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Excellent Executive Coaching: Growing Your Business and Enhancing Your Craft.
EEC 432: How to Develop Entrepreneurs as Kids, with Leah Ellis
00:18:08
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- [00:05]
Dr. Katrina Veruz
Is being an entrepreneur innate or developed? Lea Ellis is the founder of the Society of Children Entrepreneurs and she will give us a unique perspective how to develop entrepreneurship in your children. Welcome to the excellent executive coaching podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Katrina Veruz. And today we're going to be interviewing Leah Ellis, a specialist with kids. But I'm going to let Leah introduce herself because she's quite exceptional. Tell us.
- [00:42]
Leah Ellis
Thank you so much. So I am the founder and executive director of the Society of Child Entrepreneurs, which is a nonprofit organization that teaches children how to start, run and manage their own businesses.
- [00:53]
Dr. Katrina Veruz
Yes. And that is very original. That's the first time I've heard it. So tell us, why do we underestimate children's ability to lead and what happens if we change that belief?
- [01:06]
Leah Ellis
So I think we underestimate kids ability to lead because it's easier. I mean, it's much easier to say children are followers because our culture says if they follow, they're easier to get them to do what we want them to do and fall in line. So it's really easy to say, okay, you're a kid, your job is to follow. And then when you become an adult, you're allowed to be a leader. But because we spend so many years teaching them how to be followers when they're adults and it becomes time to be leaders, they don't know how. And so if we change the way we approach it, we change the way we talk to kids and teach them times when it is appropriate for them to be the leaders and time when it's appropriate for them to be the followers, then when they reach adulthood, they have a better situational awareness of leading and following and more confidence to be the leader when the time comes.
- [01:54]
Dr. Katrina Veruz
So give us an example of your own child and how she started her business.
- [02:00]
Leah Ellis
Right. So my eldest daughter is 10 now, but she was four and a half right in the middle of COVID And I was pivoting from one business to another and I was watching trading videos on my living room TV so that I could supervise the kids while I was doing training because they were trapped at home with me. And about three months into it, she looked at me and she said, mom, I want to start my own business too. Mind you, she was four and a half. So I immediately said no way. And anybody who spent even five minutes with a four year old knows that their favorite word is why. And then I didn't have an answer because I said so seemed lazy and weak, but because you're Ford didn't seem Much better. So then I said, okay, fine. What do you want to sell? And she had started getting into some drip art and painting and painting rocks and things like that. And so she said, well, what if I sell these? I said, okay, how? And she said, well, you can help me sell them on your computer. Okay, fine. All of these questions I had for her. She had an idea or she was willing to ask me, I don't know, how can we do it? And so we got to the point that by the time May rolled around, she had launched Melody Paints on Facebook and she just was a Google form. And you went in there and said what size painting you wanted and what three colors you wanted. And then you paid via PayPal, and. And she had these paintings that she was shipping out. And then the first time she shipped a painting to somebody who wasn't a friend or family member, like a legitimate stranger who found her product was probably one of the proudest days of her life. And she hadn't even started kindergarten yet.
- [03:35]
Dr. Katrina Veruz
Wow. So she really gave you an idea. From painting rocks to giving. Customizing a paint by asking which colors they want. And then she had a drip painting, like Polak, the famous artist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then. So how did it evolve from there?
- [03:54]
Leah Ellis
So once we had Melody doing her business, we were invited to partner with another bunch of kids and do a children's business fair, which is when a whole bunch of kids come and sell their products. And that was really cool. And then I hosted my own children's business fair for the first time. And I brought 11 kids into this space. They all set up their businesses and they sold, and then at the end of the day, they went home. And I'm an educator. And so having a whole bunch of kids who really wanted to learn something and we didn't seize that opportunity to teach them something just rocked my world. I couldn't believe why we were doing that. So I convinced some friends that, like, we have this kid over here, Melody, who's running a really good business, and we can teach other kids how to be her peers and run really good businesses as small children. But. But I need a platform. I need a space to do that. So I convinced them to help me found the Society of Child Entrepreneurs. And through that, now we have children's books, we have curriculum, we have an online community, and we really are teaching kids. They have a voice, they have the ability to be civically involved, and they have the opportunity to be entrepreneurs right now.
- [05:05]
Dr. Katrina Veruz
So you also mentioned that your daughter, you encourage her natural entrepreneurial Spirit. But you wanted her to not only interact with you, but also with other children. So when she started, you know, interacting with other children, what did that develop in her?
- [05:24]
Leah Ellis
I think one of the greatest things that she's been able to develop while being able to talk about entrepreneurship with other kids is a little bit more social awareness of the expectations of her age group. Because if she goes to a bunch of stuffy networking meetings with me and she's dealing with a bunch of adults who are at networking meetings, there's a very specific expectation of how she behaves and it's not really what comes naturally to her. And she gets worn out doing those events. She goes to them, but she's like, this is hard. But when we do a networking event full of kids, they have pizza, they crack jokes, they draw pictures, but they're also still building their businesses and they're still solving problems. But she's able to learn that she doesn't have to pick, act like a miniature adult or have fun. Like she can choose to run a successful business and still have a good time.
