It takes a few years longer, but hiring my kids to work with me has been the best decision I’ve ever made (not to mention the tax advantages)…It takes about 15 years of dedicated work and mentoring, but in the end, the quality is unsurpassed. My wife and I are raising entrepreneurs!
Some home schoolers are accused of raising socially inept teens. While I have not seen this to be true, no one is accusing me of this. Sometimes I do get comments about child labor laws, but lucky for me they don’t apply to your own children. I know, because I tried using that line when I was a teen.
So meet David, my 16 year old sales rep. Born and raised in our house; he started his first business managing a bee farm about four years ago (still going strong), builds incline stretching platforms for local physical therapy offices in Charlotte NC, and is in the process of rebuilding his bathroom from the studs up (new tub, cabinets, walls, tile, plumbing, etc.) He’s a problem solver, enjoys building, math, science, and gourmet cooking; on weekends we mountain bike together, along with his three younger brothers. One day he hopes to run his own bed and breakfast – perhaps in the nearby Blue Ridge mountains. In the mean time he is learning about business. He sells online classes for me, is studying and working with my accounting system, and attends events I speak at, to assist with logistics, AV, and product sales, while learning to interact with business people. Most recently he attended a demand generation event in the mid-Atlantic and closed his entire table of eight on moving forward with a security assessment (to be performed by the sponsoring reseller). We’re looking forward to a great year together!
© 2011, David Stelzl
High Tech Business Growth 
This is totally inspiring Dave.
Although my two daughters are still in the planning stage, well, I’m not even married yet, I believe the direction you’ve set with home-schooling and early business education is amazing.
I sure don’t want my kids the way I grew up under hard-core communism where the teaching was that my sole life purpose was to serve Big Brother, and living beyond subsistence was a disease spread by the “rotten, immoral, greedy imperialist pigs”.
Although the interesting thing was that the very people who were doing the preaching were living way above subsistence.
It seems that even in the all-equal communism, some are more equal than the others.
So, you should be a very proud papa for raising such brilliant kids. Keep up the great work.
Thanks for the encouraging comments Tom…we’re exciting about the future with this!