What Is the Best Age to Start a Business?

Most people I meet that want to start a business have a set of barriers that they need to get over before they can take action. Those barriers include the fear of being unsuccessful, waiting for a great and unique idea, lack of funding, or simply the unwillingness to take a risk. Although these reasons are always the same, one’s perspective towards them change with age.

So what’s the best age to start a business?

I would say Mid-20’s. I remember some 4-5 years ago I was working in an IT start-up, where everybody from the least employee to the owners were below age 30. The owners of that IT company are now millionaires (they did it before turning 30). Looking back, I realize that starting a business in the mid twenties comes with a set of advantages which where not so obvious at that time. I can now recognizing some of the advantages of starting so early. Let’s discuss a couple of them:

Reasons to Start a Business while Your Young

1) The lack of experience is conducive to open-mindedness and creativity. I mean if you ask me now to start a project, I will probably follow the same patterns that I picked up from years of work experience. This might get things done but it definitely doesn’t allow for experimentation which is usually good for entrepreneurs because it causes you to stumble upon better ways of doing things.

2) Your lack of experience will also cause you to be a more ready learner, to stay up to date, and to make the most of what you know. This is one of the interesting things about the human mind. When we are forced to learn to do things on our own, we are usually more inclined to keep learning. Some of my professors at the University did not learn this way and they would often teach methods that were outdated.

3) Your youth allows for more failures. Yes, this is a good thing. As strange as it sounds, if you are to fail (and most of us do) it’s better to do it while young – it gets you some experience for the latter and the failures are easier to overcome.

4)Young entrepreneurs don’t have many responsibilities yet so they are at liberty to take some high risk, high reward opportunities. The lack of family to support allows younger entrepreneurs to work late hours and to focus more on their business.

5) Young entrepreneurs usually have less egos and more desire to make things happen. They are usually striving for acceptance and accomplishment. This is what motivates them in the first place.

6) Young entrepreneurs still have the support of mommy and daddy (and maybe even some older brothers or sisters). Therefore, you can throw your few pennies into your business and eat on mommy and daddy’s dime (lol). Plus they’re is probably secretly expecting you to fail anyway. This takes some pressure off of you – especially if you do fail.

So, should we prefer the wisdom we’ll have as an older entrepreneur over the creativity and freedom we get as a younger one? I would say emphatically “NO” but I would like to see your thoughts on the subject in Ben’s comments section. Also, check out Ben’s post Is College Necessary for Entrepreneurs

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About the Author
Cristian Dorobantescu is a part time entrepreneur from Eastern Europe that started blogging back in 2005, with his Small Business Entrepreneur blog (Energybyte). He enjoys writing about real life Entrepreneurship experiences, small businesses and knowledge resources for any entrepreneur wanna be.

See Christian’s original post on this topic here.