He launched a sweaty startup in high school. Now he'll be a millionaire by 18

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/ed11e221da70a5ee

All right, today we're trying something new. We have three high school students, ninth graders, tenth graders, eleventh graders, that all are running their own business while they're in school. And not just like
Oh, here's my idea. These guys have real revenue. Tens of thousands of dollars in profit that they're making as
Yeah. It's crazy.
And so we invited them in, we're doing office hours with them. So they bring us their biggest problem.
And we try to help them solve it in like ten minutes. And whether you're a high school or college student or you're just running your own business, I think there's gonna be something in this for everybody because there's a beauty in these kids who they're like, ah, I just don't know anything, but they're crushing it. Yeah, it there's a lot of people who listen to this podcast that wanna start something and they overthink it.
And
There's a beauty to being ignorant and these kids are ignorant and because of that they create s amazing stuff and I think that you should steal that attitude.
I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to
I put my all in it like my day's all on the road, less travel, never looking back. Alright, we're doing something fun today. We have
high school students who have
existing businesses, they're running businesses, they're making a lot of revenue, they have making money, and they're here for office hours. And this is all part of our buddy Anand, who's here with us.
He um he's running this new thing called the formidable
fellows. And I think this is like a precursor. You you want to launch a school someday, a new school for entrepreneurship, but this is kinda your
Your MVP, is that right? You started giving out grants to middle and high school students?
Yeah, so we're building a national network of schools of entrepreneuring. It takes a while to build physical schools, so
Uh my friend Raj and I started something called the Formidable Fellowship.
Yeah, we kinda I think like Gen Z probably gonna be the most entrepreneurial generation and
Uh we saw a lot of them out there, and so we started a non profit.
Uh with five hundred K.
We're giving thousand dollar grants to middle and high school entrepreneurs and

had twenty three grantees.
You'll meet
Three of uh the great ones today.
Um and yeah, you know, kind of along the way
Other
Awesome entrepreneurs, their mesh.
from Hub Spa, Sean Griffey from Industry Dive.
A bunch of other folks have been contributors, so
Uh, so now we've got, you know, even more capital to give out to these young entrepreneurs.
This is like your uh second mountain. So basically you started a company called C B Insights that
is in the range of a hundred million dollars in revenue or something like that.
Uh now is this like your uh this is what you do after you've made a bunch of money and you want to impact the world positively besides creating
You know, business intelligence tools.
Uh yeah, it's g it's a second it's it's the second mountain. I think that's a good way of putting it, right? I think like if you could build a system that
increases human potential. Like that's a pretty tremendous thing to do. Um and I think we can do it in a way that will make
money and eventually rival the public school system. That's our goal.
All right. Well, five hundred K. And how did you find these kids? So they reached out, you reached out to them. How'd you find all these founders?
Yeah, we reached out to
A lot of entrepreneurship teachers at schools
And that was I think primarily the way a little bit of social media, some parents who found us on Twitter and LinkedIn
But yeah, I think a lot of them just
you know, word of mouth. Um and so yeah, we got a few hundred applicants to first go around
You know, qualifications where you had to have revenue?
Uh, so that was kind of a hard filter we had. There's a lot of folks who have sort of
a dream or they're starting something to burnish a college application and we didn't want that. We wanted people who are actually
Building. Um and so
Yeah, we narrowed it down pretty quickly and found some. Did you have any revenue in middle school or high school? I barely had
Facial hair.
Yeah, it's pretty insane. Like when I was a kid in uh in grade school, uh it was like make a business plan and like fake present it to a board of directors. And you think that like
Like you know what I mean? Like dear board of directors, and it was nonsense. And I'm seeing their bios, and this is so much more interesting.
Uh than what we were doing. What were you I mean, at fourteen, I don't even think I knew what that word entrepreneur meant.
Yeah, definitely didn't. My business plan was like mac and cheese, but with double the cheese. That was the whole thing.
All right. So we're gonna do this. We're gonna see what we got. Uh they're calling in literally from school, by the way, which is hilarious. Like someone came on and their lunch b the bell for like recess came on or something. That was amazing. All right, so let's try this out. Let's go, Lincoln.
All right, uh my name is Lincoln Snyder. I'm a senior at Lake Dows High School.
My business is Sunshine Exteriors. So we clean windows, gutters, power wash, fent staining.
And holiday lighting.
Um, we're located in Denton, Texas.
The main goal is to help the homeowners protect their investment and obviously at have a clean home year round.
Um my business is two years old. Last year we did sixty thousand dollars in revenue at about
Just above fifty percent margin.
Hold on, pause real quick.
Sam, you know why he's good?
Did you hear what he did there? That was some sophisticated
High level stuff he just did where he goes
He's talking about cleaning gutters and he goes We help home homeowners protect their investment.
He didn't say we clean your gutters.
What's the biggest investment in your life, your home?
Wouldn't you want to protect it? Wow, Lincoln, I'm already impressed. Continue.
Um yeah, so last year we did sixty thousand at just about fifty percent margins.
This year I plan to grow by a hundred and fifty percent to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
So you made thirty thousand dollars as a junior in high school, is that about right? I was a senior.
It was this year.
This year. Okay. Well well
But yeah.
Lap twenty twenty. School year. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.
Wow, all right. That's that's wild. Just just to recap, you go to homeowners, you'll power wash, you'll clean their gutters, you'll clean the windows, you'll put up Christmas lights, whatever you got to do, home services.
And you did sixty thousand last year as a high school senior.
And you think you're gonna do one hundred fifty this year. That's that's the subject.
Correct. All right.
Yes.
And then so it's me and I have two ten ninety nine subcontractor employees.
Um, so right now I'm completely off the field. So that means that they're doing all the jobs and I'm
The one in charge of booking, scheduling, finding the clients.
And how do you do that, Lincoln? How how do you get customers?
So
Primary acquisition source right now is next door.
Um it's a neighbor platform with surrounding communities.
Hey, look we w we complain about stuff all the time on next door. You no need to explain. Yeah.
Yeah. Um
Uh, so yeah, I kinda go on there. My angle is I'm a local high school student.
Um, I own a window cleaning brush washing. We do those services.
Um, if you'd like a free estimate, check out our website. We'd be happy to give you a quote.
And Lincoln, how do you do that? Because my my understanding is you can't post on next door unless you've been verified as having an address or you got a postcard that shows you live in the neighborhood.
They don't want people from outside the neighborhood messaging. How do you do that? Is that a new feature or am I just out of the loop? So I post in just my neighborhood.
Um so I guess in that area I am confined to my air my neighborhood.
Um on that app, but it's been
Enough.
Homes to keep me busy. I think we got maybe ninety customers last year off the next door just between March and September. If you're listening, how many people have we had on this pod saying
I don't have an idea. I don't have this. You know, this doesn't scale. All this bullshit.
He's eighteen years old. They made thirty grand and it was from posting on next door in his neighborhood only in his own personal neighborhood. Yeah. That's insane.
That's it. By the way, how did you hear about uh you know, Anand is a tech guy in New York City. How does someone uh in Texas who does power washing hear about this internet shit?
I was very fortunate. Um so there is a teacher who's a part of a teacher blog.
And I I'm
Not well known, but some of the people at my school know that I own my own business and do
a kind of power washing, window cleaning, things like that. And so she told me about it and then I submitted my application and wow.
This is cool, dude. Okay, so what's your question, uh before I start brainstorming,'cause I'm I'm fired up.
All right, so it's it's a pretty deep question.
I'm trying to figure out how to reliably acquire customers through paid advertising.
My current struggle is
Advertising on a small budget.
And not having the skills.
My question for you guys is
Should I pay to acquire those skills through paid courses?
Um
So far what I've been doing is kinda trying to learn on YouTube.
I don't think that it's in depth enough to learn fully, so I think that I might get more out of paid
Courses and content.
um seminars, whatever that might be.
