AHHHHHH! I just found out that Jordon Cox is coming all the way from the UK to be a speaker at the conference! Jordon is an amazing teenager who has built an incredibly successful business based on sharing the best ways to save money with coupons in the UK. He is a sought after speaker for TV and radio interviews. He will be sharing his success story and also offering some helpful pieces of advice based on a few mistakes he made along the way. I can’t wait for you to meet Jordon!

Hey guys, my name is Jordon Cox and I am a journalist, speaker and couponing expert from Blighty (the United Kingdom).

I am actually an ex-teenpreneur after my previous business didn’t work out the way I anticipated. Luckily, I turned what seemed to be a huge negative at the time into a positive and now write for a money saving website, speak regularly around the country and often am featured as an expert on TV and radio. MoneySavingExpert.com is the UK’s leading money saving website covering everything from bank accounts, credit cards, and deals.  The website’s email database has over 11,000,000 subscribers and receives 1,000,000s of views each month.

I didn’t go to college or university despite getting good grades at school because I wanted to do something different. I love the fact that starting your own business and creating your own journey early can open up so many more doors than going the usual education route – because it’s not for everyone.

Because I started working and building my brand while my peers were studying, I am now in a top job, with no college debt and I’m 3 years ahead in the working world all because of being a teenpreneur! There are so many ways to be successful in this world and being an entrepreneur is a great way to get started.

I now regularly speak around the UK about my speciality, couponing and just about any way to save money. I have had columns in national newspapers and have gone viral for my money saving escapades 3 times.

Part of my daily schedule involves writing several blog posts every week on the blog section of the website telling everyone about the best deals, freebies and coupons to use. Since I started, my blogs have almost 1,000,000 views and have saved 1,000s of people money.

I am super excited to speak at The Teenpreneur conference, meet all of you, and be inspired by what other teens are doing to be successful in this world.

Best,

Jordon

I met Gerri Detweiler a couple of years ago at FinCon, the personal finance blogger conference I attend every year. It was so exciting to hear about her daughters amazing business over at Horse Crazy Girls. I immediately contacted Sydney and featured her over at TeensGotCents. Gerri’s experience with the media as a journalist will be particularly helpful to parents who want to help their teens leverage media coverage for their businesses. The conference is getting closer and closer and I cannot wait to meet you in June!

I am a journalist and educator who writes about personal finance and small business. I met Eva Baker at a conference for financial bloggers a few years ago and was struck by her poise, maturity and confidence. I knew immediately she would make a good role model for other teens, and soon after I had the opportunity to interview her for one of my columns.

I also happen to be a mom raising a teenpreneur. I’ve seen firsthand how having her own business has helped her go outside her comfort zone and do things she may have not tackled for years otherwise.

Last year, at that same conference where I had met Eva a couple of years prior, I was lamenting the fact that my daughter wasn’t there with me. (She’s a diligent student and didn’t want to miss that much school.) I commented that I wished there was a similar conference for teens.

Wish granted! Not long after that, Eva told me she was organizing one, and I immediately made plans for both of us to attend. I will be speaking at the conference about getting media attention and online safety, and my daughter will be participating as well. I can’t wait to connect with and learn from other parents who are raising entrepreneurial children. I expect that we’re going to see some amazing friendships forged, along with businesses launched and boosted.

For parents who are wondering whether this will be worth attending, the answer is yes! Your kids are going to need to learn these skills to compete in our new economy. They need to be there to see what’s possible and make long-lasting connections. If you’re suffering a little FOMO (fear of missing out) right now, take it as a sign you need to sign up. I am confident you won’t regret it.

Hope to see you in June!

Gerri

I always wanted to be an actor. From the time I saw my first musical at the local middle school to the time I graduated college with my degree in drama, the thrill of performance was one I wanted to make a mainstay in my life.   

But a career in professional theater was far more than performance. It was spending hours, often entire days, in long lines waiting to be seen for auditions. It was living with the constant anxiety of the job search, even while on a job. It was negotiating personal priorities and financial stability for the opportunity to continue “living the dream”.

