Becoming an Entrepreneur at 10 Years Old

I grew up as (and still am) the youngest of 7 siblings. My parents, both retired now, were public school teachers in rural Midwest American school districts for most of their careers. This meant that there wasn’t an abundance of wealth in the family during childhood. That’s not to say my siblings and I didn’t get what we needed; quite the opposite. Somehow, my parents made it work. We had a roof, beds, and regular home-cooked meals to grow up with. Though if you were to ask my older siblings, I was downright spoiled compared to what they grew up with.

Though I may not have grown up with money, I grew up with friends. This was a time and place where the typical evening after school consisted of running around town until you found out where your friends were, if they didn’t show up on your doorstep first, and getting into whatever fun shenanigans sounded like a great idea on that particular day, until my dad did that piercingly loud finger-in-the-mouth whistle which could be heard from all corners simultaneously of the 1 square mile town I grew up in. Then we knew playtime was over and dinner time was beginning.

It was these friends though who inadvertently equipped me to start my first business at just 10 years old. One friend, in particular, who had such fancy things at the time as cable tv and dial up internet. It wasn’t until a couple years later that I would experience the shill ear-piercing tones of dial up in my own home for the first time, or that gut-wrenching feeling of everything freezing in my MMORPG I played in middle school THE MOMENT I entered the dungeon to fight the scary monsters, when my mother picked up the home phone to make a call. The internet and the phone didn’t play well together in those days.

Back on point, one of my “fancy” friends had these peculiar collectibles called “Pokèmon Cards.” I didn’t know much about them at first, really only three things. First, that they were based off of some TV cartoon which had just started airing in the United States that year. Second, that a bunch of the kids in my town of less than 1,000 people were getting into them. And third, once I saw them…I just HAD to have more! Fortunately, my fancy friend’s parents would buy him these cards on the regular, and he just happened to have about 20 of them he didn’t mind giving me.

Just as in the TV show, every kid’s goal with those cards was “Gotta catch’em all!” and so my friend had a handful of duplicates that weren’t doing him any good. It would be some time before I was given any allowance for doing certain jobs around the house, and so what was a kid of 10 years old to do with no income and no prospects? Get to work!

I didn’t think of any of what I was going to do as work at the time, and it didn’t hit me until about a decade later when I reached adulthood, that I ended up starting my business the very day I got those cards and gathered with the other neighborhood kids so we could all show off our amazing finds from packs and boxes that the parents had bought. Trading Pokemon cards was common among friend groups, and I wouldn’t count simple trading as running a business, but what came of it was far more than that.

What I ended up doing to reach my ultimate goal of catching them all was full blown entrepreneurship at an age when I couldn’t spell or even say the word, much less understand what it all entailed. Sure I traded cards, and I was able to get more variety that way, but that wouln't be enough to do it.

I’m not sure what prompted me to take the next step in my Pokèmon collecting enterprise. Maybe it was the challenge of something new. Maybe I had played more than enough wiffle ball in the empty grass lot across the street, ridden the merry-go-round enough times that week, or hit the limit of what I could imagine and play out as a secret agent acting out the missions in Goldeneye 007 for N64 with a friend who lived two houses down. Whatever it was, I decided it was time to try something different.

Though I didn’t have internet at the house back then, I did have the original Microsoft Word program. There were many fantastic art tools on there which could be used to create your own designs at 10 years old. There were tools that let you draw straight lines, circles, place and move numbers wherever you wanted, and you could even make words which bent in an arch! With tools like this at my disposal, nothing would hold me back from the goal…..

I spent an evening putting those tools to work to make my goal of collecting every Pokèmon card come true. A few hours later, I had several pages printed and ready to cut out. Behold, on each page, in denominations of 1, 5, 10, and 20, were my very own Pokèbucks!!! Yes, a new currency was created with which to fuel my Pokèmon collecting empire. And it would later become a point of pride for my friends who would come to utilize them to have one of the exceedingly rare 100 denomination of the Pokèbuck in their funds stockpile.

Simply printing these bucks off and cutting them off the page wouldn’t do anything for me though. I had to get them out there, to put them to use. And others had to see value in them as well. So how did that happen?

I recall the first transaction being with my friend Justin. He had quite the collection of cards, and luckily I had one very cool one he wanted. He wanted to trade a few cards to get this one I had, but was willing to trade more away, and apart from the meager collection I started with, I now had a stash of Pokèbucks to barter with. My friend did so wisely see the utility of having these bucks on hand for future transactions.

How it worked was, each card was determined to have a certain value in terms of Pokèbucks based off of 3 main factors. There was rarity (Common, Uncommon, Rare), whether the card was holographic or not, and then the last, and most important, factor was just the sheer coolness of the card. The full value was noted for cards I sold, and then when others wanted to trade in their extra cards for either cards I had, or for Pokèbucks, they were given a slightly lower amount. A buy low, sell high sort of thing; buy wholesale, sell retail. Whatever way you want to think of it.

