Be Imaginative and Grown Up

One of the hardest things to do as a teenager is to get a job. Trust me. I have been there and done that. Living in a village I was at a disadvantage already with not many jobs going and a lot of people wanting them. The main thing these days is the issue of the law. Anyway, I won't bore you with it, that is for another post, but shopkeepers and employers can't be bothered with the hassle. if you want a paper round before you have finished compulsory education you have to get a working permit, which requires all sorts of stuff from a shopkeeper. Blah blah blah. However there are still lots of jobs which people will employ people from the age of 13 to do little things for them.

For example you may find a gardener who needs a hand on a Saturday or the milkman or whatever. What I am trying to say is don't be closed minded about what you are going to do. It doesn't pay. Trust me.

The other point I wanted to mention was that you need to persevere with your job. For example helping out with pot washer at you local pub could eventually lead to you being a waiter or waitress or even a bar steward. There is a natural progression with every job which moves through the ranks as you become older and more experienced and more trusted by your employer. Let me explain to you my path through my teenager career if you like:

I started as a Sunday Paperboy, earning just £4 a week. After 2 months I had been moved onto a Monday to Saturday round which was £16. I was progressing slowly and surely. After about 6 months of doing that I was asked to help out on a Saturday morning putting the papers up for the paperboys. This was 2 hours work at £3.50 an hour. Rubbish, I know, but from there I got to know how the shop worked. How to work the tills, how to put out the papers etc etc. I kept asking the boss, not so I annoyed him but so I was persistent and keen, if there was a job going in the shop.

Until one day, at the glamorous age of 17, he offered me a job part-time working behind the counter. So there was £23 from my paper round and early Saturday morning, plus 8 hours a week at £5 and I was making £63 a week from my part time job. Not bad eh?

That was just with a little bit of persistence and good hard work that got me to a stage where I could earn enough money to fund a car and a girlfriend. What I am trying to say is approach any job, no matter how boring it may be to start off with, in a mature and proffesional and also positive manner. Don't be the lad that does 3 Sunday rounds and then doesn't bother turning up again. Follow that path.

Jargon Busting - Revenue and Profit

First of all I would like to clear up a few keywords. There is lots of jargon that comes with business and it's quintessential that you understand what everything means, so you can translate it back into English and use the information it comes with usefully.

The first is the difference between revenue and profit.

Now they both concern making money, but they are slightly different. Revenue is the total money which is made from a sale, while to profit is the money which is made on top of all the original payments for purchasing, manufacturing etc. For example, lets say we have just sold a bar of chocolate to somebody. Say we bought it for 30p a unit for a wholesale market and have sold it on at 50p a unit. That is a total revenue of 50p, as that is the amount of money that we have taken for that sale. OK. We had a chocolate bar, now we have a 50p coin. However we paid 30p for that originally, so not all of it is profit, so we do seller price - the bought price: 50p - 30p, and we get 20p. This is the amount of money we have made from selling the item, so that is the profit. This is one of the most simple, yet fundamental concepts which we have to understand in business, as everything requires us to be making a profit, but we can only be making a profit once all of our expenditure costs have been covered.

To break even, as it termed as, where you balance the amount you paid for a unit to the price you sell it for, we would have had to have sold the chocolate bar for 30p. we have not lost any money on the sale, and we have not made any either.

This is an important point to consider when choosing a process of making money, or when pricing up items which are to be sold. I would suggest, think of how much money you would like to make off the sale and add that onto the initial item cost, and how much you would pay for it, and then find somewhere in between. A standard guide is a mark-up price (mark-up is the price which the item is sold at) of 125% - 150% of the purchasing and manufacturing costs, but we will go into a lot more detail at some stage in the future.

So we have covered the basic principals of what this all boils down to. Making Money. I hope this has cleared the waters, rather than disturbed the silt. 

Thank you for reading. For any furthr questions please email me at peachy146@gmail.com.