Um or
Do you think that it would be smarter to just
Allocate
A semi large budget.
Two paid advertising.
And learn the skill on my own.
And kinda have to figure it out as I go.
All right, I got a bunch of opinions. Sam, you wanna go first or you want me to go?
I have a bunch of opinions. I think yes to all.
Uh basically. Yeah. Uh do all I don't know what your definition of a large budget is. The best way to learn is to do it. Uh and a a lot of people will shit on online courses. I think that's nonsense. Most of what I've learned in this internet world has been buying an online course.
uh I bought a copywriting course that changed my life. Uh I would I would I would suggest you do that. I don't know what the course offerings are, but if there is a local services
Uh
uh paid marketing course one hundred percent.
Do it. I don't know what a lot of money for you is, but if you have to spend up to two thousand dollars, as long as it has good reviews, do it.
By the way, I think if you emailed anybody who runs that course, you say, Hey, I'm eighteen years old.
I badly want to learn this. I don't have the cash to be able to put that up or you know, I'm willing to pay it kind of next year using the profits of this and I'll be your best testimonial for you. You know, I I I think you can get those courses for free out of goodwill. So so I wouldn't even let cost be a barrier.
But like Sam said, I think learning is an attack on all fronts. So you've you've you've done the right thing. You figured out what to learn.
And if you're committed to being obsessed with it, it's do it yourself.
Then it's watch free YouTube stuff.
Then it's
Do a paid
course of some kind.
Buy a book, whatever.
And then the the the last one you didn't mention that I would do it's what helped me when I went into e commerce. So f uh five years ago, I had never done an e commerce physical brand before.
And I had never done paid ads before.
And fast forward to now, you know, I've probably run
forty, fifty million dollars of paid ads and gotten pretty good at it.
And so what's what was the learning curve? One thing that really helped me was
Instead of just going straight to a course
I started doing it myself so I had my bearings and I knew what I didn't know.
on a very low scale budget.
And then what I did was I found somebody who already was winning with that method.
So I found either a friend or p somebody nearby and I said, Hey
Uh.
I really think what you're doing is great. I'm young. I want to learn.
And I basically went and I said, Can I come by for the day? And I just wanna
Ask you a couple of questions about paid ads. Yeah, sure, come over.
And then they come you come over and then you end up opening up their Facebook ad account with them and you start asking them questions. And if you do it right and if you're an earnest, genuine person, you're likable, like you it seems like you are.
um, you'll find somebody who will also give you that kind of like real world, real time type of mentorship.
Um
And they'll just tell you the ins and outs and they'll also tell you, Oh, uh
Your ad account got shut down.
Email this guy or hey, that's normal. Here's what happens. Right. So they'll tell you stuff that you can't find just
You know, generically on the internet. So I would also do that. But it's a war on all fronts when it comes to learning. You should be doing
All of them and then the ones that are giving you
A more rapid rate of learning, do more of those and less of the others as you get. You'll figure out what's best to work for you.
I would also suggest so I'm looking up next door. Next door's not a big company. Uh if I had a guess they have a thousand employees or less, I would Google next door account manager.
Or I'd go to the top. I'd
Google next door CMO or next door
director of marketing something uh V VP or above.
Uh, and I would email them and I would explain, this is what I did. I got
I just built a business that
Is about to is is doing six figures as a senior in high school.
I'm gonna advertise on next door. Do you have any type of
First time customer credits and I would bet
a lot of money that they will give you one to two thousand dollars in ad credits on next door to learn their platform.
And then I would do the same thing for uh what's the other one, uh
Sean, that the guy started Athena started th thumbtack.
Uh I would do the same. I would do next door thumbtack, I would email
as high up person as you can in marketing.
Probably
Have you run next door ads?
Yeah, so
That was kinda part of my question.
what I did last year for Christmas light installation.
Um
I really do that too?
I do.
If you need Christmas lights, hey.
I can fly out if it if the price works out. Um but yeah, so I ran the ads and they would did they did extremely well.
Which kind of it
It's almost frustrating to see that
It worked and then now I can't get it working again. But I think that's kinda with paid as it doesn't work for a while, but when it does work, it explodes.
Paid ads is a constant game of cat and mouse. It's constant iteration, constantly trying things, constantly goes up and then goes down. And it that's that is completely normal for paid ads.
But it's a you know the
You just have to zoom out and say, Wow, this is a magic money machine. I'm putting in a dollar and I'm getting three back out.
Every day? This is incredible. How do I do more of that? And so
That's totally normal.
Yeah, I think Sam's idea of like reach out to their marketing team and find their account rep and be like, Hey, I'm a kid, I got this great story, I wanna learn this
Where do I who did I learn from? Who's the smartest at this? How can you help me? Do you guys have ad credits available? I would love to be a testimonial for it. Same sort of thing. Again, use your assets.
to try to get it to make it happen. If you need help, by the way, I think I know people at next door.
that I might be able to connect you with.
Um
So
Okay, so that's the By the way, hold on but before we move on from that.
Uh don't do
What we're saying first.
The first thing you should do is you should type out a letter.
And you print one thousand copies on your
printer at home and you get a and and you want to make this look
Not professional. I don't want this to be professional. I want it to be a typed letter from you. That's like a a paper clipped photo of you like on the on the thing. Or like not paper clipped.
act like a senior in high school. Act like a mature senior in high school.
Uh and
Print it out.
Fold it up, put it in an envelope, and go and put that in a thousand
Holmes.
Uh and I want I want you to Google the Gary Halper dollar letter.
So it's the there's a famous copy writer, Gary Halpert.
And he wrote this letter and he
Stapled or paper clipped, a dollar bill to the top of it.
And that was very attention getting. People had to p what is this? Why is there a dollar on this thing? One dollar, right? One dollar took his like open rate and his read rate from, you know
Zero to to ninety five percent type of thing.
And then he wrote this letter. You could do your version of the dollar letter.
I think that would be tremendously successful. So I think Sam's idea is great here.
But I think there's even the thing you do before that, which is
You already have something working.
We're giving you new ideas. Why don't you advertise? Why don't you go do Yelp ads, Craigslist, whatever.
You already figured out that you could
Go into a community's next door.
Type something and n and uh what was this?
Sixty thousand dollars came out the other side.
So
How do you just do that again in the neighborhood next to yours? Can you find a friend or a kid in that neighborhood and say, I will pay you
A hundred dollars.
And you were gonna have type this message in your next door on this sequence.
'Cause they they can post'cause they live there, right?
And so
Go get activate basically your brand reps, your affiliates to just clone the script you did in your neighborhood.
In the two neighborhoods next to you.
And see if that gives you another sixty K per neighborhood.
Yeah. So I'm doing something similar. Uh
I'm not sure that I would say it.
Exactly the way I'm doing it because I'm not sure that's
That's certainly the right way to do it.'Cause I know that next door you're really supposed to be a neighbor
in the community. But
Uh to your point, um
I am
Doing
I think this hat is gray, my friend. This hat is gray. I'm good with that. I'm I'm out of region, I'm kinda going by radius um of different next door neighborhood communities and going from there.
Yeah, you're hacking the system. That's good. You're hacking the system. Can we uh just become your angel investor real quick and absolutely I kinda wanna see where the story goes over the next two years. This is gonna be kind of insane. Lincoln, have you heard of um do you know a guy named Brian Scutamore? Have you heard that name?

Sounds familiar, but You should Google you should Google this guy. He uh started very similar to you.
It took him years and years to get traction, ten years to get traction.
Uh now his company is called one eight hundred got junk and he whole
He wholly owns it and it does a billion in sales a year. So he's a billionaire.
Uh you should you should uh write him. He's a or I can introduce you. He's a friend of mine and he will absolutely talk to you. But you uh
You just gotta shut up and do this for about twenty years and the results are gonna be pretty pretty great.
