Episode 162: Teaching Entrepreneurship with Leah Ellis of The Society of Child Entrepreneurs
Leah Ellis is a mom of four, writer, wedding officiant, Girl Scout leader, and founder of The Society of Child Entrepreneurs. Through SoCE, Nerdy Nuptials ICT, and Girl Scouts, she creates spaces where kids, couples, and communities are empowered to lead with authenticity. Leah believes in making room for both the mess and the magic of becoming.
Leah, a “serial entrepreneur,” shares with me how her daughter's interest in selling paintings led to hosting children's business fairs. She also explains why she hopes more parents help their children start their own businesses.
Topics Discussed:
How COVID forced her to pivot to financial coaching
Having 12-year-olds solve package theft problems
Starting with a side hustle
Resources mentioned:
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Read the transcript for this episode:
Welcome to Educator Forever, where we empower teachers to innovate education. Join us each week to hear stories of teachers expanding their impacts beyond the classroom and explore ways to reimagine teaching and learning.
Leah Ellis is a mom of four, writer, wedding officiant, Girl Scout leader and founder of the Society of Child Entrepreneurs. Her life blends family creativity and leadership, from giggling over business plans at the breakfast table to mentoring kids through hands on entrepreneurship with children as her compass. Lily is reminded daily that growth is messy, love is work, and compassion changes everything. Welcome, Leo, so nice to have you here. Hi. Thanks for having me. So I'd love for you to start us off in whatever direction you'd like talking about your professional journey.
Leah Ellis 0:34
So I've had a very interesting professional journey. My husband introduces me as his wife the serial entrepreneur, because he can't keep track of all the jobs I do. I have a wedding company. I ran a financial coaching company. I've run a daycare. I've done financial teaching online, and now I am the founder and executive director of a nonprofit called the Society of Child Entrepreneurs, where I kind of get to blend all of my special interests into one really amazing nonprofit.
Lily Jones 1:03
Fantastic. And I'd love to hear more about the society of child entrepreneurs. How did it come about?
Leah Ellis 1:09
So again, serial entrepreneur, pre COVID. I owned an in home daycare, and I loved it, and I loved my students. My house flooded. I had to live in a hotel for six months. I finally was reopening my in home daycare. My Open House was the same day the state of California issued their stay at home order. Oh, no, needless to say, not anybody showed up for our open house. And I was like, well, that's okay, like, they're still essential workers. Like, we can still advertise and maybe pull in some of those essential worker kids, like I can still maybe, maybe pull this off. And then the city that we lived in opened a free for essential workers childcare center that was within walking distance of my daycare. And at that point, I realized my daycare was not going to survive for at least the next little while, my husband and I pivoted and decided to start a financial coaching company, and I was watching like, training videos and like, stay at home mom videos and stuff like that. Because it was six years ago now almost, and I had nothing else I was doing. We were all trapped, and we were in Los Angeles County, so we were, like, hardcore trapped. And my daughter was four at the time, and she was watching them with me. And so I would like project them onto our living room TV, and we would watch Christy writes about Christy Wright's business boutique together. That tells you how old we are. And she looked at me, she was like, I want to do that too. Melody, you can't start a business. You're four. Why not? I didn't have a good answer. And like, I've always been really honest with my kids, and when I realized I didn't have a good answer, didn't have a good answer for why she couldn't start her own business, I was like, Okay, fine. What are you going to sell? She said, Well, I'll sell my paintings like I make in the garage, and because she had taken up like Jackson Pollock style drip art, because it's messy and fun for toddlers. And so I was like, Okay, fine. We'll make a Facebook page. We made a Facebook page, and she started getting orders, and then she was making money. And then, after covid, a friend of ours hosted a children's business fair, and she loved the opportunity to be in a room full of other kids who were selling stuff. And we moved away, so when we got to our new home, I hosted my first children's business fair, and I was really frustrated when it was over. So it was massive. The kids did amazing. If the fire marshals had shown up, we would have been fined out the wazoo, because we were so packed. And then it was over. Like, there was no day two, there was no growth after that. It was just set up, sell your stuff, leave. So I looked at some friends of mine and was like, we could do more, like we could teach them entrepreneurship. I already have an entrepreneurship background. I already have a teaching background. I already have a founder's background, like we could do this, and they agreed with me. So the running joke is that in order to create peers for my daughter who were other kids that wanted to do entrepreneurship, we would found a nonprofit, and now we're about a year and a half old. We definitely have lots of growing to do, but you can see on my shirt today, because we haven't we have an exciting meeting at city council tonight, but we created our own mascots. We have in development a full curriculum, a board game. Our first book will be out by the end of the year. Like we've been growing in a lot of new ways, and it's super fun to see the things that kids can invent.
