A youngster's entrepreneurship yields him millions

By Alison Damast

When Farrah Gray was 8, he used his lunchbox as a briefcase and printed up his own business cards, boldly declaring himself a "twenty-first century" CEO.

At 10, he and his friends had formed a business club that raised $15,000 to finance a lemonade stand, an Internet comic book and a traveling mini-mart. By the age of 12, he had founded a venture capital firm that raised $1 million from private investors to help teen-agers start their own businesses.

Now, at the age of 17, the only obstacle between him and another million is taking out the garbage in his mother's house.

"My friends were going to Boy Scout meetings," Gray says, recalling his youth on Chicago's South Side. Tall and clean-cut with determined hazel eyes, Gray spoke from a cell phone as he lounged in a chaise by his pool in Las Vegas. "I was leading our business club meetings."

For Gray, who is now 17 and a self-made millionaire, that pre-teen foray was just the beginning of a rewarding career in finance. Today, he has offices on Wall Street, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, commands up to $10,000 as a public speaker, has been the chief executive of four companies, and is one of two youth members on the South Nevada United Way Board of Directors.

A teen-age wunderkind, Gray is an unusual business executive. Without a college degree or MBA, he has transformed himself into a successful entrepreneur and millionaire seemingly overnight. And precisely because he is a teen-ager, he has been able to tap into the frenetically sought-after teen market with relative ease.

Though there are other teen-age entrepreneurs out there, and more and more high schoolers are showing an interest in running fledgling businesses, few have reached the level of success of Gray, who even looks the part by wearing the classic business suit and trying his best to carry himself like a 40-year-old.

"There aren't an enormous amount of teen-agers who have the focus or even the interest to build a corporate empire in their teen years," says Rob Callender, communications manager at Teenage Research Unlimited, a firm in Northbrook, Ill. "Most of them are interested in video games and the prom."

Gray's latest mission is to redesign the flailing Inner City Entertainment magazine and make the national periodical, which covers urban entertainment trends and has a circulation of half a million, appeal to the 14-to-24-year-old consumer market. It's a challenge that the young Gray believes he can tackle with ease.

"In business, there's a saying that if you're going to try to cater to a market, you have to know your market, get on the train with them, go where they hang out," says Gray. "I know them because I am them."

However, those that know Gray well say that he was never a typical teen-ager. "Most kids his age are like, 'Let's go to the mall,'" says Wendy Day, founder of the Rap Coalition and a close family friend who has known Gray since he was 8 years old. "Farrah's like, 'Let's build a mall.'"

But like many teens, Gray has a small attention span and hops from one profitable project to another. In 1995, he started the venture capital firm New Early Entrepreneur Wonders with seed money he had raised from his first business club in Chicago. The company financed over 800 student projects, including Internet magazines and online communities.

Three years later, he created Farr-Out Foods, a specialty food marketing company that catered to children and teen-agers and sold their products to such outlets as Wal-Mart. After three years, the company had net profits of more than $1.5 million. Gray sold the company recently to private investors.

Though Gray is financially comfortable now, he wasn't born into money.

He grew up as the youngest of five children in a predominantly African-American Chicago neighborhood. His mother, who was single, ran her own consulting firm. When she was busy traveling, Gray would spend time with his older brother Andre, who operated a trade delegation company called Export Now.

His brother would let him sit in on business meetings, which Gray jokingly refers to as his "Business 101" education.

From the time he was 6, Gray has had one goal in mind: to make sure his family would be financially comfortable.

"My mother was struggling to take care of all of us," says Gray, who spent some time in high school, but also enlisted private tutors to help him get his general equivalency diploma, which he recently obtained. "I wanted to make sure our situation was better."

His financial drive at such a young age, said Aubrey Stone, executive director of the California Black Chamber of Commerce, makes him a role model for other kids his age.

"He's successful without playing basketball," said Stone, who recently recruited Gray to be the keynote speaker at a luncheon for young African American teen-agers.

Despite all his financial successes, Gray doesn't want others to look at him as a teen-age prodigy.

He still lives at home with his mother and does chores. He's been to proms and dances, loves to listen to hip-hop and R&B, and likes to date. He just got his driver's license. On the weekends, he likes to "just have fun," which includes playing basketball, football, going to parties and hanging out at the mall.

"My friends don't look at me any differently," says Gray. "The only difference between us was that, when I was in high school, five days out of the week I had to juggle my schoolwork and business."

He pauses, and then, like the businessman that he is, breaks the numbers down in his head. "I'd say 60 percent of my life has been dedicated to being a teen-ager and 40 percent has been dedicated to being a businessman."

Eventually Gray would like to take time out of his schedule to go to college and eventually earn both a law and business degree. But he's in no rush. After all, he's only 17.

Plus, he says, "I don't want to spread myself too thin."

 

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