Yeah. That's how this business works, right? You just kinda put your head down and get after it. Yeah, but the beauty is you don't know it's twenty years at the beginning. You just think it's just right around the corner. And you just think it's right around the corner for the next twenty years. Well he can get rich. You you're gonna get rich uh as you go, if you own the whole thing. Like these companies can be great if you if you do it right.
Are you going to college? Sounds like you graduated now, or you're about to graduate.
I'm about to graduate
Um
I'm
Yeah.
I'm going to college, yes.
Is that maybe
Michigan is the goal.
Um I got introduced through
Formidable fellowship.
Two
Uh, someone at Michigan who's kinda gonna introduce me to people on campus.
Um
And so that'll be they have a good business school and like chicks, or what are you talking about? Who who are you trying to meet on campus? What what are you talking about?
Like some professors, some deans.
Um, some people'cause I haven't gotten accepted yet.
Uh it's still in the year. Do they need their gutters cleaned? I don't understand. Why do you care about the professors' deeds?
Mm.
I have good grades and everything, but
the kind of what it takes to get out of state.
And to that
Go to a school.
What do you think? Do you have like a teal fellowship port of this where you just pay people to drop out once you once you realize that
They should just keep going as an entrepreneur.
Yeah, I mean I could probably pay one person, but bank on that. Uh my parents
My dad is a VP at Spectrum.
So not no entrepreneurship, but he does kinda in the business realm.
Uh my mom's a nurse.
Do they understand do they do they critici uh not criticize, they probably don't criticize you. Do they say that you don't respect on your name? Yeah.
Yeah, you get to sit at the head of the table now at dinner? No. Do they uh are they like Lake it, this is a fun hobby.
Uh but you know
Maybe you should consider something a bit more serious. Or do they and you don't don't disrespect your parents publicly, but or or or are they like
Hey, you got a gift. This is where you can keep going.
They're very traditional in the way that they want me to go to college and they think it's a fun thing to do while I'm in high school, but
Yeah. Anon. Do you have a service where you talk to these kids' parents?
No, we don't. You know, I you know, I think uh so yeah, l I posted about Lincoln getting into U Michigan and I guess luckily some people have reached out, right,'cause that's where he wants to go. I mean, any of these guys probably could skip college and just go pro in business.
Uh but
You know, I gotta respect what what they wanna do, of course. But yeah, no, obviously if any of them
Wanted to I'm not sure they would
You know, they could they could be formidable uh you know, without college for sure. Lincoln, just to put it in perspective real quick, you said you did sixty K last year, you'll do a hundred fifty K this year of revenue.
You're gonna make more money than your professors.
Yeah, exactly. Roughly fifty percent
Profit margin.
Forty, fifty percent.
So last year's thirty thousand. Uh a little over thirty thousand profit. Let's say you can roughly hold that.
Your
Getting close to having a million dollar business.
Already.
So you let's say you're doing a hundred K a year of profit right now, grow and you
Basically two X the business.
Um
Arguably that could be, you know, somewhere between a uh four hundred thousand dollar business to a million dollar business. But it's like one more year after that and you're a millionaire. Seasoning, exactly.
Um just to put that in perspective of like the opportunity and I I guess like wanna make sure
I wouldn't have known that when I was your age. Well, I wouldn't have known how to do any of the shit you did, but uh even if I was there, I wouldn't have really had that perspective because
You kind of as a
As a business owner, as a small business owner, you sort of value your business just on what you eat at the end of the day. So you're like, Oh, I made thirty thousand dollars.
I did a whole bunch of work. That's great.
But you know.
That doesn't even pay for one year of college.
Whereas you look at it you're like I'm one year away from being a millionaire.
If I just
literally get two more neighborhoods on board or one more neighborhood to p to to do the same thing that I just did.
Right. So you you are you are very close to a very meaningful size business and I hope you, you know, continue that.
As your new angel investor, I hope. Yeah, like I I I don't think people truly grasp this that if you do this is a huge generalization, if you do roughly three hundred grand
of seller
Earnings
Or sorry, um of a business owner earnings.
Ballpark in most cases.
You are worth one million dollars.
And I think that if people understood that, they would probably keep going uh a lot harder. And I would bet that a lot of the people teaching business at Michigan
Up some percentage of them, you would be richer richer than them before you graduate college.
Yeah.
And I definitely understand what you guys are saying,'cause the way I think about it is I compare, okay, a thirty thousand dollar salary, which is what I made last year is
Like an entry level job anywhere, but
Going to the point of doubling it every year.
Yeah.
Which you're you're not going to do.
You're not gonna double it every year, but you're gonna double it for a few more years, maybe.
You should you honestly, uh, based on what you just described to us.
Do you actually have a path where you could probably forex this business in one year?
Because you've done all of this in a single neighborhood.
And guess what? Like you know, mo uh a lot of businesses are like this where they're c what I call pond businesses. It works in one pond, it'll work in all ponds. Hi uh businesses like any any s uh app that takes over a high school
will actually be able to take over every high school. So Snapchat, for example
When Snapchat got hot.
It got hot in two LA high schools.
And investors who were smart knew right away that
Sure, on the surface that only looks like a few thousand users.
But if it works at one high school and two high schools, it's gonna work in
fourteen thousand other high schools because all high schools are the same.
In the same way that
Your neighborhood is probably similar to
a thousand other neighborhoods or more um in across the country.
And you should be able to sell local services using the same exact blue print and model that you're doing.
in those neighborhoods. And so
I think that your what you haven't done yet is just
Re replicate it. So like
You're doing another neighborhood yet?
But you said that
Your next door ads were working.
And you said that you're starting to be able to post in n new neighborhoods.
I wouldn't I would be s I would actually be surprised if you can't triple this business just doing that.
Just doing that properly.
Yeah, so the I mean the next door as from last year
Um, I'll kinda run through the numbers. It was a nine dollar cost per lead, thirty dollar customer acquisition cost, and a six hundred doll six hundred and fifty dollar average transaction value.
So twenty one to one row as
Um, so I think that just based on twenty one to one, by the end of this year, if I just pump as much as I can into those ads.
I think I'll be
And look, it'll it'll go down. It won't stay twenty one to one, but it doesn't matter. Three to one, you're laughing. So huge margin of safety. I thought you said you didn't know what you were doing.
Yeah.
Like you said, For Christmas lights, I guess, but uh window cleaning, I don't know. I guess it's Well, the Christmas lights it's because there's a a time there's an urgency on that. So that's why it's such an easy sale.
But your your your website's great. Have you seen his website, Sean?
No.
Yeah, yeah.
Uh H H
I think H H pressurecleanings dot com. URL's a little funky.

Yeah, but the the website's great.
Welcome to Sunshine Exteriors.
Okay. Why not Sunshine Exteriors dot com?
Well I have a Sunshine Exterior Texas, but it's saying I need six months before I can transfer the domain because I just bought it on a different
hosting platform'cause I needed emails with
Granted.
Domain.
There's a You could definitely transfer domain faster. Whatever that that part's not right. Doesn't take six months, but uh okay, great. Let me ask a different question. Do people come back? Do they do it again? Like do you have you been in business long enough to know the repeat rate?
Yeah, so
Didn't do a great job of tracking it and not quite enough to know the repeat rate. I'll start seeing the repeat rate this year, because most of my customers were from last year.
Um, but from first year to second year, I would say it's probably close it it's low.
Probably ten percent.
Okay.
Wow, this is great.
Um, okay, congratulations.
Anything else, Lincoln, before we before we uh let you go,'cause this was kinda great. One question.
So if you guys were in my position
Right, and you were going to against your parents' judgment
Not go to college.
What advice do you have for someone in that position?
The pitch is like this. You're gonna sit them down and you're gonna say, Mom and dad
Let me show you the potential outcome.
So
What what w uh what you're near A and M, maybe? I I don't know where you that's another cause, yeah.
