"Seven years of College down the drain."
Posted on 03/15/2008 10:13:01 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Ashley Qualls doesn't sound like a typical high school student. Maybe that's because the 17-year-old is the CEO of a million-dollar business.
Ashley is the head of whateverlife.com, a website she started when she was just 14 — with eight dollars borrowed from her mother. Now, just three years later, the website grosses more than $1 million a year, providing Ashley and her working class family a sense of security they had never really known.
It all started with capitalism 101, the law of supply and demand. Ashley became interested in graphic design just as the online social networking craze began to catch fire.
When she saw her friends personalizing their MySpace pages, she began creating and giving away MySpace background designs through Whateverlife. The designs are cheery, colorful and whimsical, with lots of hearts, Ashley's favorites.
She also pulled quotes from popular songs and built backgrounds around those themes. "Teenage girls love quotes," Ashley says, scrolling through some of her site's 3,000 designs, more than a third of which she made herself.
Thanks to Ashley's work ethic and savvy cultivation of her peer group as a target market, Whateverlife began pulling in more teenage girls than a Justin Timberlake concert - about a million a day. With a big audience, the site attracted advertisers. Ashley's first check was for $2,700. The next was for $5,000, the third for $10,000.
At the time, Ashley's parents were divorced. She and her little sister, Shelby, were all crammed into her mother's one-bedroom apartment.
When first the check arrived, her mother was doubtful, wondering if her daughter could really make money off a website. But Ashley was confident, telling her mother: "No, I really trust this. I think it's really gonna happen."
Ashley was right. The checks kept coming and the business kept growing-to the point where she could afford to buy a brand new four-bedroom house for them to live in. Ashley also hired her mother, Linda LaBrecque, to help manage the company.
It was and has been a bittersweet time for them both. "It's hard to be a mom and a manager," LaBrecque says. The roles clash every day, she says, but they manage by keeping a sense of humor.
She's proud of Ashley. Prior to starting the business, she says, her daughter was too shy to even order a pizza by phone. Now she's making presentations to business executives.
The job has also made LaBrecque's life easier, allowing her to quit her job and work from home following back surgery.
But Ashley's life has become much more complicated. When her business took off, the former straight-A student quit school to concentrate on Whateverlife.
"It's a busier schedule," Ashley says. "There's more to keep track of, whether its finances or employees and making sure everything is up to date and the content is secure."
In addition to her mom, Ashley hired three friends to help with the business, teaching them design and then requiring them to make a minimum of 25 designs a week.
Bre Newby says Ashley is a better boss than her past employers. "It's cool to have your best friend be like your boss," says Bre, "'cause she's a good boss. She's not like rude or it's not like working at McDonald's where you have like supervisors and people over you all the time."
Has the price of Ashley's business success been the loss of a part of her childhood? She doesn't think so.
"You know, when I'm with my friends, I'm still 17," she says.
But time with friends sometimes has to take a back seat to business. On a recent afternoon, her three friends drop by to hang out with Ashley, but they have to wait for her to finish with her business advisor, internet consultant Robb Lippitt.
Ashley and Robb sit on plastic chairs around a white conference table in Ashley's basement office, the walls decorated with hearts, like a Whateverlife background.
The conversation includes overtures from Hollywood and a possible deal to help promote Britney Spears's new album on Jive Records.
Ashley has even turned down a deal for her own reality television program. "I'm really stubborn, like my mom," she says, "So I know what I want from business. And I don't want that. I like my privacy. I like to hang out with my friends. I don't want cameras following me around."
For his part, Lippit says he had concerns about working with a teenager, but Ashley won him over in the first meeting. "She doesn't sit there and say, ‘I did something well-that's good enough,'" says Lippit. He says Ashley knows, without being told, that she needs to keep developing her business, or it will stop growing.
Unlike many adults, Ashley has not succumbed to the temptations that new wealth can bring. She pays herself a modest salary of $3,000 a month. Aside from the house, she hasn't made any other major purchases.
"I don't even know how to put this," says Ashley, "But it's just kind of like the shiny feeling that when you have this money, it kind of goes away after a while. It gets old, you know. Yeah, I can go out and buy you know something really cool. But at the same time I mean I don't really need too much. I like to invest it back into the business."
Despite all her success, one thing that has eluded her - something most of her friends already have - is a driver's license.
"My mom does drive me. And then my friends drive me wherever we go," she says, "And I want to drive. Believe me. But it's just been kind of crazy lately."
It may be the one thing about Ashley's life that reminds you she really IS still a teenager.
Totally agree. And I also like Dale Carnegie. His How to Win Friends book changed my life.
The point of an education is to help prepare you to support yourself and become a productive member of society.
I think she got that part down.
"Seven years of College down the drain."
ping
I’m laying odds right now that when she is able to vote, she votes conservative. Sounds like Momma and Daddy didn’t raise no fool...
“No, I really trust this. I think it’s really gonna happen.”
