I have a 13-year-old and have entered the Twilight Zone. The little boy is gone, and the Lord of the Flies has arrived. The pressures on him are increasing at exactly the same time that his body, voice and skin are going haywire. I am both loved and seen as an idiot in his eyes, his friends are now his cabal and his little brother is an alien. Come to my house for dinner sometime.I am also involved in my work, as I have been for some years, with a brand called College Pro (www.collegepro.com). This is a company that recruits, trains and operates a student painting and window-cleaning business in the summer months. It operates in the northern and colder western states and throughout Canada, and has been in business since the 1970s—when students looked like students.

The students who do College Pro for the summer are a breed of young entrepreneurs who take my breath away. They are young people who commit themselves, earlier in the year or even the year before, to learning how to run a business—from setting up a chart of accounts to hiring a team of employees, doing payroll, creating a marketing plan, knocking on doors to get appointments to do estimates, and delivering a quality job on time and on budget—while most of their friends are sitting on couches watching Family Guy and Robot Chicken (which I like, by the way, but not for days on end).

These student entrepreneurs have varying degrees of success during the summer, but all of them experience, on a nearly daily or regular basis, the famous transition curve moving from unrelated optimism to real engagement, and even crisis, and then to a more balanced reality.

But what is at the heart of these young people, and of the full-time team at College Pro who mentor and coach them all along the way, is a belief in realizing potential. The company, the brand and everyone involved with it focus on the transition from adolescence to adulthood. This bridge is one that we have all traveled—for some of us, it was painless; for others, very painful; still others, truthfully, remain stuck there. As parents, we can recognize the travails our teenagers encounter. We know that physiologically the left side of their brain (where the logic is) is not developing as fast as the right side (where the “I'm the ruler of the world and I can do anything and I'm invincible” lives). We feel helpless and we feel pained.

Yet here is a company—and there are others like it, too—which, for the right teenager, facilitates a path to learning, growth and maturity. The students who come to it with the values of their upbringing and faiths discover how fundamental business values such as “deliver what you promise,” “have pride in what you do,” “be open to possibility” and “respect the individual” can become the bedrock of their emerging consciousness about how they will contribute to their own lives and to society as a whole.

College Pro is not an easy choice for a student to make, or necessarily the right one for every student who has an entrepreneurial flair or leaning. Yet I see it, and believe in it, as a fulcrum for young people to move from ideation to reality in their ability to create goals for their lives, engage in the work it takes to make goals become realized objectives and then enjoy the reward that comes from this. The doing of College Pro makes the being of College Pro really valuable.

What I know is that many of the people I now work with were College Pro franchisees or full-time staff when they were younger, and what they have managed in their careers thus far is really impressive. As a parent, I see College Pro as a branded “in loco parentis” experience that can be as useful to our children alongside their years of university as anything else they could imagine. I believe that the opportunity for our children (and yes, teenagers are still that) to come to know themselves through what they actually do, to connect at that level with many others navigating the same challenges and questions, to come to understand what it is to serve and exceed the expectations of customers and employees, and to meet the slings and arrows of making or losing money creates sons and daughters of deeper self-consciousness and meaning, stronger understanding in them of what we as parents have tried to instill and stronger bonds of respect and love in the family.

I want my teenager to be a part of College Pro and its legacy when the time is right. When I write about how we are all growers and nomads, there is nothing more relevant to the core of that ethos than the idea, and reality, of “together, realizing potential.”

[Main Image: iphotostock.com]