I would say look, the average salary
that a graduate of bus of in the business administration school is this. I don't know what it's going to be, probably eighty grand.
I'm already going to make that.
And if you go to uh what's the the broker that we like, Sean?
Uh Quiet Light Brokerage. You go to QuietLight Brokerage dot com and you say, here's how much these businesses sell for.
In one year I'm going to already be well above the average in terms of of
of earnings.
For a
First, second, and third year postgraduate A and M
business admin graduate or whatever. I'm gonna be already out earning that.
All I'm asking for
Is one year.
You don't need to support me financially. All I need is your blessing. I just want you to say
Get after it. Go and achieve your dreams. Because look, if you look at
all of the change in the world at all, a lot of it is is due to someone who just went out and got after it and made a lot of money. And I'm trying to do that. And if it doesn't work after one year,
I'll do what you've asked me to, which is go to a grade school. But just give me twelve months to make this happen. And I don't want anything except for your emotional support.
How's that pitch, Sean? Is that good enough?
It's great.
Uh that's exactly right. You want to ask for the gap year.
Not the full four.
Um so so y you don't have to make this like long term
Life altering
Decision.
Just say, Hey, I'd like to basically I want to take a gap year.
I'd really give this my all. I think I'm gonna learn a lot. I'm already learning a lot.
And I think this could really grow into something.
Um, and as you know, after school school is about learning so that, you know
Uh the way I you know
Hey, school's great, but an education's more important. Like the thing I would go to school for is to learn about business. I'm already learning a ton about business this way, and I'm gonna learn so much more if I
If I just take this year and focus on it.
Hey, at the end of this year
Uh you know what? Maybe I will actually you know
Decide.
Hey, college is the right move. I wanna be around friends and I wanna do all that.
In in which case, no harm done. One gap year.
Um and if this really takes off and we reassess at the end, you know, I can go the other way and actually maybe maybe continue on this path.
But I wanna take a year. And I think I I would start with that. So I think the ask is a year, not to not to never go to college.
Yeah. And then you let'em know that like
The reasons why and how you're thinking this through and that you want their support.
that they believed in you, you know, all up until this point, you just want them to keep believing in you. You see how that lands. So you got your little emotional manipulation. You have your uh puppy dog clothes. You g you got it all under the hood, we got a lot of stuff going on there. But
Um, that's what you want to do. And then you see how that goes. But at the end of the day, like look
Sometimes just you know, it might come to this. I hope it doesn't, but it might come to this where they say, No, you gotta do this. This is you you're you don't know what you're talking about, blah, blah, blah.
You may have to decide for you what's most important, right? That's the coming of a eighteen year old thing, and there are plenty of stories of people who
Do it and then years later their parents are like
Yeah, holy crap. I didn't know
I didn't understand at the time, you know, y you know, they come around to it.
You at the end of the day you got to take control of kind of like what you want for your life.
But I think that the one you're asked should land. I think you got like a fifty to seventy percent success rate with that. All right.
Salary?
Of a an accountant student.
Uh A and M.
Is
Sixty thousand dollars.
Yeah.
That that's gotta th that's gotta be the numbers that you present to them.
But well, they might not it might not all be only be about that. You know, people parents ultimately they just want your good, right? So they're like
We want you to have this education, you have your degree, that's just like safety net idea.
Uh plus we want you to have that experience. You're young. Blah blah blah. So there's like other factors too. So I wouldn't I would try to understand. So like let's say they say, No, you gotta do this.
Before you start arguing with them, just ask them g get curious. Be like
Okay, so like
You know, it seems like schools got a couple of different parts, right? There's like the learning part, which I think I'm getting a lot of here.
There's friends and social life, and then there's like, you know, the safety net of having your degree. Like which one is it for you? Why?
Why do you feel like it's so important? What what is the part that really, you know
Let me help me understand. And then let them articulate it. And then you know exactly what you need to smack down because they've served it up to you about what the reason is that they think you gotta go to college.
Are are your parents Republican, Lincoln?
They are.
Uh.
Well you don't want to go to college and be around a bunch of sissy blue hair woke liberals. They're gonna turn you gay. A and uh anywhere in Texas, really. Oh no, you cannot trust the higher education system.
And it's untrustworthy. They're gonna absolutely make you question things that you do not wanna be tainted by that. I was uh in and for college, I would say their main points are so obviously there's the income chart.
From college graduates to non college graduates.
Which is different for being an entrepreneur, right?
That's just
Going to the workforce.
Um, that's kinda one of their things. And then the other one is um kinda the people that I meet in the shift on perspective from being
out of college.
Oh, I could send some protest pictures, my friend, of Columbia University, and we are gonna convince your parents that college is not the place to be for you. That'll work.
That'll work. We're gonna try
Ion, let's give you a shot. Let's see if your your audio video is working. So Anon, you want to do an intro for him? You wanna be his his Bruce Buffer, his Dana White here?
Yeah, uh so Ian is uh a ninth grader. He uh fun fact, went to the same high school as me.
uh has built an awesome baking business, but I think he'll he'll fill you in. He's a he's a phenomenal entrepreneur.
Yeah, all right. Um hi, my name is Ian, like Alan said. Um I'm a freshman in Hunter and Central High School in Ringos, New Jersey.
Um so I'm the founder and CEO of Teens to Table.
Um we sell homemade bake goods to local establishments across New Jersey.
And school suppliers as well.
So my business is one year old.
And last year I did four K in revenue.
Um, this year I expect to grow over six hundred percent and aim to do at least twenty five thousand dollars.
Um which is really exciting.
Um, so in addition to my business, I'm also a competitive chess player.
And so right now I'm trying to figure out how to hire people.
Um to help with my production while also maintaining both efficiency and quality.
And so currently I bake everything myself from cookies to brownies.
And that really ensures my consistency, but I'm considering
bringing a small team to keep with the growing demand that I'm
Get currently gaming.
So I on
Before before we go into your question, let's just get a little more context on the business. So it's
Baked goods, you sell it to who? To you said classes and teachers or who are you selling to?
Yeah, so I sell to local establishments, so bakeries, ice cream shops, and then I also sell it to schools.
So when schools serve food and lunch
Um, there's usually my cookie on the shelf as well.
Okay, gotcha. You're making all the cookies right now.
You're going and you're selling to them. How are you getting that sale? You're going, you're knocking on doors, what's the pitch?
Yeah. So the pitch right now is I usually either
Go to the bakeries and go to the
Ice cream shops and just go in person.
Or on the phone and I say, Hey, I'm fourteen years old and this is actually
Something like that.
Astonishes a lot of people.
Um, really find that interesting. So I say I'm fourteen years old, I'm the founder of Teams to Table.
And I pretty much tell'em what I do.
Um usually when I go in I bring samples of my cookies.
Just to make sure they like it and everything's good.
Um that I start with the pitch either.
Can I sell
And put a table up or can I put it on your shelves?
Gotcha. Okay. And you said you're gonna grow the business six hundred percent. So how are you gonna get
Go from four thousand to twenty five thousand. Is it just
Knock on more doors, or is there something more to it?
Yeah, so now it's more into the school suppliers. So I'm supplying currently to Machos and Pomptonian, which are two school suppliers in my local area.
Um, so I'm hoping to get more districts and more schools.
So currently I just got an order for seven hundred cookies between the two suppliers.
Um and I'm in contact with two other suppliers, our Mark.
And another supplier in the local area for my school. So both of these plus uh matches and pomptonian should hopefully get me to twenty five thousand dollars. Yeah.
And why do you have a bunch of uh some type of like curry and and and other pizza and stuff on your website? Is that just uh a stock?
images that you are that are placeholders for now, or you actually gonna make more stuff?
Oh, so that's actually the future goal to bake more stuff. So those are the things I've made so far.
Um, along from baking, I love to cook.
So I love to cook like Mediterranean food, Indian food, Mexican food.
