Every entrepreneur has to start somewhere. While some small business owners learn the ins and outs of entrepreneurship through traditional degree programs, many JumpStart clients are everyday people who turn a passion project into a business, find a niche for their talents or create solutions to problems they see around them.

Picture three entrepreneurs you know. What qualities do they share? Ingenuity? Grit? A deep understanding of their customers? I bet you can name a dozen more.

I also bet all three people you’re imagining are adults.

When we picture entrepreneurs, we tend to think of founders pitching investors, opening storefronts, or leading growing companies. What we don’t picture is the teenager selling cupcakes to classmates, the student teaching themselves graphic design or the young creator building an audience online. But that’s often where entrepreneurship begins.

The question isn’t whether young people have entrepreneurial potential. It’s whether we recognize it early enough to nurture it.

A recent Cleveland Magazine article looked at how schools are already helping students move beyond hypothetical business plans to create products, test ideas, find customers and learn from the results. Those experiences build more than business knowledge. They help young people see themselves as problem-solvers and entrepreneurship as something they can begin now.

And that’s more important than ever. According to Bank of America’s 2026 Small Business Owner Report, Gen Z is contributing to new business formation at disproportionately high rates. Raised in a digital world and surrounded by a thriving creator economy, many young founders see entrepreneurship as both attainable and sustainable. As the small business landscape evolves, this generation is reshaping our idea of who can be a founder.

For E’Lyric Christopher, entrepreneurship didn’t begin with a business plan. It started in high school with cupcakes. What began as a side hustle grew into catering work, a marketing degree and years spent refining her craft. Today, E’Lyric is JumpStart’s first Next Generation Fellow, bringing her vision for SoulPour—a business rooted in craft, culture and community—to life through Café CoLab, a JumpStart initiative made possible with support from Nestlé.

Her story is a reminder that entrepreneurial talent rarely appears overnight. The same curiosity, creativity and determination that sparked a high school side hustle now fuel a growing business. The fellowship didn’t create E’Lyric’s entrepreneurial spirit. It’s helping strengthen it. The talent was already there. The fellowship simply gave her more tools, connections and support to turn that talent into a thriving business.

Not every early idea becomes a business. But every founder benefits from the chance to experiment, learn and keep going until an idea becomes something more. After all, every entrepreneur has to start somewhere.

For E’Lyric, it started with cupcakes.