I’m starting to think I ought to get my daughter Maggie to be my business mentor. She has better instincts than her mom and none of the baggage.  

Maggie, now almost 15, demonstrated these instincts at the tender age of seven when she started her first business. Like many seven-year-olds, she liked both eating candy and painting her fingernails. She hatched a plan to open a business called Sugar and Style where girls from the neighborhood could buy candy while getting a manicure. The young girls in our Midlothian cul-de-sac far outnumbered the boys so she understood her demographics.  

Maggie is an extremely enthusiastic kid so I’m used to the excited phone calls where 10 sentences of detail spill out before I even realize who is on the end of the line. As this business plan developed, I received one of these phone calls with a request to come home IMMEDIATELY because she had noticed that the PaperTown store at the intersection of Huguenot and Robious roads had closed. She thought this would make an ideal location for her new business venture. Seeing this as a teaching moment, I explained that the owner of the shopping center would charge her rent for the space. She asked me how much, I guessed and said $2,000 a month. She told me that was stupid because she wouldn’t make enough money for herself if she had to pay a landlord $2,000 a month. She had the balance sheet logics down.