Um, so f apart from the baking, that's just another one of my passions and
Hopefully as I go later on to my business I can incorporate those as well.
Have you thought about putting cookies on your website?
I believe are there cookies on Italian food. Tomatoes and avocados and uh uh a cookie would definitely be cool.
All right. So um sounds like you are
You're going full break and bad, dude. You're going up the supply chain. You're finding the the distributors. How good are these cookies, by the way? I I need to know. What are we dealing with here?
Um, so the cookies they're really big. Have you ever guys tried Lavaine cookies from New York?
Yeah. That's how they are. So that was my goal to design those recipes and I
Think I cracked the code there.
Um, so that's how the cookies taste.
How much money you have in the bank? You you did forty K last year. I I imagine you're just doing checking. Four K.
Four K. That's what I said. Four K. You and you're doing a ch like checking account accounting, which is basically just like is my bank account going up?
Uh, how much do you have in your bank account?
So in my bank account I have around
Two point one K I say?
Cool. Understood.
That's pretty good.
Okay. And so now your question was something around scaling up or hiring, right? What was the question?
Right.
Yeah, so right now I'm trying to hire people, um, because with the new school suppliers that I'm getting and then Machios and Pomtonian.
Um it's really hard to
Just do this myself now, especially since it's gonna be around
Hopefully projected one thousand to two thousand cookies per week.
Um, so I'm considering bringing on a small team to keep up with the growing demand.
And so my biggest concern for this is I use a commercial kitchen'cause I
Can't do this really in my house. So
They charge by hour.
So if I hire people to work
Um am I gonna lose my profits and
all of my money because they're not gonna be as efficient as me when I bake the cookies.
Um, and then at the same time I worry that the quality of the cookies could suffer because
the people I hire might not follow the exact same process and if they add
One more teaspoon, let's say, of baking powder that might
Skew off the whole recipe. Wait, so you said that you're doing fifty
A thousand cookies a week. So fifty two thousand a year. And how much in revenue?
Uh so revenue it's gonna be around twenty five K.
So projected. Okay.

Cheap, right?
Yes, with the cookies since they're bulk ordering, I don't make a lot of profit off of them right now. Let's walk through that.
You get an order.
Typical order will be how much
How many cookies?
So
A typical order is around six hundred cookies.
Great. Six hundred cookies. On that six hundred cookies, what are you charging that that end customer or the not the
Let's assume it's not going straight to the customer, but you're sounds like you're selling to the school district or the bakery or the the wholesale um
Relationships. How much are you charging?
wholesale for that.
Right. So for wholesale it's
Eighty cents per hoogie.
Um so between
Seven hundred and eight hundred I make around four hundred dollars in revenue.
Okay. And then what does it cost you to to make those cookies?
Yep. So I make two cookies. I make an oatmeal chocolate chip and I make a chocolate chip both
Um the oatmeal costs twenty seven cents to make and the chocolate chip costs twenty eight cents to make.
Okay, gotcha.
So you're basically
sixty six percent gross margins on the on the cookie itself.
And that's like includes the kitchen cost and everything, or that's literally just the ingredients.
Yeah, so that includes everything from packaging to the commercial kitchen and to the ingredients. And do you have like your Excel file that basically kinda shows your your unit cost and your percentages and
When you do that, what is it uh
W what do you see when you're when you add in the labor? Do you see that the profits go to zero or do you because you're that was your question. You're like, Well, my profits go away. That's kind of an Excel question, not a
Sean and Sam Christ, really, right? So like what does the Excel tell you?
Mm.
It really depends just based on like minimum wage, say fifteen or sixteen dollars per hour.
Um
It depends on how many
actual people I hire. So right now I've been trying to experiment with two or three.
And see if that works in the spreadsheet. And right now I'm
My profits are going
Oh
pretty pretty much to zero. So I'm making like twenty to thirty dollars.
Per order.
Um so I just wanted to see if there was a
Better, more efficient way to do this.
Um without like choking all my profits.
Raise your prices. That's the easiest way.
So basically I think there's like only two or three ways to grow a business, right? You sell more of what you already have.
You sell the same stuff to the current customers, but you get them
to buy more, whether a larger quantity or more often.
Or you raise prices.
So you those are like pr so you know, there's a great book uh called Getting Everything You Have Outta Everything You Got.
And it just walks through like those are the only three options.
Sounds like you're selling a lot more stuff if you're gonna grow six hundred percent.
Uh, but you probably should charge more, I would think.
Uh I don't know anything about the cookie business, but
I think that sounds really cheap, right?
How hard is the sale? Is the sale really easy? If the sale's really easy, you should charge more.
How how often are you turned down when you're t asking these people to buy your stuff?
So
It's quite a bit. So right now with Machias and Pomptonian, I signed a contract with them.
Um, so that's pretty much going till the end of the school year for me. So till June.
Um so with them
Pomptoni is actually only taking forty cents per cookie, so to me that's like
That's a really cheap thing'cause I'm really making twelve or thirteen cents of profit per cookie.
So with them we're making like a total of
Barely anything for profit. With Pom or with Machias on the other hand.
I make eighty cents, so they charge it.
Uh oh. We're giving out all the leverage.
Um so I I make around uh eighty cents from them as they charge me for a dollar.
Um so I feel like
In my question, like a follow up is if I raise the prices.
Do you think there's they would say we don't want

For you to put your products anymore or
Is that a possibility?
Well it's definitely a possibility, but it's one you gotta figure out. So two ways to figure this out. You can go to your existing customers.
Assume you have a good relationship with them, assume they're happy. Um
And you could tell'em. You could be like, Hey
Um
How's this going for you? They're like, Oh, it's great, like awesome.
I really love working with you.
You know, I'm fourteen years old. I'm figuring this out as I go, and one thing I'm learning is that I'm providing you guys five hundred thousand cookies. Right now I cook all of these by myself.
I need to bring somebody in. If I do that, I'm not I'm not gonna make any profit.
And so
I was wondering would it be possible
Like
For us to raise the price here and go to a dollar a cookie or ninety five cents a cookie, whatever it is.
That way I'm not losing money.
providing you business and see what they say. They might look at you in your puppy dog eyes and they'll just say yes. They might say no and you'll find out, right? And then when you go to that next bakery
You you're gonna go cold test them and they're never even gonna know about the eighty cents. You just go to them straight away and you say it's a dollar ten a cookie.
And then you say these cookies are amazing. This is an
Have you ever been to the bakery in New York? This is a New York City cookie that I'm bringing to you, right? So you're you have to up the perceived value of the cookie through your packaging, through your story, through your through the benefits that they get working with you. And you could say, Hey,
I am gonna be able to you know.
tell everybody in our local community that you guys support, you know, this young entrepreneurs, blah, blah, blah. So you gotta find a way to be able to charge a higher price. And so that I think that's your easiest lever because
You're not gonna be able to get labor.
For that much cheaper.
But you can get more margin out of every cookie that you sell.
And you don't want to grow broke.
So if you have the wrong model, right? You have the wrong cost structure today.
And you let's say you do go get these bigger contracts and you're cooking ten times more more cookies. Well
You're just literally gonna grow broke if you do that, right? Because you're gonna have to hire to s fulfill those orders, but if you don't have the margin to support it, you will
Go out of business.
And so and I by the way, I think you could test these things. So you first you test it in Excel, then you bring on one other person.
And you know, you can always cut bait with that person if it turns out that you're not able to, you know
uh optimize them full fully to to get the cost out uh to get the benefits out of it.
Um
But you know, you just go sort of one step at a time. I wouldn't go get two or three people. I would start with one and then
Move to two, move to three, as you figure out that bottle.
Right, okay, yeah, that makes perfect sense. Thank you.
Yeah, you might also want to try to sell to a richer customer. So who is gonna be less price sensitive?
