Erica Swallow wants kids to have the skills to become businesspeople right away, and shares how some kids go on to start their own successful businesses from an early age. I researched it.
A Springfield real estate agent and president of the Springfield Preservation Trust, he wrote a five-book series called “Little Ranchers” about child entrepreneurs.
“I wrote these books to help kids understand that entrepreneurship is a potential career path,” she said. “I didn’t know that until I went to university.”
The Little Launchers series is illustrated by Li Zeng, and each book profiles a real-life child entrepreneur who discovered a problem, devised a solution, and turned that solution into a business. Masu. This series has been translated and is currently on sale in China.
Ms. Swallow will read from her fifth book, “Gabby Invents the Perfect Hair Ribbon,” at the Richard Salter Storrs Library in Longmeadow on Tuesday from 3:30 to 4:15 p.m. This book is about Gabby Goodwin, who said this at the age of five. She was annoyed because every time she danced, the hair clip she was wearing would fall out of her hair.
“She and her mother sat down and designed a better hair tie,” Swallow said.
Gabby took her new and improved barrette and began selling it. Now in middle school, she runs an accessories company and continues to see problems in her life as potential opportunities.
Swallow himself discovered the problem that led him to become a writer. As an editor and features writer for her website Mashable, she used to see a lot of headlines like: It was like, “Wow, a kid starts his own business.”
“When you see the same headline dozens of times, it’s no longer unusual,” she said.
But it got her thinking about child entrepreneurs and how they got involved in business in the first place.
“We wanted to make this not so unusual and normalize the business for kids,” she said.
Swallow researched existing books on entrepreneurship for kids and found books primarily about how to start a lemonade stand.
“It may be good for learning basic business concepts, but it doesn’t teach you how to solve problems,” she said.
That’s the key to good entrepreneurship, she said.
Swallow researched 60 different children who started businesses and settled on five in her series as the best examples for others.
“We want to challenge kids to look at a problem and write, draw, and find a way to find a solution,” she said.
Currently a real estate agent at Coldwell Banker in Longmeadow, Swallow began her career in marketing and journalism after earning degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, and Simmons College. His last degree was a master’s degree in writing for children.
Although not all of the children she investigated in the Little Ranchers series are as young as Gabby, all of the businesses featured in the series are still active. She found that children naturally try to solve problems.
For example, in “Jason Saves the World”, Jason drops his cell phone and cracks the screen. Rather than tell his mother what he had done, he went online, found the screen and repaired his own phone.
At about the same time, he became aware of the problem of recycling electronics, or rather the lack of recycling.
“He learned that old electronic equipment such as computers and monitors was being shipped to India, where it was being piled up in huge piles,” Swallow said. “He started a business where he bought old cell phones, repaired them, and resold them so they wouldn’t go to waste.”
Solve two problems with one solution.
