Young Minds

Young Minds

Steve Morris saw an untapped market in teaching kids and teens the ABCs of entrepreneurialism. Now he's gone global.

entrepreneurs by Mark Gordon | Managing Editor

Onetime Atlanta investment banker Steve Morris has had what he calls an entrepreneurial affliction ever since he was a kid growing up near St. Simons Island, Ga., when he ran his own lawn-mowing business.

Still, he never latched on to the right entrepreneurial mentor, someone who could nurture his self-run business hopes and dreams. "I could have done more with my entrepreneurial desires," says Morris. "But I didn't get the basics at home and I didn't get them at school."

So just like any other entrepreneur worth his do-it-yourself moxie, Morris founded a business to solve that problem, with the hope that future like-minded young entrepreneurs wouldn't have to face it. The result was YoungBiz, a Sarasota-based franchise company that sets up mini-learning centers, after-school programs and summer camps worldwide that focus on financial literacy and an entrepreneurial education for children and teenagers.

Even though the business is now more than a decade old, Morris, 49, is leading it through a major growth spurt, both in terms of revenues and locations. On the former, Morris says 30% increases in annual revenues over each of the last three years have placed the company in the high end of a $1 million to $5 million annual revenues range; he declines to elaborate on specific revenue figures.

Meanwhile, the expansion plans are growing rapidly on a global basis. YoungBiz now has a presence in seven countries outside the U.S., including South Korea, England, Indonesia and South Africa. Morris has personally made trips to all those countries, as well several others over the last few years.

International growth is a centerpiece of the company's expansion plans. Franchise agreements are in the works for several Mideast countries, for example, including Turkey, Jordan and Kuwait. Morris has also been working on getting into China for the past three years.

In fact, the latter effort has become something of personal crusade for Morris, as he's seeking a Chinese business partner to work with there, as opposed to simply selling franchise rights.

Morris considers YoungBiz' global ambitions a natural fit for its core product: entrepreneurialism. What better way to help emerging countries and economies outside the U.S., asks Morris, than by preaching the benefits of capitalism and the entrepreneurial spirit?

"Freedom is built on economic changes," says Moore, "and YoungBiz is an exporter of freedom."

With such lofty goals, it's little surprise that the soft-spoken Morris says YoungBiz' growth and future plans all stem from finally finding what he calls his life's passion. It was an epiphany that came after spending a little more than a decade working for Bank South, a regional bank in Atlanta that was bought by Bank of America.

"I'm not saying we need to make every 12-year-old kid an entrepreneur," says Morris. "But we need to educate them about choices."

Entrepreneurial spirit

Morris faced his own choice in 1994, soon after Bank of America bought Bank South. He had become something of an entrepreneur-in-training at the bank, where his accomplishments included opening a mergers and acquisitions division, running the bank's financial planning unit and convincing the bank's executives to buy a public financing company.

When the bank was bought out, however, Morris decided the time was ripe to forgo corporate America and give YoungBiz a shot.

The company initially focused on building an entrepreneur-infused curriculum it could sell to schools and community-based programs. It turned out that was a low-margin line of business, so Morris began to think bigger.

In helped, in a counterintuitive way, that Morris had no business model to base YoungBiz on, since no company was doing what he envisioned. That gave him the freedom to think big.

A few schools and communities in Georgia and Florida had been experimenting with some financial literacy classes, but the training and curriculum was limited. Meanwhile, the nonprofit sector - led by groups such Junior Achievement - was attacking the problem of non-businesswise youth from a 30,000-foot high perspective.

But while Morris liked the Junior Achievement ideals and pro-capitalism approach, he was seeking something more like a surgical strike to reach the 9-19 age group. He made his move in that direction in the mid-1990s, when he bought three companies: A publishing house that printed education materials, manuals and books; a company that ran summer camps; and an Internet content company, which published an online education newsletter and owned the Youngbiz.com domain name.

The trio of companies put Morris on his way.

So much so that by 2005 Morris had shifted YoungBiz to franchising in an effort to increase his profit margins while simultaneously spreading his pro-entrepreneurialism message to more young people.

Since a bulk of what YoungBiz offers to potential franchisees is its $2 million-plus inventory of intellectual capital, from its camp guides and training manuals to its curriculum, Morris decided to pursue what's known as a format franchise system.

That's when a franchisor essentially leases the business model, as well as programming and training assistance, to the franchisee, in return for a fee. The minimum startup fee at YoungBiz is $35,000.

So far Young Biz is in eight countries, including the U.S., and five states. Domestically, Moore has sold franchise rights for one city, Detroit, and four states: Florida, New York, Pennsylvania and South Carolina.

A franchise curriculum

Moore built his franchise concept with three components: parents, schools and youth groups. A franchisee could buy a territory, say Florida, or Pennsylvania, and then he could work on penetrating those three markets.

The parents market is reached mostly through summer camps that combine games with a financial education. A franchisee can set up camps under a variety of settings and programs all run through the YoungBiz corporate office, made up of Morris and four other employees.

The school side is classic door-to-door sales, where a franchisee and his team sells YoungBiz' books and manuals straight to school principals and district administrators. And finally, the youth group facet represents possibly the most diverse part of the company, as a franchisee can look to sell programs and materials to organizations such as the Boys & Girls Club, the YMCA and the Boy Scouts.

Morris says YoungBiz is "the only company in the country that does this type of curriculum by franchising."

Morris even expanded his age reach for the company's programs to 21 year olds, a good move he reasoned, considering the statistics he had seen on how ill-prepared the American college student was when it came to a range of business concepts, from balancing a checkbook to reading a company's balance sheet.

Morris' biggest challenge has changed little over the 14 years he's run YoungBiz. It's essentially a varying theme of any entrepreneur's toughest challenge: Finding the best people. In Morris' case, he's constantly searching for the right fit to buy franchises - not only someone with the right financial support for the venture, but someone with a healthy amount of entrepreneurial spirit.

"We really have a strong passion for this," says Morris. "We love what we do."