I Wish I Could Have Done This In School…
When I was 6 years old, I watched my mom launch her own small jewelry business, where she would visit craft shows with cases of jewelry and make a little extra money. After visiting a craft show with her, I had the genius idea…”hm…there are girls in my class at school…I bet THEY would want some of this jewelry!” So the following week, I brought a butterfly ring to school. I showed it off to some of the girls in my class. I don’t exactly even remember how I brought it up to them…but I assume it was something like “hey! Do you want this butterfly ring?” And I imagine they might have said yes at some point, because the next thing I knew, I made $12.
And then, the next thing I remember was my teacher pulling me aside and saying…”You can’t do that.”
“Why?” I asked as any inquisitive 6 year old would want to understand the reasoning behind this.
“Because we can’t sell things in school.” A perfect “teacher” answer…
And that was the end of my sales experience in school…there were a couple of other forays that didn’t take place till about 10 years after the fact. All had a similar ending.
Things have certainly changed significantly, but it’s safe to say that entrepreneurship, and specifically, sales is something that is strangely not only not taught in schools, it’s downright forbidden for the most part, unless of course we’re selling for the school fundraiser, just not for our own personal gain.
I had a similar experience trying to promote a jazz band concert in high school. We had this genius idea to cover the hallway with bright green flyers and hand them out to students as they made their way to the cafeteria. We got “busted” within about 10 minutes. I still remember the Vice Principal’s face fuming because he had told us we had to get flyers signed, approved, and they could only be placed every 100 feat…BS in our minds.
Why did my school punish hustle?
I’m not sure I’ll ever understand the logic behind what schools do, and I am not here to bash school, or teachers…I later became an elementary teacher and definitely felt the pressure to enforce rules in order to keep my job and stay in the good graces of administration, so I get it.
But what I don’t get is this…why are schools not designed to promote the things that help the American economy grow — selling, marketing, entrepreneurship?
The climate around these topics is certainly shifting. With products like the “Greenlight debit card” to teach kids about handling money coming up, and of course shows like Shark Tank making entrepreneurship an evermore popular topic, and of course the social media and app-creator tycoons out there who have made it mainstream to be an entrepreneur, it’s certainly at the forefront of many people’s minds.
But how do we really teach entrepreneurship to kids…or anyone, for that matter?
Safe to say, I had to take my education into my own hands in order to uncover the secrets of starting a successful business. The first step was reconditioning how I thought about sales. That feeling of sales being something “bad” and forbidden stuck with me for a very long time. So at one point, I forced myself to accept a commision based sales job. I was pretty bad at it, (because I was selling something I didn’t believe in) but I did learn the fundamentals of selling.
Later, I became a music teacher and was able to fuse that entrepreneurial drive I had with my skill set in order to establish one of the fastest growing Music Academies in the world, Weatherford Music Academy, which has grown from just 30 students in July 2019 to offering over 500 lessons per week by the end of 2020. This doesn’t make us a HUGE company, but it has certainly had a huge impact on my life, plus we are providing over 25 jobs and making a big impact on our community. I was able to quit my job and work for myself, and now I have the time, the leverage, and the understanding of how to establish a successful and fast-growth business operation.
It brings two thoughts to my mind: number one, how do I repeat my success and turn the process into something that can be scaled even further? Because growth is the objective, and having an end point is of little interest to me, and having scale is everything.
The second is, how can I eliminate the problem that I faced as an energetic young kid? I wish that entrepreneurship could have been something that was at the forefront of my education, or at least incorporated into it. I had to fight desperately to piece together the knowledge I was seeking by doing deep dives into books, courses, seminars, as I struggled to understand why everything in college seemed irrelevant to actually obtaining results, and definitely fell into some deep and strange rabbit holes along the way, until I finally found that winning combination for myself.
The way that we learn the fundamentals of math, reading, and writing in school, I believe we should be offering the fundamentals of selling, brand building, and marketing in order to be able to provide young people with the abilities to be able to take any area of interest to them and make a career, or a company out of it.
I’m in the beginning stages of figuring out how to dissect my own journey from being a kid that turned into an introvert after hitting that wall over and over again and realizing it wasn’t ok for me to display this kind of entrepreneurial tendency when I was in school, to realizing I HAD to demonstrate this ability as an adult in order to survive and become the person I was meant to be. Learning some of these skills earlier on, and having mentorship from someone who had walked the path, could have saved me years, and also provided me with a much greater trajectory for success. Now that I have finally attained a good amount of the knowledge and experience, I can dedicate the next 10 years of my life to sharing, and doubling down on the lessons that have come with a modicum of success in building a profitable, sustainable, and growing business.