Right. If you go to local businesses, you go to real estate
You know, uh the guy who's killing it in real estate down there. You go to the dentist, you go to
People who are
themselves local entrepreneurs.
that are making enough money where they don't care if it's eighty cents a cookie, a dollar a cookie, or two dollars a cookie, really.
Um, they like the story, they like you, and they wanna be supportive.
I think that might be helpful versus going to somebody like Earmark. Airmark I think literally provides food to like prisons and ca and school cafeterias, right? They're
Th it's gonna be harder to get wiggle room with them than it is to to get, you know, the local dentist to to say sure things. Yeah, or local car dealerships, things like that. That story is so much better when you have your face on it with the
With a with the story and then your stuff right there.
You should maybe do you have like a sign so that let's say I am the car dealership and I do carry your cookies.
Like they could just give away a free cookie to every customer who walks in, by the way. They're selling cars.
I think a pretty known sales tactic is you you know, Sam used to do this, right? You go negotiate with somebody off Craigslist, what's the first thing Sam brings?
Oh yeah. It's called the uh rule of reciprocity. So basically I do something nice to someone, whether it's
Something really small. Like I go, Hey, you know, uh I was gonna meet you to look at this car.
Uh
I just
Brought a Coke. I went a Coke. You w you want a Coke a Coca Cola as well?
And then uh the rule of reciprocity states that when you do something nice to someone, they will always or almost always do something nice back, and it's oftentimes not in proportion to the gift that you gave them. So you do one little small thing's nice.
go do something a lot bigger in return because you always want to just like be even.
Right.
Yeah. So I would go to like a local car dealer should go c local call car dealer and just say, Hey, I wanna provide you guys cookies every week that you guys can just give out to customers when they come in.
Trust me.
There's d have you ever heard of the rule of reciprocity? People are much more likely to wanna buy when they're eating a eating a delicious cookie and they feel taken care of. And this thing's gonna cost you a dollar. But if you close even one more sale this whole year.
This whole year.
Right.
You know, that's a thirty-five thousand dollar sale for you. Um, you know, this this pays itself back in spades. And so you can make a pitch like that and you can go get
Actually like
uh contracts with people who are willing to pay more, right? So a simple rule of business is sell to the people who have money.
Dude, I wanna see you I wanna see him give like a speech like a Wolf of Wall Street where it just like ends with like sign on the dotted line for Christ. You know what I mean? Like I wanna see him like like pitch these hard. Yeah, actually that is one piece of advice I'd give you, which is that look, this this probably won't be your last business.
This is the first business. This is your starter business.
And you're gonna learn a whole bunch.
You're gonna get more value out of the story you're creating than the cookies that you sell.
My first business was a su sushi business.
We probably made, I don't know, fourteen thousand dollars of profit in the one year of uh operations that we were we were working on that thing.
But the story that I told about how we cold called a food network chef and how I went door to door selling sushi, how we
You know, reverse engineer the POS systems to figure out all the sales of all Chipotle stores in the cr Colorado area.
Those stories got me bigger and bigger opportunities as I went.
They got me speaking opportunities. They got me into accelerators. They got me other other doors open. And so
One tip for you is
While you sell the cookies, you should be building the story.
So the story of yeah, I went into the car dealership and I
I gave a a talk called How You Can Increase Sales by Six Hundred Percent Like Me.
And I talked the the car salesman about the rule of reciprocity and then how they they they became customers of my cookies. Even if it's not a lot of cookies, it's an awesome story. And putting yourself in those positions will build your skill and build your story, which ultimately is gonna be a lot more valuable than the cookies that you sell, I believe.
Okay. Yeah, that that sounds really great. And definitely for the car dealership, that's it.
Great thing to put in mind for me. Even even though I have these suppliers, I think it's good to
start advancing and thinking about more places to sell. So I think that's a really good that's really helpful advice, yeah.
All right, thank you, man. Uh you're uh you're killing it. Keep going. Just it's amazing how far you are at at fourteen.
All right, next.
Abigail.
Well yeah, Abigail.
Hi.
Where are you from?
Um, I'm from Odessa, Missouri.
Oh nice. I'm from Missouri too. Uh hey, Sean, I posted
Abigail's Instagram.
I want you to click it.
And I want you to look at what her hobby is. So scroll down. You're gonna see like it looks like some prom photos, but keep on scrolling down.
And you're gonna see that
In her free time.
She's a race car driver.
What? Yes.
Okay. Triple threat. Yes. Student, entrepreneur, sprint car driver.
How did you get into that, Abigail?
So actually I'm a third generation sprint car driver, so my
Grandpa drove
Race cars and my dad has driven race cars.
And then I kinda just passed it on down to me.
That is awesome. Amazing.
Okay, so Abigail.
Uh, how old are you and what's your business?
Um, I am a senior at Odessa High School. I'm seventeen years old and my business is growing and selling chrysanthiums.
So like Mums, which is like something you'd put on your front porch during um like the fall season and Halloween.
So that's what I do right now. Um my business is two years old. Last year I made fifteen or this past summer, I guess, I made fifteen thousand in revenue.
And this year I expect to grow by one hundred percent and aim to do at least
thirty thousand in revenue.
A damn.
Okay, so explain us the business. So where do the flowers come from? Who do you sell'em to?
So how my business works is I actually order the mums, which we call plugs,'cause they're like about this big.
And I ordered them from a company in North Carolina.
I also have to o
Order um
Fertilizer so we can
Make sure that
Um
plants get nutrients that they need, I have to order the soil and then the pots for it.
So that all goes into the price for the mums?
And then we have about a two week long process of putting it all together'cause we have to mix the soil
And then we put them into color blocks and then put the mums in the color block.
It's a really, really long and tedious process.
And then I
Then I we put'em on our um what we call runs.
And then like big tarps with watering lines.
And for the next like
Three to four months I spend watering.
Uh after it
They're ready to go and they're fertilized and watered.
And they're grown to about as big as they can get.
We market them to schools and fundraisers.
And I also do retail at my own house.
So I try to post that on social media and try to hand out flyers to
Like local towns and post them at local businesses.
Wow, that is a lot of work.
This picture which is just like a field.
Or like these like long, long rows of these pot plants with the watering system.
Is this where where do you do this? Is this your backyard? What is going on? So I live on forty acres.
And um about
Thirty acres is uh leased out for farmland.
And the rest of it is for my mum's pretty much. So anywhere we can put'em on the yard we
Pretty much put them there.
And right now we're in the process of building a greenhouse.
So from my profit with my mum's, I've been able to buy a greenhouse.
So that I can have a place to start my mom's
And also a greenhouse is a good place to have a steady revenue.
For the other six months out of the year where I'm not growing mums.
So you um sorry, so I I missed the part of you you're selling. So you're selling to
Said you said school fundraisers, businesses
And you're handing out flyers, you said. So who's the core customer? Who's the who's the main customer?
So right now we're trying to do um wholesale as our core customer so that if like
What we do is I'm in F F A, so F F A chapters will sell it for a fundraiser. Sean doesn't know what the F F A is. You gotta you gotta spell this out.
Okay, so F
used to stand for Future Farmers of America, but we've kind of veered away from that because
We don't want it to be the stereotypical about cows and
Like farming, what we really do right now is we promote youth in agriculture and leadership in agriculture.
And we're pretty much growing the next generation of agriculture list. So Sean, if you grew up in a in a uh more rural environment
Uh, if you're in high school
Like you kind of by default join the F F A. There's millions and millions and millions of members. And it was kind of like a thing. Like instead of Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, and maybe not instead of, but it's similar to that in rural areas. You join the FFA and you get like your F F A jacket and they're like pretty you're they're pretty famous. What do you do once you join? For me
I currently serve as my local chapel chapter president in Area Six Sentinel and I'm running for a Missouri FFA state office.
So what I really do is I um
Do public speaking events.
And stuff like that. So it's really shapes me into I who I am because
Right now talking to you like I am not nervous.
