An 18-year-old wants to sell phones and tablets, but his father demands he study medicine instead. Evan Carmichael suggests negotiating a summer trial like Michael Dell did: convince your dad to let you try for three months, and if it fails, go back to school. Focus on selling to businesses, not individuals, to make money faster.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's video, I'm going to answer a question from one of my readers, Cave Wilson, who's a YouTube viewer. And his question is, he is an 18-year-old entrepreneur and he wants to become a business owner. He wants to sell smartphones and tablets. And his father wants him to become a doctor and go to school and, and become a physician. So he's asking my advice on what to do next. So my best advice for you is actually look at the story of Michael Dell. Now, when I was starting my business, I found a lot of inspiration from famous entrepreneurs, and that gave me ideas for what to do and also the motivation to keep going and keep trying new things. So Dell's story is very similar to what you're going through right now. He was in university and studying to become a physician And that's what his parents wanted him to do. His father was an orthodontist, and he really wanted to not do that and start his own business selling computers. And so what he convinced his father to do was he would take one summer off of school. From May to August, he would work on his business and try to get it going and generate sales. And the deal was, if he made a success of himself between May and August, he could leave school and run his business. If he wasn't successful, he'd have to go back to school in September and become a physician. Now fortunately for Dell, it worked out and his business took off and now he's one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world. So maybe you can replicate that success as well. I would talk to your father and see if you can make something similar. So from May to August, work on your business, pour everything you can into it, and if it works out, be able to keep doing that. For you to have the biggest chance of success, I would say try to start finding a customer. So if you're selling smartphones and tablets, who's gonna buy this? And try to go to business, I would think, as a stronger market than consumers. Consumers could be one-off, a lot harder to make individual sales, where a business owner, if you can solve a real need for them, could buy lots of your products, lots of inventory from you, and can basically put you in the business. So I'd invest a lot of time and energy. I wouldn't try to spend a lot of money, but go out and put a lot of your sweat into it. Blood, sweat, and tears to get the business going and try to get into the business market to generate some immediate cash flow and start growing your business. So I hope that helps. I'd love to hear everybody's thoughts and feedback. Please give the video a thumbs up and leave a comment under the video too. It helps me keep going and making more of these videos. So thank you and stay tuned for the next episode.
