Author Erica Swallow hopes books will inspire entrepreneurship in kids

Erica Swallow wants kids to develop skills that could make them businesspeople right away, and she has studied how some children started their very own successful businesses at young ages.

The Springfield real estate agent and president of the Springfield Preservation Trust has authored a five-book series called Little Launchers on kid entrepreneurs.

“I wrote these books to help kids understand that starting a business is a potential career path,” she said. “I didn’t learn that until I was in college.”

The Little Launchers series is illustrated by Li Zeng and each book profiles a real-life kid entrepreneur who saw a problem, figured out how to solve it, then took that solution and turned it into a business. The series has been translated and is now being sold in China.

Swallow will read from her fifth book “Gabby Invents the Perfect Hair Bow,” at the Richard Salter Storrs Library in Longmeadow on Tuesday afternoon from 3:30 to 4:15 p.m. The book is about Gabby Goodwin who, at the age of 5, became frustrated because every time she danced, the barrettes she was wearing fell out her hair.

“She and her mom sat down and designed a better barrette,” Swallow said.

Armed with her new and improved barrette, Gabby started selling them. Now in middle school, she still runs her accessories company and continues to look at problems in her life as potential opportunities.

Swallow herself saw a problem that sparked her becoming an author. As an editor and feature writer at the website Mashable, she was seeing numerous headlines that read something like: wow, kid starts own business.

“After you see the same headline dozens of times it is no longer unusual,” she said.

But it got her thinking about child entrepreneurs and how they got involved in business in the first place.

“I wanted to make this not so unusual, but to normalize kids in business,” she said.

Swallow looked at the existing books on entrepreneurship for kids and found mostly books about how to start a lemonade stand.

“They might be good to learn basic business concepts, but not about how to solve problems,” she said.

That, she said, is the key to good entrepreneurship.

Swallow investigated 60 different kids who started businesses and settled on the five in her series as the best examples for other children.

“I want to challenge kids to look at problems and then write, draw or find some way to come up with solutions,” she said.

Now a real estate agent at Coldwell Banker in Longmeadow, Swallow started out in marketing and journalism after she earned degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University and Simmons University — the last a master’s degree in writing for children.

Not all the kids she researched for the Little Launchers series were as young as Gabby, but all the companies profiled in the series are still in operation. She found that kids naturally look to solve problems.

For instance, in “Jason Saves the World,” Jason dropped his phone and broke the screen. Rather than tell his mom what he had done, he went online, found the screen then repaired his own phone.

At about the same time, he became aware of the issue of recycling electronic devices, or rather, the lack of recycling.

“He found out that our old electronics, like computers, monitors and stuff like that, were being shipped to India where they piled them up in huge piles,” Swallow said. “He started a business where he would buy old phones, repair them, then resell them keeping them from being discarded.”

Solving two problems with one solution.