The 17 years old businessmen

How many of us look down our noses at the thought of 17 year olds owning a business? The thoughts of ‘they have zero experience in managing a business’, ‘they have no people skills’, ‘they are still children themselves’, ‘they will fail at the first hurdle’. Compared to how many of us cheer and support them into following their dreams and making it a reality?

Let us look into Tom, Mark and Rich’s journey as they turned their little holiday football club into a roaring successful sports coaching company, an online booking software and franchise opportunity over the past 20 years! And Why Onside Coaching feel the younger demographic are perfect for the Onside family.

Whilst studying at Warwickshire college, the three 17 year old men, feeling as proud as punch with their FA level 1 football coaching award in their hand, went out to seek a football coaching job with every leisure centre they knew. Their bubbles were soon burst when they needed their lifeguarding bronze award to work in a leisure centre alongside any job offering. Feeling disheartened, but not defeated, and all 3 having a huge passion for football decided they would run some football holiday courses themselves to see where it could take them.

Before they knew it, they had finished University, they had huge successful holiday courses, they had become a limited company, they were employing people and schools now wanted a piece of the action.

These 3 (now early 20’s) men had started something that was no longer a summer job to earn them a bit of cash. They were delivering physical education curriculum and PPA sessions to school all around Warwickshire and their team had grown to over 20 members of staff. They had several holiday courses also running all over Warwickshire and 1000’s of children on their books all keeping active.

They grew with the times and adapted for schools and became all things multi- sports that covered a huge curriculum spectrum and now had a management team to help support with this. Not only sport but they now have a dance programme and Forest School programme too to suit all school and childcare needs.

As their business grew so did the amount of admin. Something needed to be done about the 500 stamps they were using every holiday course to get booking forms to parents. And the amount of time it took to physically input all parent and child information to create registers. (a whopping 40 hours for just the Summer holidays) Now it takes less than 30 minutes, and 1 part time member of staff to oversee it all.

That’s when Onside Live was born. An online payment system that took all the admin and labour intensive work away from the management team. 6000 customers use it to book, thirty members of staff use the interactive registers and it’s all controlled remotely by one system and one member of staff, part-time.

The launch of a new version of their booking system in 2017 was the “light bulb moment” that we realised others could benefit from using the booking system too, and that’s when the Onside Franchise was born. A franchise model where the booking system could keep the owner of the business on the front line doing the thing that they are good at. Coaching.

So let me ask you again? Is 17 too young to start a business?

The only difference now, is that there is all the support from the Management Team, Franchise Manager and Directors to help you grow. Where these 3 lads did it all by themselves.

If you enjoyed this story, and want to hear about our younger business franchise owners success please read our next story about Lottie