrepreneur is the harder way.”
If it were easy, he added, “you would all already do it and come on Shark Tank and take my place.”
It’s hard enough to find something you can control and do yourself. Getting great at it – which is Cuba’s number one rule for making money, by the way – is a lot harder.
It involves extensive research of your business plan and potential competitors, finding funding and creating backup plans to allow flexibility if you need to adjust on the fly, the billionaire previously said.
As long as you don’t mind doing that work, especially after you’ve decided on a business opportunity, a world of opportunity can open up for you, Cuban told high school students.
“If you’re willing to take the initiative and start a business, anything is possible,” he said.
Disclosure: CNBC owns exclusive off-network cable rights to Shark Tank.
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