Raising Our Kids to be Entrepreneurs

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Summary

Of all the lines classic lines parents love to use, this line may be used more than any other:

Study hard because you need to go to a good school so you can get a good job.

But what if parents took a different approach?

What if parents started raising their kids to be outstanding entrepreneurs instead of outstanding students?

Molding kids to be the entrepreneurial leaders and business-boomers of tomorrow—challenging them to walk a different path through constant encouragement and by stressing their natural strengths—might be a better way.

In this episode of Making Bank, Adam Toren, founder of Kidpreneurs, discusses about how he started entrepreneurial journey as a child, and how his grandfather taught him the art of the sale—as fate would have it, the most important art lesson Adam (and his brother) would ever learn.

Listen as Adam and Josh talk about:

• The key ingredient to being a successful entrepreneur
• Why putting all your eggs in one basket is the biggest mistake you’ll ever make
• How to utilize tools and online marketing
• Why procrastination is the thief of fortune
• How to match entrepreneurship with the lifestyle you want
• Why passion can’t always pay the bills

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Transcription

Welcome to the Whatever it Takes Network. I am Josh Felber, host of the Making Bank TV show, and we’re going to explore today: Raising our kids as entrepreneurs. So many of us … You growing up as kids, your parents may have asked, “oh I want you to be a teacher” or “I want you to be a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant”. I think where our nation is going, where our education system, with all the problems in it, is we have to start raising our kids as entrepreneurs to start turning the country around and start turning the systems around.

I know for me from personal experience. I have 3 kids. Twin boys who are 4, and my daughter who is 6, and that even myself is when I was a kid I did all these different entrepreneurial small little businesses I tried to do. Whether it was the lemonade stand or selling things in boys scouts, or learning sales. Then at 14 years old I started my first company selling computers because I asked how can I do this better.

The crazy thing is, my parents didn’t empower me or they didn’t say hey go and be an entrepreneur. It just happened. They bought me some books one day. Tony Robbins and thinking go rich by Napoleon Hill. For me, reading those inspired me. Inspired me to do more, inspired me to go and and want to be an entrepreneur, even though I didn’t know what it was back then. I feel that it’s my duty and my obligation to raise my kids as entrepreneurs, as well as you, if you’re a parent out there looking to have kids one day, should look at the same thing as raising you kids to be entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs, they’re the next leaders, our kids are the next leaders. With the skills and the entrepreneurial talents that we need to bring into this country. So many times doctors and families that are so ready to put your kids on Ritalin and ADD medication and “oh my kid likes to talk but doesn’t like to do his school work, so let me go get him a tutor for his school work”. We always want to focus on what we’re not good at. As we’re raising our kids, we have to focus on their strengths. Your kids a great speaker, take him and get him speaking classes. Empower him to talk better. Encourage that, instead of playing it down and saying “ah go and you you got to do better in your school work” and everything.

Maybe your kid’s a daydreamer, it doesn’t mean that he can’t focus. Help him focus in on what he’s dreaming about, and where he can go and take that. So many times we’re not sure as parents, you and I, what traits should we look to nurture. Some of those traits are attainment, tenacity, leadership, sales, sales we do all day everyday within our life. Networking, teach your kids how to network and how to make friends, and hoe to connect with others. That’s going to set them apart for their whole life. How to handle failure. As kids we get such beat in our heads that failure’s not good. Failure’s not good, no no no no.

We have to teach our kids how to handle failure. What is failure, why failure is good. For me, raising my kids, my daughter’s 6 years old now and she’s been talking about … My wife is also an entrepreneur, who owns a big [inaudible 00:04:00] skin care company. Our daughter sees this, see’s both of her parents in at entrepreneurial role and she said “hey dad, I would like to do something”. First she tried a little jewelry business in making jewelry. The skill levels were a little higher for her and trying to figure out so the stringing all the stuff together and putting them together.

the next thing you know is we have pets and she had this “ah, I want to make healthy treats for our pets”. She came up with a name, we went out and had a trademark search done on it for her and taking her through the process. The first trademark search that came back for the [inaudible 00:04:41] paws wasn’t able to go through, so we had to switch the name, and had to help her understand why the name had to be switched. She was so in love with that first name. It’s teaching your kids that thought process. Why certain things happen and how to work through them. Now we’re in the process of moving things along. Getting a trademark, getting her website designed and everything else.