- [06:17]
Dr. Katrina Veruz
Right. Okay. No pressure. This is exactly. And less pressure, more creativity.
- [06:23]
Leah Ellis
Yeah, that what happened in a class that I taught today. Actually, those kids really shook me up. Their challenge was to build a tower. And I thought it was a pretty straightforward thing. We were working on teamwork and collaboration. So I said, you're going to get a partner, a roll of tape and five sheets of paper. And with these things, I want you to build a tower. I did not think that by the end of it, we would have to redefine what constitutes a tower. Because they were taping ropes of paper from the ceiling and letting them dangle down and telling me that that was the tallest tower. Ah, well, how do we define tower when we're doing a height contest? And that's the creativity that we allow when we give the kids direction and opportunity and not.
- [07:08]
Dr. Katrina Veruz
Not impose your interpretation of how they see a tower.
- [07:13]
Leah Ellis
Yeah, right. So it was really cool. We ended up with some really interesting looking towers.
- [07:19]
Dr. Katrina Veruz
I bet. I bet. Good. And how does it actually look like for a child to run a real business?
- [07:25]
Leah Ellis
As you know, honestly, it doesn't look that different than a grownup running a business, which I think is what surprises people because they expect a child run business to be like colored pencils and lemonade stands. But I have kiddos who are doing cost of goods sold and calculating the amount of 3D printed filament they need so that they can keep up inventory for a 3D printing company. I have Kiddos who make pens and are calculating how much does each bead cost so that they know how to price the pin itself. They are working on the same things, profit and loss, managing a budget, talking to their customers, dealing with customer service, even on the days when sometimes the customer is not always right and figuring out how to handle those situations and they're really good at it.
- [08:11]
Dr. Katrina Veruz
And so what's your coaching to allow this? How? Because many, as you said, many parents expect their children to follow their advice. So what you do to not have that impulse to try to, you know, to step back, to let them figure
- [08:29]
Leah Ellis
things out, you have to be really curious and you have to be willing to ask a lot of house and why's every so often. But part of our structure for our program is I take the kids and I do about 15 to 20 minutes of instruction and I teach them whatever small bit of this information they need for whatever our topic is that month.
- [08:50]
Dr. Katrina Veruz
Give us an example. Just give us an example for our listeners.
- [08:54]
Leah Ellis
So in November we discussed what happens if you can't run your business so Covid shut down and you can't get your inventory or you're a child and you're grounded so your mom won't let you go to a children's business fair or you broke your arm so you can't make the product you're trying to sell. What do you do? So I teach 15, 20 minutes on. You can make a new plan, start something new. You can pivot to another option, another program, or you can partner with somebody else to help you. So, so maybe you make really good cookies and your friend has an oven. So now you're going to make the batter at home and bake at her house because your oven is broken. So now you know your choices are pause, pivot, plan or partner, stop, find something new to do, change your plan a little bit. So they've got this understanding of, okay, if there's a problem in my business, these are my menu of choices on what I can do to get over that problem until I can go back into regular business. And then after that 15 to 20 minutes of education time, I open it up to what we call a Sochi circle, which is really just a Socratic circle with a new name. And I asked the kids open ended questions, what would this look like in your business? How could you apply this to your business right now? What problems could you see occurring if this happened to your business or if you weren't prepared for this to happen to your business? And then they have an Hour of open discussion where they problem solve, they brainstorm and they discuss these topics as essentially their own miniature mastermind class. And then they go home and they apply those business principles to whatever project they're doing so they're ready for those problems when they come up in business.
- [10:39]
Dr. Katrina Veruz
Fascinating.
- [10:40]
Leah Ellis
Yeah, yeah, they're brilliant.
- [10:42]
Dr. Katrina Veruz
Yeah. So tell us how you got into this. You told me earlier your story, right? Your daughter. Would you tell us that story?
- [10:52]
Leah Ellis
So I'm a little bit of a serial entrepreneur and I had a business and then Covid hit and I couldn't run my business. It was something that Covid completely shut down. So my husband and I were pivoting to a different business model and I was home alone with our two daughters because he was deployed. And that meant I was watching business training videos on the living room TV so that I could do things like wash dishes and supervise the kids and stay still. Feel like I was moving forward in my business. And after a while, my 4 year old started watching the videos with me. And then after a little bit longer, she came to me and she was the one who said, mom, I want to start my own business at four and a half years old. And so I let her. And then taking that and adding in the education component of bringing other children into this and creating peers for her and kind of that combination of my entrepreneurship with my education and her passion has created this organization.
- [11:52]
Dr. Katrina Veruz
Wonderful. So what do you think are the skills that the children gain from this entrepreneurship that traditional education doesn't allow?
