By Bridie Smith
A DIY haircut, an Instagram account and the trust of friends is all it took for 17-year-old school student Nathan Yin to launch his side hustle as a barber in the burbs.
Nathan Yin in his parents’ garage where he has set up his barber business Yinny Fadezz.Credit: Simon Schulter
After deciding to spend $100 on some clippers rather than pay a barber $50 for a small taper around the sides, Instagram photos of Yin’s haircut caught the attention of friends, who asked for a similar cut.
“They liked it and then asked for another cut, a burst fade, which is much bigger than the taper fade I did first,” the year 11 student says.
Others came knocking for the popular cut and soon his Yinny Fadezz barber business grew to include about 40 friends and classmates.
At $20 a cut, it’s a garage business which has generated about $3000 in a year and proved so successful that his parents now have to park their car on the street.
Yin’s business nous can be traced back to lessons he learnt early on in secondary school.
Yin goes to Haileybury College, a private school that charges parents almost $40,000 a year. But students are learning a lesson that money can’t buy: how to fail.
Haileybury’s Anna Sever says it’s a life lesson which can slip under the radar in an environment which often places a premium on success at the expense of resilience.
“When you’re a school and teaching students to get everything right, you have to have a way of teaching them that getting things wrong is fine,” Sever says.
“The resilience it takes to come back [from failure] is something kids need to learn.”
For the school of more than 4800 students, that lesson comes in the form of a compulsory program called StartUp, run for year 8 students, which teaches entrepreneurship in the most practical of ways: by asking students to identify a business idea and launch it to see if it will fly.
The subject then becomes an elective in year 9 and part of the school’s co-curriculum for interested senior students.
Yin says his backyard barber business has taught him time management, communication skills and how to stick at something long-term.
“It’s about being committed and not slacking off,” he says. “To keep chipping away, and slowly you improve.”
Other students’ side hustles include a clothing label run by year 10 student Oliver Schreurs, an online decorative keychain business run by year 11 student Amelly Chea and a drone photography business which has seen year 10 student Suvan Sujeendran take on five employees.
Without knowing it, Sever says students are picking up valuable skills including managing commitments, problem-solving and people skills.
Sever, one of the school’s deputy principals, says these are lessons best learnt through experience.
“Entrepreneurship is a big deal,” she says. “It’s in the DNA of this school.”
But private school students are not the only ones taking hands-on lessons in how to become entrepreneurs.
Mansfield Secondary College’s Jade O’Connor with some of the VCE Vocational Major students behind a successful car wash business.
In April, Mansfield Secondary College received $6250 in state government funding for students to launch and run small businesses as part of the school’s VCE Vocational Major program.
The money raised from the students’ small businesses will go towards modifying two classrooms as part of an ‘applied learning hub’.
The school’s vocational major head’ Jade O’Connor says some students started a label called Summit Society, with beanies the first item to be sold in the school and local community. Other students started a car washing business.
“That’s been the business which we put the least amount [of money] into, and yet it’s turned the biggest profit,” O’Connor says.
She says it is rewarding watching students work together to achieve a goal and building business relationships with industry.
“I’ve seen leadership like I’ve never seen before,” she says.
Mansfield Secondary College assistant principal Janessa Burkhardt says she is proud of the projects the students have delivered in such a short time.
Head of senior school Julie Anderson says the program will have a legacy lasting well after the students graduate, as their skills will keep them in the local community.
“These are the kids who are going to coach footy, they’re going to donate prizes for things, they’re going to join Rotary,” she says.
“And I just don’t think you can’t put a price on that.”
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