Young David Spizzo talks and walks like a college student enjoying resort life during his summer break.

But don't let the wrap-around shades, floppy thongs, baggy shorts and Hollywood good looks fool you. The young man is all business.

At 20, David is a bonafide entrepreneur in his fourth year of owning and operating Big Wave Dave's Jet Ski Rental at Breezy Point Resort. The lazy days of summer mean sales.

"Take the chance, what do you have to lose when you're young?" says David, who started his own business just after turning 17.

It was an idea that began to take shape the previous summer, he says, getting his feet wet in the rental business while working as an assistant at Breezy Point Marina.

"The question asked the most by the Marina customers was whether we offered jet ski rentals," he says. "I was just responding to an obvious need."

It would have been easy to turn the idea over to his father, the resort's owner Bob Spizzo. Instead, in the summer between his junior and senior years at Pequot Lakes High School, David went out and negotiated a loan to purchase four high-end
jet skis.

"I am in the business of selling fun," he says. "What could be better than that at a resort."

He must be right. Within two years he had doubled the size of his rental fleet and added a specially designed dock system to house them. Big Wave Dave's was getting bigger.

His parents, Bob and Mary Kay, purchased the resort a couple years before David was born. He knows the resort business so it was a natural place for the jet ski venture. But it wasn't his first: He's been in the stock market since he was 13, starting with a gift from his grandmother, Theresa, and supplemented by his own bank loans.

"It's been working out okay," he says of his stock investment strategy.

Big Wave is about to begin his sophomore year at the University of Minnesota, "if something better doesn't come up." Like most entrepreneurs, he is impatient with the pace of formal education. Before enrolling at the U, he took a year off and did the "Europe thing: training, backpacking, hitching, meeting new people," before returning to the resort for his third summer as Big Wave.

He is still undecided on what his plans are for the future, but what makes him so unique to his peers is that he took a chance and pursued an idea. And more than once.

"This kid made it all on his own," Bob Spizzo says of his son. "And that's the way it should be. He started as a busboy at the Marina Restaurant as soon as he was old enough to work, just as his brother and sister before him.

"I'm very proud of how he has turned the opportunity to work into an entrepreneurial frame of mind," he says.

Like any other occupation, the jet ski rental business has its advantages and disadvantages. Big Wave says that  having to work every day during the peak of the summer can be a "bummer." And not every customer is polite, so he has learned to roll with the "wave" so to speak.

On the other hand, Dave loves getting a good tan, meeting nice people and seeing everybody's smiling faces after a day of fun on Pelican Lake with the jet skis.

Asked if there was anything he wished he would have known before developing his business, David unexpectedly replies, "Everything! I was so wet behind the ears my first year it's amazing to me that I'm still around."

His motto? "There are two steps: creating your idea and following through with that idea. It's just like when you first buy a car: you're not going to get anywhere without driving it."

With this in mind, Big Wave Dave's advice to all of you who think you have a good idea: "Take the chance." He speaks from experience.

Big Wave Dave operates from the docks behind the Marina Restaurant from 10 a.m. until dark, seven days a week. His rates are $40 to $50 an hour during week days and $50 to $60 during weekends, depending on size of machine. For rental information, call Big Wave at 218-562-7365.