Herman Wouk gave his Majorie Morningstar character a line pretty much like this one very early in the book(actually she thought it). It seemed like ‘forshadowing’ but the mature Wouk of course knew that every kid says it and deeply believes it too boot. It’s a precious line, though in this girl’s case, BINGO!
She has the same degree Bill Gates had. And as much use for it.
Talent Always Wins.
Thought you’d get a kick out of this ping!
Why bother? She's already doing better then most high school graduates and a lot of college grads. Real question is if she is smart enough to not blow all her money and make some good investments for later just in case things go south.
College isn't for everyone and doesn't seem like this girl needs it.
So don't get one. Jobs are just income with training wheels. Jumping through academic hoops like a trained seal just to impress some zero-talent manager is an antiquated paradigm.
"So don't get one. Jobs are just income with training wheels. Jumping through academic hoops like a trained seal just to impress some zero-talent manager is an antiquated paradigm."
BINGO!
Our #3 son and youngest of 4 kids is homeschooled, but is registered with a school for the purposes of an official transcript and a diploma. They credential all his work, and award credits for his courses. At this point, Ashley could send them her high school transcript, and document the work she's done to build her business, and she would probably have more than enough credits to get her high school diploma, without having to do any more work! Then she could forget about that piece of paper and continue building her business!
Very good.
The only downside I see is that she’s missing out on the necessary leftist indoc by dropping out of school. How will she survive the purges to come if she’s not well versed in party approved rhetoric?
Sold the cart many years ago and moved up to
http://www.waymatic.com/default1.htm
Mmm. I saw it, and got sidetracked by the blog link on your post. LOL
Makes me proud, really. My thoughts went to hmmm, if she were a Chinese or Russian kid, she’d prolly be a hacker and waste her talent, and her life.
She appears to have a cat lodged in her laptop...
My nephew (one of two that I raised) makes $200K a year off of his website via advertising. “Google” ‘Final Fantasy’ and his site is the first one that pops up. He’s 22. :)
(No, it’s not porn, LOL! It’s an on-line roll-playing game.)
“Jumping through academic hoops like a trained seal just to impress some zero-talent manager is an antiquated paradigm.”
Thank you! I’m a few credits shy of a BA in Business. I interviewed at a company once with a snot-nosed know-it-all that was less than impressed that I didn’t finish my degree. (Sorry! I had three kids to raise, and I was wrapping up my 20-year military career!)
Anyhow, he obviously hadn’t read my resume very carefully because I had just left a job where I was Comptroller of a 2 million dollar a year construction firm, LOL!
I didn’t take the job, even though it was offered. Dork. That was a turning point for me (at about age 35) that it was completely up to me from here on out to make my own cash in this world.
I can always make money. Always. And I’d rather make it for myself than for a twit like that, thankyouverymuch! :)
One reason I was interested in computers was that years before I had a part time summer job and sold clothes in the mall. One of my customers was a guy in Houston named Chris Kraft. He worked for NASA and he told me "some day you will have your own computer on your desk!" He was a cool guy, so I always watched for those new computers and when the first microchip machines came out I made sure to hunt them down.
Dad really thought I was nutz when it came to PC's. I had some ideas about how to automate dad's business so I put his client information on a database. He represented a big company that had all dad's data on a mainframe. So I asked them to dump all the data on to mag tape and converted it on a buddy's PRIME supermini. Some other people asked me to do the same thing so I did and then started making some money. Then I started doing bigger things. I remember one day a guy from IBM came by my office. He said he had heard about some of the database things we had been doing and that we needed to buy a $500K IBM RISC machine. "because you can't do anything on those toy machines".
I took him in to a little data center I had made and pointed to a 486 machine that I had built. It had an EISA motherboard and 22 SCSI drives with multiple controllers. I had taken some big cases and welded them together to handle all the drives. I also had paid the kid who ran the air conditioner system in the building to let us tap in to it and we were pushing cold air in to the cases. Using household dryer vent tubing. That's the only way they would run because things got so hot and at a point the machine would lose it's mind. The IBM guy said "what the hell is that thing?" I said that's a computer running a 20 million record database and it costs 90% less than what you want for your machine. He said "you can't do that! It won't work!" I said I wish he would have showed up a couple of months earlier to tell us that because we were too stupid to know we could not do what we had done that he said we couldn't. And have a nice day.
I have a bunch of stories like this. Meeting a guy name Linus online, etc. And along the way people telling me "you can't do that!" So I know how this girl might feel if someone tells her "this is short lived" or some such pablem. She should listen to nobody and just keep creating things THAT PEOPLE WANT. It's a simple business plan.
My dad thought I was crazy because of my love for computers. That was until one week many years ago when I made more money in a week than he did all year. At that point I became someone he was proud of.
Personally, I would not know how to work for someone. I just have never done that. And if tomorrow I was starting all over again for some reason I'd just make something else up to fill a need that people have. Someone always needs a hand with this or that. Just help them out and send them a bill.......
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.