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This was a conversation I had with a friend last week. He is currently a very well paid project manager at a big consulting firm. Both will not be mentioned. He told me about how he started a business when he was a teen that he wished he did not start.

Bootleg DVDs

In one of his teen businesses, he started bootlegging movies to sell to everyone. He even sold them to his teachers. Did he make money? Yes and he learned a lot about business.

He was however told by his teachers that he would get in trouble one day if he didn’t stop. After a while, he did but there was no harm done.

But the question still remains- should he have done it?

To my surprise, he said he should have never started that in the first place. He didn’t want his ethics to be messed up.

Twenty years after that business, he still thinks about it.

His point was that what you do when you’re young affects how you grow up as a person. Especially in business, if you don’t set your ethics straight, you’ll have problems with your integrity later on.

If It’s Not Legal, Don’t Do It

Your business is only as good as the person behind it. If people find you to be not trustworthy or lacking integrity, they won’t do business with you. So if a business sounds really good and there is potential to make big bucks, consider what it will do to your integrity later on in life.

Don’t be like the Enron guys.

[Image credit: xeni]