Lily Jones 4:26
That's so cool. Yeah, it's so cool thinking about kids of entrepreneurs. You know, my kids like whole lives. I've been building a business too. So it's just interesting having them have that experience. And then I love that your daughter's like, how about me, too, and that you took it and ran with it, right?
Leah Ellis 4:43
I didn't have a logical reason why the answer had to be no other than her age, and that's technically a form of discrimination, so I couldn't use that against her.
Lily Jones 4:55
And that's great that you're kind of codifying it and creating a curriculum and a book and. Yeah, and all these other resources I am. We have a curriculum agency side of educator forever, and we created an entrepreneurship curriculum, but for, like, older kids, middle school and high school students a few years ago, and it was so cool, like, really seeing entrepreneurship as a way of solving a problem in your community. And these kids just got so engaged in the process of, like, building something that was their own and align to a change they wanted to see. So, so cool to see that come to life.
Leah Ellis 5:25
We start. So I tell parents, if your kid can add and subtract within 20 they can run a business, because they can count back change. So we start at six years old. Six year olds can come in and we'll help them build their business or their businesses. And our formal curriculum is 36 weeks long, and it has there's two versions. There's a grade three, four or a grade five, six, and so we have those two versions. And like I just finished the lesson plans for week 29 and it's all on social entrepreneurship and how, if you're an entrepreneur who notices a need in your community, you can use this process to make a change in your community.
Lily Jones 6:05
I love that so inspiring. So tell us a little bit more about the offerings that you offer at Society of Child Entrepreneurs.
Leah Ellis 6:11
So we have our annual membership, which is when kids can join our membership, and then they come to a monthly mastermind with us. They come to our children's business fairs. They get a cool t shirt and bags and stuff like that. Then we have our workshops that are open to our whole community, where they can come in and they can pay to spend a few hours building some portion of a business with us. And then we have the curriculum that will within the next two years be available for private schools and homeschoolers to buy for their schools. The board game, I think, is probably about two years out, but it's called roll a biz. And essentially what happens is you have three dice, you roll your dice and get a problem, a customer demographic and a budget, and then you have two minutes to create a business and a pitch, and then pitch it to the judge, and the judge picks the business that they want to give their fake investor money too.
Lily Jones 7:06
Amazing. That's so fun.
Leah Ellis 7:08
Yeah, it's like a pitch contest and Shark Tank wrapped into one, and you play it with dice, which makes it very quick and easy for kids to grasp and keep going.
Lily Jones 7:17
I love all of those. And it's so cool to see all the different parts you know, of like, once you have a great idea, all the different ways that you can kind of spin it. And I think what's so cool hearing you talk both about your daughter and these resources that you're creating is really the agency it gives to kids. Of like, you can create these things. And I know that you say that kids don't have to wait to lead. And can you talk a little bit about, like, how a Society of Child Entrepreneurs helps them lead.
Leah Ellis 7:42
So we do talk about like, if you are running your business, what are you doing? My second daughter had a face painting business, and she got massively busy. She had this super long line, and so I had to look at her, and we had to learn on the spot. And I was like, You're too busy to do this on your own. Your sister's business is across the way, and she's not busy right now. You need to go hire her right now to come work for you. And she had to run across the aisle get her sister and hire her sister to come be her assistant face painter. And so she had to, like, be her older sister's boss. And like, they had to have that dynamic between the two of them and run that business. One of my favorite leadership stories about my daughter, we were planting a tree with her girl scout trip, and she looked at me, and she was like, I feel like we're not celebrating our tree enough. I was like, What do you mean we're not celebrating our tree enough? And she was like, Well, I think you need to call the Chamber of Commerce and see if they'll do a ribbon cutting for our tree. What we need to celebrate it more? We need to have a party. We ended up having a ceremonial groundbreaking with golden shovels, a ribbon cutting, a poetry reading the newspaper and the mayor present for us to plant a tree that was about two and a half feet tall.