- [12:03]
Leah Ellis
Oh my gosh. This is such an incredibly long list. Like it just goes on and on for days. But I think some of the most important ones are true confidence in themselves and their abilities. Because it's really easy to say, oh, you build confidence by, you know, mastering a skill. But this is them building confidence by experiencing what their life will actually feel like and encouraging themselves and dealing with the failures and recovering from them and learning reiteration. So this is where confidence is not rated on a scale of A, B, C, D or F. Confidence is rated on are you improving from yesterday to today. So they have a lot more open endedness there. I also think that they're developing communication skills, self management skills, problem solving skills, and then they're reinforcing their language skills and math skills that they're already learning at school. And that's just to skim the very, very top of the list of skills that these kids can learn.
- [13:06]
Dr. Katrina Veruz
Yeah, absolutely. Definitely. I like how you say there's confidence by learning more and more. A certain skill here, it's confidence that you can turn around. You're agile, you have flexibility, you're constantly looking for new ideas. And how, if you're faced with something that's really difficult or you have an accident, or you have Covid how to jump from a situation like that and recuperate and think creatively of different solutions. I think from your example, that certainly was very evident. So how can communities create environments where children are trusted to contribute in meaningful ways? Now, the education system doesn't allow all this. So what is your proposal?
- [14:00]
Leah Ellis
Start at home. And the easiest thing to do is when you are sitting around the dining room table or in the car, driving to practice or doing school pickup and drop off. Whatever it is. When you're with your kids, ask them what's one thing you've noticed in your daily life that you wish you could change and how would you change it? Because now you've taught them that you care about your voice. You've taught them that you care about their problem solving skills. You've encouraged them to vocalize their problem solving skills and practice that communication all in that one little conversation in your car and then just continue building on that. Well, okay, if you wanted to change that, who would you need to talk to? What systems would need to change? What products would need to exist? A lot of business owners, a lot of coaches will use the phrase what has to exist or what has to happen in order for you to do this? What has to happen? And then start asking, what has to happen? Who needs to be involved? What does that system look like? And let them go be involved. I don't love talking about my daughter too much in a podcast, but I will tell you this one more story about her. She walked into my office about two months ago and did not say hello to me. Looked me dead in the eye and said, I need to go to city council. When's the next city council meeting? And I was like, what? Hi. Why? She said, I get honked at when I'm walking across the street because there's not a good place to cross from my school to your office. It's not a very long walk. There's only one crosswalk. Traffic backs up. It's terrible. It's not safe for me. It's frustrating for the drivers. And if the city would just paint a crosswalk at this intersection instead, it would relieve all of that congestion in the traffic. So I want to go to city council and tell them to paint a crosswalk. So I called our friend on city council, found out when the city council meeting was, she wrote her script on what she wanted to say, and she stood on a chair so that she could reach the microphone and read her letter to city council asking for a crosswalk. They followed up the next week by inviting her to the Main Street Improvement Project Planning Committee meeting. And now our 2027 capital improvement plan includes a $20,000 crosswalk at the location that she wanted.
- [16:21]
Dr. Katrina Veruz
Fantastic.
- [16:22]
Leah Ellis
Can you imagine if we waited for her to be 18, how many other kids would get honked at, get frustrated, get annoyed?
- [16:29]
Dr. Katrina Veruz
Yeah.
- [16:30]
Leah Ellis
He was like, well, let's just fix this problem.
- [16:33]
Dr. Katrina Veruz
Yeah. Very proactive. Very proactive. And the fact that you encourage her and you allow her to do it and take her seriously, what a confidence she'll have. And proactive. So congratulations. Well, we're coming to the end of our podcast.
- [16:51]
Leah Ellis
Thank you.
- [16:51]
Dr. Katrina Veruz
Tell us where we can get a hold of you.
- [16:54]
Leah Ellis
So the easiest place to find us is our website, s o c e I c t dot org or you can go to s K-O-O dash l dot com socecircle and you can join our online community. And in that place, you can actually see weekly challenges that I sent home for you to practice at home with your kiddos. You can see lesson plans, and you can share your experiences with other families of child entrepreneurs.
- [17:22]
Dr. Katrina Veruz
Well, I missed having small children for this. I tell you, my kids are already grown. But what a wonderful thing you're doing. Congratulations.
- [17:32]
Leah Ellis
So much fun. These kids are amazing.
- [17:34]
Dr. Katrina Veruz
Yes. Thank you very much.
- [17:36]
Leah Ellis
Thank you.
- [17:39]
Podcast Narrator
Thank you for listening to the excellent Executive Coaching podcast. You can subscribe to all Future podcasts@excellentexecutivecoaching.com join us join us each Wednesday to learn more about the latest trends in leadership techniques and bring your coaching to the next level. To learn more about Dr. Burris CEO mastermind, use the contact form@excellentexecutivecoaching.com.