“The key to starting a business while you're young is to do what you can do, what you can do with your time,” Cuban recently told a group of high school students at Louisville High School in Texas.
That means starting with what you know, he noted.
“If it's a product, it should be something that's easy to get and sell,” Cuban said. “At the end of the day, it comes down to one simple thing: The best business is… It's something you can control and do yourself.'' What is an entrepreneur? ”
Cuban famously started learning his business early, as a pre-teen selling trash bags door-to-door in a Pittsburgh suburb. He then sold a variety of collectibles, from baseball cards to coins and stamps, and used the proceeds to pay for college, he said.
In each of these cases, Cuban followed his own advice to today's teens by using household items and collectibles available to children and selling them for a profit.
Similarly, during his college years, he worked as a bartender and taught dance lessons to earn additional money. Cuban then appeared on “Dancing with the Stars” in 2007, where he publicly displayed his dancing skills and finished 8th in the competition.
“I was a hustler…I was always pitching. There was always something going on. That was my nature,” Cuban said on a 2016 episode of ABC's “Shark Tank.” .
Now, Cuban said she regularly tells children and teens looking to start their own businesses to do what she did. He told CNBC Make It in September that the company will build around “things we can make or services we can provide to our friends, family and neighbors.”
Of course, this is easier said than done. Successfully starting and growing your own business is notoriously difficult. According to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, approximately 20% of new businesses fail within one year of launch.
“Being an entrepreneur and starting a business is not easy, and it's not like you're going to suddenly make a lot of money,” Cuban told the Louisville High School students. “Being an entrepreneur is a more difficult path.”
If it were easy, he added, “you guys would already be doing it and be on 'Shark Tank' and take my place.”
It is very difficult to find things that you can control and do. By the way, this is the first rule of making money for Cubans, but it is much more difficult to get good at it.
This includes extensively researching your business plan and potential competitors, creating a flexible backup plan should you need to raise capital and make adjustments on the fly, the billionaire says. mentioned earlier.
As long as you're willing to put in the effort, a world of opportunity can open up to you, especially after choosing a business opportunity, Cuban told the high school students.
“If you have the initiative and the desire to start a business, anything is possible,” he said.
Disclosure: CNBC owns the exclusive off-network cable rights to “Shark Tank.”
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