Lily Jones 8:56
Amazing. Yes, like, but she took charge.
Leah Ellis 8:59
She knew what she wanted, and she wanted, and she was like, You need to make this call and make it happen. And once it did, she had the order of events. She knew what she wanted to happen, and then it happened. And now, like it was on the front page of the newspaper, but it was below the fold, so now my 10 year old has a life goal of being above the fold. That's something that not every child would aspire to, but she really knows that's what she wants. And then talking about entrepreneurs solving problems, I had a really small workshop over spring break last year, and these three girls were absolutely hilarious. So the lesson that day was on how entrepreneurs solve problems. So the first thing you need to do as an entrepreneur is identify a problem and then come up with a solution that you can monetize, to sell it, and that's your business. And to make things easy, I gave them a problem. It was like your problem that you have to solve is poor. Pirates. We are all tired of our things getting stolen. Fix it several iterations later, lots of me giving them really mean pushback, like delivery drivers don't care about the lock box on your porch, and thieves are just going to steal a lock box and my packages, they ended up with a robot body bolted to your house with two bolts so it didn't create long term damage. Extender arms to store the package in itself, no matter where the delivery left it, and facial recognition so that it would give you your package when you got I looked at these girls, they were six, nine and 12 and said, I feel like that programming is probably a little bit above your head, which the 12 year old looked at me, deadpan, completely serious. I'm in robotics club. I'll figure it out. That's what entrepreneurship and leadership is like in kids. Like there is no holding them back their imaginations and their confidence when we give them space will blow you away.
Lily Jones 11:07
That's so inspiring. And I think that, you know, we think about entrepreneurship, or I've experienced entrepreneurship as really, like a personal development project too, right? Like we learn all these skills and resilience and listening to people and responding to those needs. And I'm curious, just if you can talk a little bit more about what you see kids developing through entrepreneurship.
Leah Ellis 11:29
So so so much self esteem and confidence, because they have to talk to strangers. They have to deal with customer service problems. They have to defend their decisions if somebody questions them without getting heartbroken that they were critiqued. I had one girl, she really didn't want to be in her first booth like she wanted to make money. She didn't want to have to talk to people. She's the secretary of our junior Board of Directors now, and helps run the whole organization like she just like, once she hit her stride, nothing will slow her down. She's even a consigner in our local zoo.
Lily Jones 12:10
Cool. Yeah, that's fantastic. And so thinking about if every community had a Society of Child Entrepreneurs, what do you think the world would be like?
Leah Ellis 12:21
I love this question so much because it's so much fun, because it's like, okay, I have this tiny little ball of children, and these kids are learning that their impact matters in their community. They have power, they have a voice, and they haven't been told that they can't yet, because I really hate that word yet, and that means, when they're grown ups in every community nationwide, we have this generation of empowered people with belief in themselves and empathy because of their customer service experience, to be able to look at their communities and say, this is a problem that's impacting my community, and how can I solve it? We're also really lucky because we're able to add some of the adaptive leadership technology like theories from Kansas Leadership Center into our curriculum so our kids learn about how Leadership isn't a title. Leadership is an activity, and it is something that everybody can do and should be doing in their communities, and how to take those steps to build their community into a better place. And that means we have a whole planet full of people who are like actively trying to make the world a better place and taking care of their community, and who is going to complain about a bunch of really smart kids making their own money and making the world a better place?
Lily Jones 13:38
I love that vision. I mean, I'm not going to complain. I think that sounds fantastic and so helpful for kids to have this vision from the beginning of like, hey, I want to see this change, or I want this in my community. Oh, I can help create it. And I think again, like going back to the yet, you know, like taking that out right, like you can't yet. I think even as grown ups, we feel that sometimes of like, oh, we put up all these barriers for ourselves. And so giving kids the permission that they can go out and create the change they want to see is so empowering.
Leah Ellis 14:13
I feel like my generation, we're all slightly apathetic because we spent too much time in our youth being told, like, you can fix it when you're older. And now we're older and we're like, I'll fix it when I'm older. Like, if we can just teach the kids the now, like, go fix it, even if they don't have the resources to fix it. Now they're at least starting conversations, starting processes, so that it's something they can fix later, and we don't risk dulling their spirit by telling them no so many times.
