Running a business in the summertime when you and your kids would likely rather be out having fun at the park can be hard but it is also a great opportunity to teach kids a few lessons that will serve them well in like like the value of hard work, how being kinds and going the extra mile can benefit you, and how to perform basic tasks and skills needed to run a successful business. Get your kids to help with your business this summer!
How to Get Your Kids to Help with your Business this Summer
Organization
Kids can be great at helping with organization. This easy task can go a long way in helping you run your business while helping keep kids busy. If you have a type-A personality kid that likes to organize you can take advantage of this personality trait to make it easier to run in the long run.
Order Fulfillment
Kids can help with packaging and mailing orders. If you place thank you cards in orders you can have younger kids doodle on them for a sweet personal touch. This makes kids feel good that they are helping with the family business while keeping them seated instead of running around. Customers often love getting cute little personal touches from the businesses they purchase from. Stuffing envelopes and boxes and taping on labels is an easy task for older kids to do.
Accounting
Teens can benefit from working on accounting by getting an opportunity to learn with real-world applications. Many high schools have accounting classes done with fake invoices and payments while you have the opportunity to teach teens accounting with real money and invoices. Not only can teens learn a lot about money and business while helping with accounting but because it is something you need to do together at least in the beginning this is a great bonding activity. Get a traditional ledger pad to make this process easy. Grab this free expense and budget printable!
Social Media Accounts
Teens are already on social media all the time. Why not have them run your Facebook page, Instagram, and Pinterest accounts? While this will have some learning curve because they must learn how to use social media for business rather than social uses. This can be a great way to teach your child the power of social media while allowing your pages to grow and bring in more potential clients and customers.
Advertising
Kids are naturally creative and make great marketers. Put your kids to work coming up with new marketing strategies to help grow your business. From making images for social media to making fliers and coming up with loyalty programs to increase word of mouth promotion, kids are great at coming up with ideas that you can use for advertising your business through the year. Use their ideas to put together a marketing plan for each season or month to keep them busy and get the creativity flowing.
Brainstorming
Want to get creative and add something new to your business? Kids are great for coming up with new ideas and they can help you brainstorm and plan new products or business opportunities. This is a great way to get your kids to help with your business this summer! When kids help plan new products they get excited to be part of the family business and while you need to work on something else you can challenge your kids to create mock-ups or drawings that you can use in developing new offerings in your business later when you have time to do so. Keep a binder full of the great ideas you guys come up with to pull out when the kids are back at school and you have more time and energy.
Work as an employee
If you have a physical business such as a brick and mortar store or service business you can put your kids to work as employees helping to run the everyday operations. This can be a wide variety of things from storefront cashiers to helping stock the shelves. For many services you can teach your kids to help like a landscaping business can benefit from kids learning how to cut grass or rake leaves while the adults work on other projects. This is a great way to instill a great work ethic into children while helping to keep them busy and learning over the summer.
Start their own business
While it can be great to have the kids help you with your business another great option is to help your kids start their own little business to help them learn important business skills and have a bit of extra money for spending. This can be a completely new business or a section of what you already do to give them the ability to really be part of the family business. Kids can really benefit from the sense of accomplishment that comes from their business being successful and growing with the work they put into it.
The best way to get the kids to help with a business is by getting them involved in the creative process. If you want your child to be an integral part of the company, give them the opportunity and responsibility for creating content that will shape how people think about your product or service. For example, if you’re marketing food products, ask your children what new recipes they would like to see on the menu or where their favorite place is for eating out. They might have some great ideas! Enjoy these ideas on how to get your kids to help with your business this summer!
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