For perspective, a run of the mill common like a Pidgey could expect to be worth 2 Pokèbucks, where as a holographic Charizard was worth the big 100 Pokèbucks, which some of my friends sought to obtain a home-printed bill of. Come to think of it, with the cards we dealt in back in those days being from the original sets, 100 Pokèbucks for a Base Set holographic Charizard was a pretty sweet deal for them!

Suffice to say, the Pokèbucks rolled out and the cards rolled in. I kept 2 binders filled with plastic pages made for holding trading cards. One binder was my personal collection; Anytime I had acquired a Pokèmon card I’d never had before, it went in binder #1. Binder #2 was FULL of the duplicates I had collected, and was dubbed the trade binder. I would tote that thing around with me on my escapades with friends during our card playing and trading times. And the binders would get more full. It got to be where my friends were buying and selling cards amongst themselves with the Pokèbucks as well; a currency just for kids which our parents had no control over. We were in the club.

Before long I was the kingpin of Pokèmon in town. If someone wanted a card for their collection or to build a play deck with, they knew where to go. Sure, when the other kids’ parents would buy them new packs of cards that were just released, the other kids would have the new stuff before I ever did, but they knew that just meant they’d get more in trade value when they exchanged them with me for all the other cards they wanted. In a town of less than 1,000 people though, there were a dozen kids at max who had Pokèmon cards. I had soon hit the limits of what my local setting could offer in the way of collecting and trading opportunities. But then the school year began, and it was time for middle school.

By now, I had two trade binders, and my backpack was quite heavy. But with a hundred kids who collected Pokèmon within reach instead of a dozen, the opportunities abounded. Before I knew it, Pokèbucks were the school currency among students and I had completed my set of one of every card of the first three generations of Pokemon by the time middle school was over, with a lot of cards leftover that went into the multiple trade binders I had built up, every single card having been obtained without spending so much as a single penny to acquire them (the printer paper and ink for the Pokèbucks having been paid for by my parents, of course).

When high school came around, these endeavors had no importance to me anymore, and my transition to adulthood left my trading empire in the dust. Later on, I would give many cards away as gifts to the children of my six older brothers and sisters who had shown any interest in Pokèmon. Several hundred went that way, but a few thousand remained, stored for who-knows-what in the future. It wasn’t until many years later that I would break them out again, dust of the binder covers, and start selling them off online.

Then shortly later I would go on to write an article about the whole ordeal and shamelessly plug my online store at which I sell sealed and individual Pokemon cards, along with other trading card games such as Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Force of Will, and Digimon at https://traderscorner.tcgplayerpro.com/ at an average of 10% below current market value, in case you were wondering.

But most importantly are the lessons learned as I’ve looked back and reflected on those days as a child, and what has come of it. The experience demonstrates a measure of success in multiple regards.

As an adult with various goals, it just goes to show that reaching those goals is a lengthy process that requires persistence more than anything else. A series of small efforts and actions, one day at a time, with an overall goal driving them. If you had told me as a 10 year old child that I could one day pay for the mortgage of a good house to raise a family in just by wheeling and dealing in trading card games, I would have told you, “What’s a mortgage?”

But seriously, every day that the smallest of achievements is made toward the goal, that day is a success in regard to achieving the goal. We shouldn’t be concerned as much about making things happen now as we are about making the steady progress as we live each day. I think after this story is written and submitted, I’ll look through another binder of cards, and when I list two or three of them online at the aforementioned website for you all to look at and maybe, hopefully purchase, I will have reached my goal of making progress on that today.

As a family man, another lesson I’ve learned which I will keep in mind throughout the years to come, is to notice what my children are doing, and encourage them in it. If I see my 1 year old son someday pulling up Microsoft Word 275, or whatever version of it is available when his motor skills become developed enough to use a computer, and he uses the multiplanar graphic rendering tools to create the 3d projection images which will no doubt be available to us in the future, I will certainly take note of it, and do whatever I can to help him pursue it if he shows interest in it, and especially if he shows aptitude with it as well.

I very much look forward to seeing what that kid can do. This isn’t at all to pat myself on the back as a pre-teen, as by and large I was mostly interested in videogames in my spare time back then along with the outdoor shenanigans with friends, but it just gets me thinking that if a 10 year old can do what I did with little assistance, how much more can my children do if I pay attention to what they enjoy and excel at, and put my full support behind it? Time will tell.

Lastly is that none of this would’ve been possible for me as a child if not for my friend Corbin who gave me the cards in the first place, asking for nothing in return. In fact, those bonds I formed over the years, the great friendships, have made a great many things possible in life. The best way to gain a friend is by being a friend. I am thankful to say that I’ve found myself many times in life in a position where a caring mindset and willingness to be a friend, sometimes to complete strangers, has turned into something no one involved could have predicted over the many years since making these new friends. And these friendships have paid back the efforts made to establish and build them MANY times over.

Being able to celebrate in and share successes in life with friends from all different walks, some of whom have quite literally come back from the brink of self-induced death, is an incredible joy, and one of the things which makes life truly worth living. Being able to inspire others to achieve their dreams, and help guide younger individuals, whether entrepreneurs at 10 years old or not, always ends up being worth whatever amount of time and effort is put into it.