Lily Jones 14:46
So going back to entrepreneurship as personal development, and I know you've started many different businesses yourself, but I would love to hear kind of what you've learned about yourself through your own journey of entrepreneurship, or particularly with starting. Society of Child Entrepreneurs,
Leah Ellis 15:03
I've learned that really crazy. ADHD, so if I do not love it, I have a hard time focusing. And therefore, I've learned that as an entrepreneur, you're allowed to give yourself carrots. You're allowed to say, like, I really don't want to update my CRM with follow up notes, because, like, I already did the follow up and now I have to put in follow up notes, and that feels like too much work. So you're allowed to say, but when I finish my follow up notes, I'm going to go to Walmart and buy some cute new shoes or whatever little thing you want to give yourself, like you're allowed to bribe yourself there. It's not against any rules.
Lily Jones 15:47
I think it's all about, yeah, finding ways to help yourself stay motivated. I mean, I think I'm so curious about this, just in general, in life, of like, how do we actually do the things we want to do? And it's a constant exploration for kids and for grown ups of like, how do I actually do the things and get around my own hurdles, whatever they might be, right?
Leah Ellis 16:07
And especially if you have so I have undiagnosed, probably autism. My second daughter is diagnosed autistic, and we all have executive dysfunction issues and ADHD and so it's really interesting, like in my household, to get things done, but because of the creativity of entrepreneurship and self reflection, we're able to say, like, this is what we want. This is what we have to do to get it and this is what we're going to do in absolutely minuscule steps to make it happen. I think that's the other thing that entrepreneurs have a tendency to overwhelm themselves by coming up with, like, I need to be on every social media page by the next 90 days, or my business is going to fail, and not giving ourselves those like little micro goals of I need to post three times on Tiktok in the next month, so that I know how the platform works, and what my followers want is a way easier goal, and it's still getting you towards that long term goal.
Lily Jones 17:11
Yes, I love that, yeah, really breaking down the different things we want to do. And I think it reminds me of like being a teacher and having kids be engaged in whatever topic I'm teaching is the greatest tool, right? Like engagement is what makes everything else worth it. And so I think thinking about kids building their own businesses, you know, if they're engaged in that, or us building our own businesses, right? Like things that we find important, just like you said, right? Like it makes it possible for us to overcome all those other things and break them out into small steps or use tools to get to where we want to go. But it really does always start with engagement of like, finding a bigger purpose there.
Leah Ellis 17:52
Exactly. And like so as a teacher, as an entrepreneur, as a nonprofit director, like, the most exciting moment in anything is when a customer or a student or a client gets that spark of, oh, like that spark transcends anything, and that can keep you motivated for a really long time. And when we have 10 year olds who are selling their art and get that spark of a stranger looking at something they created and saying, Oh, you did this. Then there is nothing they can't do because they believe they can do it, and therefore they do.
Lily Jones 18:30
So powerful. So thinking about grown ups who might be listening to this podcast, and they might be like, Well, I didn't get a chance to start a business as a kid, but maybe I want to do it now. What advice do you have for grown ups who want to go into entrepreneurship?
Leah Ellis 18:46
Baby steps. Don't just jump straight into I'm going to be a business owner and I'm going to take this thing and I'm going to quit my day job, and I'm going to flounder until I make it. Start your Etsy shop with your three pairs of earrings and see how they sell. Do three more, then add 12. Like don't expect success overnight, and remember that your business needs to make it five years before it's permanently sustainable and less likely to shut down, which means there is going to be three to five years of occasional terror and amazing joy, and you have to get through the terror to celebrate the joy. And that means every time you get scared, every time your nonprofit doesn't make the money you want, every time you don't sell as quickly as you want, or you go to a farmer's market and you don't break even, take a deep breath and plan for the next one.
Lily Jones 19:40
Great advice. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Lily. Can you tell people where they can connect
Leah Ellis 19:45
with you? So we are at S, O, C, E, I C t.org, it's Sochi, i c t. We're also the Society of child entrepreneurs on Facebook and Instagram. And then you have show Notes. There should be a link to it's our Sochi hub. It's a bit Lily link, and it has kind of all of our shortcuts on events that are happening with us.
Lily Jones 20:07
Wonderful. We'll add all those to the show notes. And thank you again for coming on.
Leah Ellis 20:11
Thank you so much.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai