Being an entrepreneur since a very young age, I can trace the story back to where it all started, The Columbus School. Current entrepreneurs and people that sell in the school face tremendous challenges when it comes to the financial aspect of their businesses. Nearly with every example, these small entrepreneurial ventures don’t end up being a huge company because of the lack of resource management education that entrepreneurs get.

“Incompetent or inexperienced management that made a series of poor decisions leading up to the company’s inability to pay its creditors is the number one cause for companies to file bankruptcy,” Morris Pearl, Chairman of the Patriotic Millionaires Group said in a Quora response. The potential TCS students have with their products and the way they manage distribution, sales and inventories are admirable but the way they manage the money they make is not.

“All my income was for me because my parents supported that I wanted to do a business for myself…until today all my income is for me and I just save it for myself, for whenever I want to buy something,” said Maria Jose Rico, TCS 11th grader and founder of Le Rouge Bakery when asked about where her profits went after a good month of sales. Students are doing the “easy” part wrong. In the business world, the hardest part is coming up with a commercial, well-structured product, that sells for a good price and appeals to the masses. The “easy” part is following financial plans for where the money is going and what to do with it to make the business grow; that part has already been invented.

Many point fingers toward the school and blaming the entity for not having enough resources to refer to when managing money for a business. “Most of the times I don’t know what to do. I spend it or save it for future stuff, they don’t teach us that at school,” said Matias Arango, TCS 11th grader, and entrepreneur.

Students should not be saving up the money or spending it on random stuff; they should cautiously and in a structured manner, re-invest some of their money in their “companies” to make them grow.

Even though the internet has tons of reliable sources to educate young adults in the financial aspect of business, it is of the utmost importance for TCS as a school to intervene. The Columbus School is characterized by having a modern education curriculum, open for students to learn in Project Based Learning classes and alternatives like electives and VHS (Virtual High School). In this efforts, the school should include financial and business related options for young entrepreneurs to choose from on next year’s curriculum, implementing things like an Entrepreneurial Seminar and more PBL classes related to business.