It was a lifestyle in which I struggled to find sustainable joy, paired with a passion I didn’t want to give up.

While navigating through those early career realities, I began blogging, in the hopes that a public account of my impossibly audacious dreams might find grounding in a more sustainable day-to-day reality. More specifically, I focused on the financials, turning to money as a tangible tool to master some control over a life that had started to feel entirely out of my own hands.

And it worked. Even while running from auditions to babysitting gigs, I started to gain a sense of empowerment by taking responsibility for my finances and reclaiming ownership of my story.

I found that my passion for performance didn’t have to be limited to a stage and script. I could enjoy that same thrill of storytelling on my blog, where I’d found an eager audience of like-minded millennials, struggling to assert their independence in a difficult economic climate, without sacrificing their respective passionate pursuits. I had stopped waiting for directors and producers to hand me the opportunity to reach an audience, and started building my own.

Four years later, my reality is greater than anything I’d ever imagined. It turns out my impossibly audacious dreams weren’t nearly big enough. Even my star-struck middle school self, falling in love with musical theater for the very first time, could not have begun to grasp the immense joy I’d find channeling my passion for performance into entrepreneurship. Not choosing one over the other, but rather, creating my own opportunities to do both on my own terms.

Entrepreneurship empowered me to stop following my passion and create the opportunity for my passion to follow me.

Earlier this month, it was to Egypt, where I spent ten days performing and sightseeing. Last month, it was to California, where I spoke to various business leaders about growing their reach in the millennial market. And in January, it was on national television, where I debated the leading financial stressors for young people with one of Fox Business’ leading anchors. Next month, who knows? But I’m excited!

And I’m even more excited to be coming to Jacksonville this June to partake in the Teenpreneur conference! I find that too often, especially as teens, we’re asked what we want to be when we grow up, but it’s such a limiting question.

Let’s not force ourselves to choose what we want to be, but instead, use entrepreneurship as a tool to become all that we can be – whether it’s an actor, author, entrepreneur, finance expert hybrid, or something else entirely.

I look forward to seeing you there!

Stefanie

Stefanie O’Connell is a financial expert, Gen Y advocate, speaker and author of the book, “The Broke and Beautiful Life.”

Dedicated to helping young adults achieve financial greatness, Stefanie has been nicknamed the Mindy Kaling of personal finance by The Greenwich Time. Her work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Yahoo!Finance, The Dr. Oz Show, Fox News and ABC World News. She also works with universities, leading financial institutions and Fortune 500 companies, sharing her fresh and timely advice with their audiences.

When I first started blogging LaTisha Styles was one of the first bloggers I contacted and she responded almost immediately. She was so encouraging to me and even gave me the chance to guest post on her site even though no one knew who I was (or cared) and she would gain nothing from helping me. When I was trying to think of people who I wanted to come and share at the Teenpreneur Conference she was at the top of my list. She has had the entrepreneurial spirit for as long as she can remember, she currently runs her own business, and has started coaching new business owners to success. I’m thrilled she agreed to come and speak at the conference because she is genuine in her desire to help other people achieve their business goals!

As I child, my parents taught me the value of hard work. I asked my mom if I could have an allowance and she told me she would talk to my father.

A few days later, my sister and I were taking on extra chores and making 5 dollars a week. Sweet! My dad taught me how to tithe the first 10% of my income and I was allowed to spend the remainder. And each week I went to the corner store and bought candy and icees.

A few months later my sister and I started to complain, cautiously, about how we should get more money in our allowance. So my dad decided to teach us how to make money instead.

This is when the entrepreneurial bug bit me. He drove us to Sam’s Club which is a large warehouse with bulk items. Toilet paper for a year, canned food for a month and almost any item you could think of, even candy. He gave us our final allowance and told us if we wanted more, we would have to earn it.

So with about 20 dollars each, my sister and I bought our first box of candy. As soon as we got home, we opened the candy and started eating a piece. After all, we purchased it with our own money. But my dad quickly stopped us.