And I know that my freshman year I would have been completely nervous'cause I never did public speaking.
And it kinda just shapes you to get those like life skills that you need in the long run.
Okay. College acceptance letter. All right. That was a great great essay. So you um
Okay, so sorry, so your call you said your core customers wholesale. What does that mean? Who's the who's the buyer?
So right now we're trying to do contracts with ret with um like hardware stores around us.
So we have a couple like um
Hometown kind of hardware stores, and then some bigger ones that are all across Missouri.
And right now we're just kind of focused on Missouri.
Because delivering my product is kinda one of the hardest parts. So we actually get to use my sprint car trailer.
To deliver all of the mumps.
So that's kind of
That's kinda funny how it clashes.
And how much profit did you do?
This last year we did fifteen thousand.
And
Uh you did fifteen thousand in revenue, I thought you said.
Yeah.
How much in profit.
So our prophet was about
I
Think seven to eight.
Wow, all right.
Each year it fluctuates like how much the soil's gonna cost or how much the pots are gonna cost.
And our really our big cost this year was making those runs.
And now we already have those, so it's something that we can pack away for like the fall and the winter time.
And then we can put'em out next year and that's another cost we don't have to pay for.
So Abigail, let me ask you a question.
If you wanted to sell ten times more.
Moms
How would you do that?
Like not you said you're gonna double your sales.
What if you wanted to go ten times bigger? What would you do?
I think that
Right now, that's kinda what I'm like my question to you guys was gonna be just because
I like to do the wholesale part of it, but I also know that I can't grow
How much I wanna grow just doing wholesale?
But I think really right now my biggest thing is going to be just getting
my company out there
And
like promoting it better to other companies so that they
But
possibly sign a contract for us so we can have that fixed amount that we're gonna sell to them.
Like, you know, I went to FarmCon, which was this conference that Santa told me about.
uh Kansas City.
And uh you know, there was like five thousand people there, they're all farmers. And if they had heard your story on stage
I think a lot of people would have
Handed you a card, said, Hey, let me know how I can help. Love what you're doing.
I'm so excited that
Somebody
And um
somebody in this next generation is excited about
Agriculture, it's great to see it. I wanna support that.
I think there's a lot of that goodwill. And I wonder
If maybe the faster way to 10X your sales would be
Like who's the CEO of
Whatever.
Uh
Home depot or whatew whatever like the wholesale store is that's gonna carry.
Like how do you go to them?
And
Be like hey
I want to be in your store.
Like that is my goal. That is my dream.
And I w I wanna get my moms on your shelves. How do I make that happen?
And do you just I think if you hustled more to the top.
You could actually get
uh more growth faster than going bottoms up in this case, because your story is your asset, right?
Yeah, the f the flowers might be great, but your story is the real differentiator. How many other people are there with your story?
Zero.
And so how do how are you using your story to unlock the growth is what I would be doing. Whether it's telling your own story on TikTok.
It's getting on stage at places like FarmCon.
or the FFA annual whatever event.
Or it's getting that cold em sending cold emails every single day.
to the CEOs of all of the major
uh distributors or retailers
Until one of them takes your meeting and puts you on their shelves.
If you listen, we did this episode with Nick Mowbray. He was this guy in New Zealand.
Literally like on the other side of the earth.
Making toys.
By himself and he was like
I emailed every retailer in every country.
Every single day.
And he's like, I just kept doing that until they finally cracked. And they would tell me, No, I'm not interested, not interested. And one day they would be like, Can I see a sample? Or hey, are you gonna be at that show?
I'm going to the show. If you're there, I'll I'll I'll take fifteen minutes and meet with you. And he would fly there and make it happen.
And I think if you
Ten X your approach towards
Getting the major distributor.
I think you you might leapfrog into a much bigger space because otherwise the way you describe this, like I'm tired just hearing how you grow these things. Like
It is so much work to just
Get the product made.
That
I feel like you
It's only worth doing that if you're gonna be able to have like
land some like major sales versus then it's also double the work to go sell to every school for a fundraiser and mom and pop's
I think that's just like too much work.
There's also a s for all y'all, uh, there's a small window that you have
Where you're like this prodigy.
Young and lovable. Yeah. Yeah, that that's gonna go away.
But you've got this like two to maybe six year window.
Where you being pestering
That's just
you
And awesome.
And then in a few years it's gonna be annoying and weird.
And so while that so while that window is open
Take it.
You know, take that opportunity. It's a We have a friend who was eighteen and they got written up in the new in TechCrunch as like the young hotshot prodigy.
He's 23 now and he's like he feels washed up. He's like, I can't use my storm. Like my entire shtick was that I was young. He's like, nobody wants to hear about that.
Twenty three year old.
Prodigy. There's no such thing. You're not you're not a phenom anymore.
Yeah, it's like a it's like a it's like a blind painter, you know, like you you gotta use everything you can. Use that story. Like, you know, you can get away with a lot right now. And uh the same stuff that you're gonna be able to get away with now, you're not going to be in the future. And so I would definitely do exactly as Sean's saying, which is go hard.
On going
to the top.
And you you you you're not really annoying
When you're eighteen doing this.
Yeah, Abigail, in the next thirty days, do you think you could get a meeting with the CEO of either Ace Hardware or uh Home Depot?
I think
I don't know. I think that that is something that like just sounds crazy to me. Like I feel like I probably could just because
I'd like to say I'm a very
Well spoken person.
And very like good with my words, but right now
I just have like a lot of other things going on.
So it's hard to like focus all of my time on my business'cause I am a senior this year.
So that's just like
Kinda hard.
That's the only time I think that this this excuse is valid. I would say okay that that is the only time that I will accept that excuse. I I want to give
Everyone listening and you guys uh
a little bit of feedback that I learned when I was a little bit younger, which is
The most powerful people on earth are one cold email away.
And because of email and because of Instagram, which you guys have grown up on, and all these and everything else on social media.
You would be shocked.
At how small the world is, and it sounds insane to say
email the CEO of this large billion dollar plus multi tens of billions of dollar company. That sounds insane.
But I think that you are literally I wouldn't say one email. I would say your one email and twenty
Follow ups.
Away.
From just about everyone on earth.
And there's been times
Where we I even emailed um Jeff at Amazon.com and I think I followed up like twenty times and I got a no thank you.
But just it's just proof that that you are you you are much closer than you think to just about every single person you you want to reach, particularly some type of executive.
All right, I'm gonna show you something real quick, Abigail, before uh you know, fifth period starts here. So just check this out. All right, there's this guy on Twitter right now.
Uh his name's Sonnet. He's uh
Or his Twitter handle sound it. He's building Z Fellows, which is another young uh student program. I think it's at Stanford.
But just check out this
This is a cold email.
that my friend Nico, who's now a a famous venture capitalist, he invests in Snapchat really early on, again off a cold email.
Uh okay, you might not be able to read this, I'll read it to you. It's
Uh him em emailing Elon Musk.
Okay. So I'm giving you the h the CEO of Home Depot and Ace Hardware.
This guy emailed Elon Musk and he goes.
Dear Mr Musk.
He says, I'm a graduate student at Stanford and taking this class, blah, blah, blah. I'm writing a paper about Tesla strategy because I think you're such an innovative company and we're gonna
put together our recommendations on the future of your corporate strategy.
Since you're the chairman of Tesla.
I thought it'd be great if we could do a short interview with you in person.
over the next few weeks to talk about your strategy.
I'm aware that you receive dozens of similar requests on a daily basis. That's why I'll do my best to make this not only useful, but an entertaining experience for you and your company's execs.
Hopefully we're able to contribute first class recommendations. I'm happy to sign an NDA. Blah, blah, blah. I look forward to hearing hearing from you. I would be grateful if you would participate in our research, Vico. And then Elon writes back.
Okay, if you can limit the meeting to twenty minutes or schedule for late in the evening.
