Lucas Weaver has always known he was good with money. 'I was making money at school from the age of nine,' he told me. 'At break time the school shop was always really crowded. I used to buy sweets cheaply from supermarkets and then sell them in the break to my classmates. I probably made as much money as the shop. Then a girl I knew started making jewellery. I offered to help her sell it to the other kids. By the time I changed schools, I was making good pocket money.'
But Lucas's big break came when he was 14. 'I read an article about a teenager who was importing scooters into the UK. Not ordinary scooters, small ones. Small enough to go in the back of a car. They sounded really cool. I thought to myself: I must have one of those. But they were £1,000 and I didn't have that kind of money.'
To begin with, Lucas got in touch with the makers. 'They knew the scooters were selling well in London. I told them there must be a market here in Birmingham and they could sell lots of them here. This is the UK's second biggest city. It made sense. I asked them to send me a free scooter that I could show to people. They weren't interested.'
A few months later Lucas made a deal with them. For £4,000, he could have five scooters. Buy five get one free. He already had £2,500 in the bank. 'I worked like a mad person for six months,' he said. 'I organised discos. I took newspapers and leaflets from door to door. I bought and sold all sorts of things on eBay. Within six months I had my scooters. I sold the other four in the first week. I asked for twelve more. I had eight orders, and I bought an extra four because I knew I could sell them.'
'Businessmen were really keen on them,' he explained. 'They could use them to get to work. Or they could just put them in the back of the car. Then if the traffic was bad, they could just park the car, take out the scooter and still get to work on time.'
By the time he was 15, the scooter business was making serious money for Lucas, but he already wanted to find something new. 'I needed another challenge. I enjoyed my own scooter for a couple of weeks and then I got bored and sold it.' So where did he go next?
'The eBay experience was the turning point,' he says. 'I was running my business out of my bedroom. I was using my dad's garage for the unsold scooters. I had no space. My next business had to be an online business. My younger sister was having music lessons at school and it was impossible to find good cheap musical instruments without going all the way across the city.'
Lucas talked to a couple of local music stores and persuaded them that he could set them up as online retailers. 'I was always good at selling,' laughs Lucas. 'This was before the days of mass internet retailing so the stores weren't very keen at first. However, I offered to take all the start-up costs for a higher percentage of sales.' They agreed. Lucas thought they might regret their decision and he was right. Both stores almost doubled their sales of musical instruments, and Lucas made a lot of money out of it.
What about the future? 'I'm not just in this for the money,' says Lucas. 'I enjoy the freedom of working for myself and I want to put something back into society. One day I'd like to start my own charity.' And is he a millionaire yet? 'Not yet,' he says, smiling. 'I'm doing quite comfortably. But once I leave school I'll have a lot more time.'
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