“Figure out how much you can make from this box. And don’t eat your profits. You have to be able to buy another box to make more money.”

Hmm. Now we actually had to do some math. My sister and I were about 8 and 10 at the time and had already learned the basics of money math. We realized that if we ate two pieces and sold the rest, we would have enough to buy another box of candy and we would have 5 dollars left over!

We were amazed.

But now we had to sell our candy. My sister and I had plenty of friends in our apartment complex and we mostly sold to them. Our candy prices were cheaper than the corner store so it was an easy sell. We sold our first box in a few days and we were ready to go back to Sam’s Club to buy more candy.

My parents only visited Sam’s Club twice a month. My sister and I realized that we would need to stock up to have enough candy to last through two weeks. It took us a month or two but eventually we had enough candy stocked to sell through two weeks and we had money left over.

Each week, I would go to church with my family and pay my tithes. But I didn’t save a dime. My expenses ate the remainder of my profit. And the more money I made, the more I spent.

About a year later, my mom and dad saved enough to put a down payment on a house in a small but growing county in Georgia. My mom took a waitressing job while we were in school and saved all of her tips towards the down payment.

My dad took a night job delivering the local paper so he could earn extra money. Our new home was being built from the ground up and there were still plenty of bugs that were reluctant to move. When we visited to see the progress, we saw a bat sleeping in the arch ceiling. And when we finally moved in, we found scorpions trying to make their way into the basement.

My sister and I still had our stock pile of candy ready to sell and we stored it in the closet.

One morning we reached up into the closet to grab the bag and found ants!

Our entire inventory was ruined!

My mom ignored our pleas to lend us money so we could buy more candy. She didn’t want any more bugs in her new house. Our business had ended.

By the time our candy business ended, I was almost 13. I was already making money babysitting for neighbors and I was just biding my time until I could work a real job.

Fast forward a few years to college. I graduated with a Finance and Spanish degree, and found a full time job, but I still felt the entrepreneurial bug.

I found a way to start earning extra money on the side by starting a blog. I grew that blog into my platform as a millennial personal finance expert. I’ve had the honor of being quoted in Forbes, and featured in The Economist, MTV, and Business Insider. The part time hobby that I created grew into a full business. And today, I teach emerging entrepreneurs how to do the same.

I always say that you KNOW if you have that entrepreneur inside of you. And that age has NOTHING to do with your success. There is no better time to start than now. Come to the Teenpreneur Conference and I’ll show you exactly what you need to succeed.

Can’t wait to meet you!

LaTisha

Announcing another teen speaker for the conference is so much fun! I originally met Sydney a couple of years ago when I found out about her website and how she was running a business as a young teen. What she had accomplished was so amazing and I was very impressed that she had tens of thousands of girls visiting her website every month! I was able to interview her over on my site TeensGotCents and learned a lot from her. Of course, she was at the top of my list of teens I was hoping could be involved in The Teenpreneur Conference and I’m thrilled that she will be attending and speaking about her experiences as a teenpreneur!

I’m Sydney Englund and I am really looking forward to meeting other teen entrepreneurs at the Teenpreneur Conference! I started my website, HorseCrazyGirls.com when I was nine. I was obsessed with horses (I’m still horsecrazy) and I was looking for fun horse games. Some of the sites I came across weren’t all that great or safe. One of my friends was creating a website and I decided to create my own.

It didn’t take long before girls from around the world were coming to the site to share their horse stories, pictures, reviews of horse games and movies and more. It’s been an adventure trying to keep up! And of course now there are so many social networks that it’s even more challenging to stay on top of it all.

I’ve learned a lot with my business. I’ve cold-called sponsors, interviewed authors, created videos, done radio interviews, and faced challenges I never expected when I started. But it’s also helped prepare me for the real world. There have been successes and setbacks, and I just keep pursuing the next goal.

I can’t wait to meet other teens with businesses at the conference. I am looking forward to sharing my experience as a speaker, but I also really want to learn from everyone there. It’s going to be brilliant!

See you in June!

Sydney