My entrepreneurship journey began at the age of thirteen while in boarding school. While my peers were studying for our University entrance exam that was four years away, I was making money through the instant coffee business I started.
Before I went to boarding school, I had a couple of jobs fixing bicycles and helping our local plumber in the city. Aykut’s Instant Coffee was nothing like my other jobs. This was something I started from scratch on my own. After a few weeks of selling my instant coffee at school, I felt like I hit the jackpot.
Our campus was about thirty miles outside of Anakara with only about 4-5 bus rides to the city during the day. As a boarding school student staying on campus, we were only allowed to leave on the weekends. Since I grew up in Ankara, every weekend I would travel home to stock up on my supplies for Aykut’s Instant Coffee. My mom was my first angel investor. She was nice enough to fund me for my first round of supplies to get my business going. I had already made a cafeteria expansion plan in my head. I was mentally in the entrepreneur mindset.
When I would return to the dorms on Sunday night with all of my coffee supplies and snacks, I would immediately begin selling to my floor only. If any of the upper grades knew I had cake, they would never pay and would take without hesitation. While I was selling coffee, I didn’t think about selling coffee-mate and sugar. I was giving sugar for free. I quickly realized I needed to include sugar and milk in the packaging as a part of the purchase. That’s when I created my own instant coffee where I put coffee, sugar, and coffee-mate in a small plastic bag that only required you to add hot water. I was inspired by Nescafe TV Ads. At the time, Nescafe was super expensive and none of my customers (peers) could afford it.
My coffee operation was going well; however, I was only in business with the boy’s dormitory. Boys could not go to the girl’s dorms and I needed to figure out a way to sell coffee to the girls as well. I recruited a couple of girls and offered them sales commissions of what they sold. While running this illegal coffee business on campus, teachers became intrigued. It got to a point where teachers were asking to borrow money from me. I was a thirteen-year-old who slowly lost interest in school because of how great my business was going. I was making more than the average teacher on campus and created my own distribution channel with a “girls” selling team!”
One day, our principal approached me and said he wanted thirty percent of my business in exchange to operate legally within the campus. I countered offered him ten percent. After a small negotiation phase where teachers were involved, they came to the conclusion that it was inappropriate for a young student to be running a coffee business in the dorm. They eventually created their own coffeeshop project without me and that ended my coffee venture. I learned a HUGE lesson that day. Never negotiate with the STATE. Just give them what they want.