Acro.net – Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

How many times have you stayed up all night, doodling the outlines of that new project that somehow managed to crawl into your mind?

Ideas are concepts that are triggered by external stimuli. They are paths formulated along the neurons of your brains. You begin to materialize them once you describe them – once you get them out of your own head!

These plans often arrive in the form of a business plan or venture. Your brilliant concept expands itself on paper, assumes a life of its own, becomes an entity that lives and breathes your own dreams.

All of a sudden, you are on your way to creating *the* killer application or *the* ultimate web site for a product or service no-one thought before. Nobody is going to stand in your way!

But what is the most important part of your business plan?

As humans, we always look up, further. The Greek word, “anthropos” means exactly that – “he who gazes up“, towards the sky and the stars. As humans, we often get caught up into our own dreams and ideas.

Your business plan needs a safety switch, a security line. An exit plan.

By defining at the beginning what will happen when your own plan won’t succeed, you are defining the minimum percentage of your success. With an exit plan, you are not limiting yourself, you are simply ensuring that you won’t get burned if things go wrong.

Exit plans can be as simple as points along a timeline. They can be as complex as a set of processes that will engage once certain parameters fail to produce certain results. They are there to ensure that your vision is realistic and that should you fail you will be able to recover quickly and fully.

In the world of domaining, investments in one TLD or another, a specific market or a certain vertical need an exit plan. Times are fluid and focus becomes blurry, but with an exit plan you will be able to predict the signs of losing the game – thus winning it in the long run!

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At the age of 15, I was the typical teenager: doing minimal effort at school, hanging out with friends, trying to impress girlfriends. There were no computers, no cellphones, no Internet to play video games – we hang out at the arcade, feeding coins to the game machines. We had time to go on trips on the weekends, go catch a movie or have parties. Healthy stuff.

Today’s teenagers are just too busy to claim that their leisure time is separate from work time or that there is a world of separation between them and adults. The Internet has created persistent expectations and rather firm stereotypes, bringing easy access to a myriad of goodies – directly to one’s bedroom. If you’re 15 and you have no cable access and a spanking new PC, you’re an outcast. Geeks are in and even chicks dig them these days.

The problem lies with young teenagers of both genders that attempt to overstep their age boundary and indulge into the commercial world of adulthood. One would argue that teenagers, being exposed to a variety of active environments these days, can actually mature faster and are therefore able to function more competitively in an effective fashion. While this might hold some water, studies show that the human brain between the ages of 12 to 20 undergoes an extreme fluctuation of its chemical secretion levels. Both boys and girls can act irrational, utterly emotional, unpredictable and with knee-jerk reactions that can sometimes be dangerous to themselves and to others.

Excluding children prodigies, which seem to evolve extremely well under the supervision of adults, young teenagers are simply too moody to successfully engage in the worldwide professional arena. There are certain qualities that are gained from life itself and cannot be taught in a family or at school. Such elements are crucial when engaging in business transactions with others, especially adults. Responsibility to one’s financial obligations, the weight and importance of one’s word, the ability to deliver timely what was promised, the ability to predict or rebound from the unexpected. These are qualities that one gathers in life, as we mature, from interaction with others through aging.

In today’s business environment, everyone with computer access and a few guidelines can attempt to form an online business. While exceptions are there, the overall rule appears to be that most teenagers are not to be trusted with managing tasks which involve a need for secrecy, the handling of large amounts of funds, delivering timely or in full. Teenagers simply don’t possess the experience and will to deliver all that, every single time, as they need exactly that – time – to stabilize their minds, to solidify their persona. And time is what separates young children from teenagers and young adults from mature individuals.

Should one avoid dealing with teenagers in an online or real life business transaction?

Whatever happened to the romantic entrepreneurial image of lemonade stands? The answer is: adults that engage in business transactions with teenagers must be aware of the consequences. In most western countries, a person under the age of 18 cannot – by civil law – be held responsible for their actions; their parents or guides are responsible for that. When an unscrupulous teenager fails to deliver and defrauds you in a domain sale, for example, good luck with trying to establish a case against them in the juvenile system of law; unless they ended up hacking the Pentagon.

I am all for supporting and rewarding the excitement of the youth as I have been one myself; if I had the opportunity to teach business ethics to a group of young people I would definitely attempt to encourage them to learn by listening more and acting less as adults and more like their own age. The best years of our lives predate adulthood and we cannot claim them back once we live them as adults.

Now, let me go back to playing my classic video game.