As we’re raising our kids, we want to help our kids learn from failure. We also want to let our kids make decisions. So many times we don’t give them and let them make their own decisions. Give them food options or clothing options when they’re little. What outfit to wear. Limit their choices so they don’t get overwhelmed, but let them make that choice. So many times it’s just like “take this, here take this, you have to have this”. I know you do it with your kids. Make that change today. Ask why. Challenge the status quote. I fall into that trap sometimes. “just listen and just go do it”, but my kids ask why so many times, all of a sudden you’re just wanting to beat their head on the desk. You have to step back and realize that this is them learning this is how they understand things.

Remember when we were all kids and anything was within our reach and so we want to teach our kids about money as well. So many times they’re not taught about money. We give them an allowance. That’s like giving your kids a paycheck. Watch them to go find things. Take their money and pay them based on a commission basis and have them save some and spend some, so they’re able to have fun with it. Next up, we have Adam Toren, founder of Kidprenuers and we’re excited to meet with him. I am Josh Felber host on the Making Bank TV show on the Whatever it Takes Network.

I am Josh Felber, you’re watching Making Bank on the Whatever it Takes Network. I am really excited today for our next guest. His Name is Adam Toren, along with his brother Matt. They founded youngentrepreneur.com. Adam is an award winning author of 2 books, Small Business Big Vision and their passion project, Kidpreneurs, which is an awesome book. Adam is also the advisor to several start ups. Adam and his brother Matthew have been business partners since they were young kids, that’s really cool. They have started and bought and sold several companies over the years.

Adam I really appreciate you coming on today and thanks for joining me on Making Bank.

Adam Toren: Definitely my pleasure Josh and thank you for making the arrangements for having me on.

Josh Felber: For sure. I’ve been excited to have you on my show. It’ a cool passion and it’s something that’s deep with me, because I have kids. When I was 14 I started my first business and so when you guys had your kidpreneur book you rolled out with. I was like “man I gotta grab this” and started reading it to my kids every night, and now my daughter’s reading it and writing notes and everything else, so it’s so awesome that you guys were able to take that information and put it at a level for kids to understand.

Adam Toren: Definitely. Thanks. It’s amazing how things come about, because when my brother’s daughter was about … I think she was about 7 or 8 years old at the time, she asked my brother “daddy, what do you and uncle do for your jobs?”. She obviously saw all the other kids at school and talked to the kids and we did something a little bit different than the other parents at the school. She obviously knew what a doctor and a lawyer and a dentist was but the fact that she didn’t understand what an entrepreneur did, what her uncle and her dad did kind of bothered us a little bit. We thought it was important for her to understand the basic principles of entrepreneurship.

Something that is a very important skill set to even know whether you’re going to be an entrepreneur or not. We looked everywhere to find a book or a program or curriculum that was written to speak to that age group in bite size nuggets that was easily absorb-able and something that kids could really relate to. There was really nothing out there so Kidpreneurs was born.

Josh Felber: That’s awesome. Then you guys even have parents books so parents aren’t familiar of the business, it gives them a nice guide book to help the kids.

Adam Toren: Yeah. Actually Kidpreneurs is now evolved into a full curriculum. So a full year program. We’re in about 250 elementary schools around the world.

Josh Felber: That’s awesome.

Adam Toren: Yeah so it’s been an exciting adventure so far and something that’s really near and dear t our heart.

Josh Felber: For sure, that’s excited. I take a couple of steps back. What got you … When did you start your entrepreneurial career and what got you started in that?

Adam Toren: It takes us way back to when we were 7 or 8 years old and our grandfather Joe introduced us to something called these Dipper Do airplanes. He actually literally brought out this dusty box of airplanes. They were like little paper airplanes but they were cool and in a cool packaging and he said “guys I’m going to teach you the art of the sale”, how to wow a customer. How to impress them, how to do really cool things and treat a customer right. He said “I’m going to bring you to a folk festival and I’m going to bring you to these Dipper Do airplanes”. So the weekend rolled around and we went to this folk festival, and low and behold, grandpa Joe was right. We sold out of these 250 airplanes in a couple of hours and at that point we knew we were bit by this entrepreneurial bug. The rest is history.

Josh Felber: When you guys were that young, did you guys start little businesses along the way or did you have like a gap where then all of a sudden you’re later on in life, you’re like okay cool this is what we’re going to do now going forward”.

Adam Toren: We did everything from mowing lawns to shoveling snow to going back to those same clients that we shoveled snow and mowed lawns and asked if we could recycle their soda bottles and cans and bring them to the store to cash them in for money. We sold candy at school, we did everything during that 7 to 12 year old age range. Anything we could think of. We were definitely motivated. My brother and I have been business partners since the kid days, which is pretty cool story in its own.

Josh Felber: Yeah that’s awesome that you’re able to connect on that level with your brother as well as both share the same passions and everything to move forward in the business realm.

Adam Toren: Best friends, business partners. Throughout high school we had various business ventures as well. We were importing car stereos from New York, because back then obviously the most popular thing to do was to bounce pennys off the roof of your car. The most base wins. We were importing these car stereos and boom boxes and had a relationship with the local guy that installed them. So we’ve had a lot of different projects all over the map.

Josh Felber: What’s been your most passionate and exciting one that you guys have started?

Adam Toren: It’s got to be Kidpreneurs for us because it’s something that we never thought would blossom into anything. We just wanted to come out with something that really spoke to the kids and then all the mompreneurs and the mommy bloggers and everybody embraced the book. It was such a wonderful feeling. That’s the feeling of giving back. This is the book that we wished that we had as kids. It’s a really cool feeling to have.

Josh Felber: Out of all of that, that was your best success. How did that that really make you guys feel when you saw that book hit that tipping point.

Adam Toren: It felt amazing. It felt really good to be able to sell and wholesale and donate over 100 000 books. It’s an amazing feeling.

Josh Felber: That’s exciting. Especially being able to connect and help kids at that level as well as their parents.

Adam Toren: And to also see my kids and my brother’s kids and hoe they were touched by entrepreneurship and what they’ve done, and the ideas that they’ve come up with. It’s just an amazing feeling to see your kids do some amazing things with ideas that the parent has come up with. It’s cool to actually see them taking action.

Josh Felber: My daughter’s working on starting a [inaudible 00:14:05] treat business for dogs and cats. She’s got the name, we had to go get it all trademarked so she was covered and wondering why it takes so long. You gotta explain the whole process.

Adam Toren: Speak to your daughter on Kidpreneurs. When that launches we’ll definitely teach her. Will be wonderful.

Josh Felber: It’s pretty soon. We’re probably about 4 months out. When we come back, what I’d like to so is talk a little bit about … You guys have owned so many businesses, there’s got to be something where you’ve had some failures. So want to touch base on that. We’ll be back right after the break. Can you stick around for a little bit?

Adam Toren: For sure.

Josh Felber: Awesome. I am Josh Felber, you’re watching Making Bank on the Whatever it Takes Network. I am Josh Felber, you’re watching Making Bank on the Whatever it Takes Network. We’re back with Adam Toren. We’ve been talking about Kidpreneurs and him and his brother’s successes, his entrepreneurs and we want to touch base Adam. What is the key ingredient that you found that’s created the most success for your guys’ entrepreneurial career?

Adam Toren: One thing we’ve narrowed it down to, and there’s obviously a lot of key ingredients, but it’s surrounding yourself with other successful people. We hear about it all the time, obviously you’ve heard it. Hang around with 9 entrepreneurs all the time and you can consider yourself the 10th. If you surround yourself with 9 guys that are getting stuff done and making stuff happen. You’ll quickly follow suit. So definitely making sure that you’re always choosing your friends wisely.

Josh Felber: That’s a cool take away, because my wife and I just had a conversation with our daughter the other day about friends and who you surround yourself with is where that’s going to take you in life. One of her friends, it wasn’t really her friend, it was an acquaintance. Was just not treating her well and so we had that whole story and that whole conversation so that’s really cool that you said that, and that’s a huge thing. For me, I’ve always tried to surround myself with higher level people, not just at the same level. I always want to have that higher level people to connect with and hopefully raise their game as well too.

You guys have invested in, owned many businesses over the years from all the way when you were 7 and 8 to where you are now. What was one of the biggest failures and then what was that piece that you took from that, that helped catapult you to success?

Adam Toren: Well a while back we had a fashion company that manufactured women’s fashion accessories. We were actually going to sole Korea and Pusan in Korea and importing these women fashion accessories many years back. We developed a fantastic relationship after we were at the Jacob [inaudible 00:17:25] center in New York. We had a booth there and everything and we had a great relationship with a buyer of a major retail chain. Things were going extremely well with her. We were doing very very well until the buyer left the company. The new person that took over that role actually decided to go with a different supplier. Imagine that. We were actually left with about 50 000 dollars in inventory from the previous order that they had stocked.

it was an immediate stop at 50K in women’s fashion accessories. The lesson here is obviously don’t put all your eggs in 1 basket. They were our only client. That was it. When they decided to not take on any orders, we were done. We still have some of these accessories in our garage today. So if your viewers are looking for any women’s fashion accessories, hit me up.

Josh Felber: They can go to your website and get some right?

Adam Toren: Yup.

Josh Felber: I have dealt with retailers and stuff and it’s just a brutal market place. Most of [inaudible 00:18:34] there, they switch roles within the company every 6 months it seems like.

Adam Toren: We learned that the hard way. That was an abrupt adjustment to our game plan, but we quickly moved on.

Josh Felber: The premisis of the show is we want to help empower entrepreneurs, be more successful or take that next step to being an entrepreneur. What was maybe a success or short cut or something that you’ve come across along the way that’s helped you guys either get there faster, or be able to continue to move forward down that path for success.

Adam Toren: I can tell you about a recent experience that we’ve had. In the beginning when we launched Kidpreneurs, we were very fortunate to get a lot of publicity for the book and the program. We were even featured in the Wall Street Journal, full page. Which was amazing. We decided this year that our goal this year is to sell as many books as possible to hopefully share the entrepreneurial experience with kids all over the world. We started learning all about Facebook ads and online marketing and really studying, and again hanging out with people that are experts in that category. The ability to track and split tasks, your various campaigns and all that good stuff. It’s fantastic and extremely helpful.

We had been able to sky rocket the Kidpreneurs awareness through Facebook ads, targeted Facebook ads using tools like Infusion Softs has been powerful for … Click Funnels, are you familiar with Click Funnels?

Josh Felber: Oh yeah.

Adam Toren: Lead Pages. There’s so many different automation tools that make your life so much easier now, so we are really trying to utilize these tools and make our Kidpreneurs program sky rocket as fast as we possibly can.

Josh Felber: You guys have taken technology and used those technology pieces to amplify and to create massive movement within your business it sounds like. That’s really cool. Throughout your super long entrepreneurial career. What was that best advice that you’ve ever received?

Adam Toren: I don’t remember who actually told me this but procrastination, is the thief of fortune. In other words, as we’ve heard a lot these days GSD, get stuff done or get beep done. So take action, make things happen, remember procrastination’s the thief of fortune, and get things going for yourself.

Josh Felber: Give me a device you can’t live without. I know you guys are all technologically savvy.

Adam Toren: We’re all about the automated lifestyle so I have everything on my iPhone. My iPhone 6 is full of everything I need, which I’m doing right now. I’m in Vancouver traveling and the iPhone’s been perfect for us.

Josh Felber: One of the things too is. As you guys are growing Kidpreneurs. How did you manage to take your business and being able to match that to the lifestyle that you wanted to create. So that you weren’t working those 80 hundred hours a week and not have that life to where you can get out and spend it with the families and go on vacations and things?

Adam Toren: It’s all about these automation tools and I also feel the need for appreciation and gratitude all the time. I have a really solid schedule that I stick to that I get work life balanced. Actually there’s one that I’d recommend for your listeners to download, it’s called Headspace. Heard of it?

Josh Felber: No I’m not familiar with that one.

Adam Toren: It’s a mindfulness app that works you through. Anyone at any level can really take advantage of the mindfulness aspects. I also wake up really early in the morning. One of the early risers. I’m up usually at 5:30 in the morning and I start my day early.

Josh Felber: I’ve used Windstreaks before, the one that Dan Sullivan had.

Adam Toren: Okay I’ve heard of it.

Josh Felber: Having a morning routine sounds like it’s helped you as well as then maintaining a schedule of chunking or blocking out your day from a productivity stand point, to be efficient as possible.

Adam Toren: Balancing and obviously eating well, sleeping well, fitness. All the things that make a really good work life balance.

Josh Felber: Last thing before we wrap up is, one or two items that you want to leave with our listeners with that they can take with them to move them forward in their entrepreneurial success.

Adam Toren: A lot of people say follow your passion. Sometimes, I’m being realistic here, sometimes passion doesn’t always pay the bills. That’s my opinion. So I’d say that you do something that you know you can work smart at. So you have the ability to sprinkle in a little bit of your passion projects throughout your life. Because we all have tons of passion projects. I can think of a lot that probably wouldn’t pay the bills but I’m doing them now because we’ve been able to make things happen with a lot of hard work and hustle.

Josh Felber: I really appreciate having you on this show. It’s such an honor that we’ve been able to connect and share your background, your successes as well as Kidpreneur. For people to go check it out they can go to Kidpreneurs.org?

Adam Toren: Correct. That would be great.

Josh Felber: Again, such an honor and thank you for your time today.

Adam Toren: Great to be on your show Josh, thank you very much.

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