And this was Nico as a student. There's another email of him. By the way, that's not even a good email.
That's an em that kind of an email. And let me show you another one I just saw a little today. So the cool thing about following this guy on Twitter is every day he's tweeting out a cold email somebody sent.
Uh, so this is Corey Levy who runs Z Fellows now. So this is him emailing
Andy Roddick, the tennis player's mom.
So his not Andy Roddick, his mom. So he finds his mom's email address and he goes, Dear Mrs. Roddick. And he goes, um
As you already know from my previous emails, my name is Corey Levy from Houston, Texas. I'm twelve, turning thirteen, and I'm a big fan of your son Andy.
I know Andy's playing this tournament in Houston. I was wondering if I could uh meet him and h or hit with him before. I've been dying to hit with him for the last two years. Please email me back.
Corey.
And then she says.
Corey thanks for the no. Andy's gonna be at Houston as the tournament gets closer. Reach out again. I'll definitely make a range for you to meet him. Can't promise you'll hit with him, but I'll try.
Um, please keep a touch and keep playing tennis. It's a great sport.
Turns out Corey was like thirty four when he wrote that email though, so it was kinda weird when he showed. He still got a baby face, actually. So Abigail, I say all that to say this, which is
Uh one, you should follow this guy'cause if you see every day a cold email that works.
It'll go from that sounds crazy to this is perfectly normal.
And that's one of the reasons probably people should listen to this podcast. It's one of the reasons why you should follow people on Twitter who are inspiring, because they will make the crazy seem normal. And that's all you need is to delude yourself into believing it's normal to actually make it happen.
The second thing I'll say is
You described the process of like a multi month
potting and moving and arranging and watering and
Kissing and touching the flowers to make them all work.
And then I was like, Hey, could you send a cold email? You're like, I don't know, I got a lot of class coming up. So I challenge you, which is I think this email is gonna be the least of your worries. I think sending a cold email every day will take you literally no more no more than 10 minutes.
And I think you've got that ten minutes. I think so because you just showed me your ten acre
farm you're doing by yourself. So so
Uh what happens is that
familiar work feels comfortable and feels easy.
unfamiliar work feels hard and you you sort of talk yourself out of it. You tell yourself a story about why it's your senior year you don't have time. In reality, the thing I'm telling you is a lot easier than the stuff you're already doing. So that's my challenge to you, whether you you choose to accept it.
Pick one hundred people.
Who you who you want to reach.
Okay, spend y only thirty minutes a day.
For the next month.
And follow up with each of them.
Ten times until they say no, thank you or yes. Uh and your your reply rate, if you're any interesting or any good, is gonna be about ten percent. So most everyone's gonna say no or not gonna reply, but I promise you ten percent out of a hundred is gonna be awesome. It's gonna change your life.
One one more thing.
Go Google Sam Parr Cold E mail. Go read Sam's cold emails he sent.
To recruit speakers to HustleCon.

random conference that he was starting and the follow ups is where the magic is. So there's the initial email, which
a few brave people are willing to do. Then there's the four follow ups that Sam was sending that nobody's willing to do. I would go read those.
The other thing is
There's a great story of uh Tim Ferris. Do you know Tim Ferris?
I don't believe so.
Wow, that's amazing. Sam. She knows us. She doesn't know. Holy shit. Dude, our heroes are their grandparents. You know what I mean? All right. So
Uh, Tim has this great s Tim wrote this book called The Four Hour Work Week and he's this great guy. He's got a great podcast. So
He has a story where he went to a Stanford business school course and he offered a challenge. He said
I will give a round the world ticket, so an all expense paid round the world plane ticket to anybody here.
who can get in touch with the um
Whoever could call Dail and get in touch with the highest
Kind of uh most hard to reach person. So
The whole class, reach out to whoever you want, whoever gets the person highest on the food chain gets around the world ticket.
And
He
Um by the end of the class, I don't I'll butcher the exact story. You can go read it, but by the end of the class, he
Um he's like okay, so who g who got who?
And
I think one person got like I don't know, Bill Clinton or something like that. And he's like, Oh, amazing. Who else did other people get? And most people like I think
of the classic only four or five people got anybody.
And he asked, he's like, What what was the difference? Was it your cold email script? And it was basically that like eighty five percent of the class, ninety percent of the class didn't even try. They just perceived it to be too hard.
Anybody that tried reached somebody.
And then within that group of people, some people literally reach like a former sitting president.
And so I think that uh there's a lesson in there, which is that like most people just won't even try. And this is something that sounds hard, but it's actually not that hard, especially when you have your type of story.
Um, I think it will actually be trivially easy for you.
You'll be surprised. The CEO of Ace Hardware
Y if you emailed him, you will be the most interesting email he got that day.
'Cause guess what? There's not a lot of other 18 year old sprint car drivers, young entrepreneurs who are selling or who are interested in agriculture, who are actually out there doing it and not even just talking about it.
There's there's only uh you know, a couple and nobody's emailing him. So I think it's gonna be a lot easier than you think.
It's something I'll definitely give it h have to give it a try.
All right.
I'll take.
Thank you.
I'm gonna keep cold email you every day until you cold email them, all right? I think that's how fucking it's okay it'd be a good reminder.
I and you'll have to invite us to Odessa. I wanna watch one of your races. I wanna drive the damn thing.
Definitely. Where did you say you're from Missouri?
I'm from Saint Louis. Yeah, I'm from Saint Louis. You're from Saint Louis. Yeah. I'm from Odessa, which is just
A little bit east of Kansas City. Yeah, where uh a lot of people like if you told Sean that he wouldn't know anything, but uh
You know, the difference between K K C and Saint Louis is like LA and S F, Sean. So not that similar. Um
All right, who we got next?
By the way, just to recap, Abigail shoot your shot.
Cold email, use your story to uh to go to the top and think about how you could ten X your business instead of two extra business. And follow up until you die.
Yeah.
Sam Cold emailed his way out of Missouri and you can too.
Anand. Thank you for bringing these folks to us.
Yeah, absolutely. Um let me just plug real quick. Uh March fourteenth's our next deadline, so formidable fellowship dot org.
And I think for just generally
This has given me like an amazing amount of hope in like the next generation,'cause I think the stories you hear like
you know, everybody's just scrolling away on TikTok, ruining wasting away their life. And like we see honestly hundreds of like amazing young people. You met just three of them today, so um
Yeah, so you know, if uh if you like what these guys do, please support'em.
By cutting.
Are you just doing good in the world now?
Is that what's happened?
You're just doing good?
No, I mean no, this is I mean, this is fun. This is a lot of fun. You know, he he put it puts a lot of wind in my sails. He put up about five hundred grand or something of you and your partner's money. He's just doing good.
It's called the second mountain. This is what you do when you when you we got seven hundred grand with donations now. So I mean we got lots of money for grants. So if there's
young entrepreneurs, if parents are hearing this, you know, we've had a lot of

This inspired their kids to start a business, so
Hopefully we'll see them in six or twelve months. So yeah, and I mean it's it's pretty dope like what
has started to happen and we're only four and a half months in. So we're still super doing this.
That's a great question. That's what I'm asking myself. This is amazing.
I'm done. You can just you can just join us, Sean. It's all right, all the infrastructure set up.
That took the longest. So just like a hype man?'cause that's kinda my skill.
Yeah, yeah. We need a hype, man, for sure. So uh no, but these guys you know, these guys are great. You know, if you need to buy moms, cookies
You need your you know, you want your uh
You want your home beautified and to protect that asset, as Lincoln said. Uh
You know where to go. Dude, it's also awesome not to hear about AI.
Do you know what I mean? Like Which is great. Which is great. But like it's like
You know, these guys are actually doing the damn thing like in real life. Yeah it's it sounds awesome to hear m different different stuff. Yeah, I I think the other thing, we have like a podcast with these guys called Future Titans and like Ayan goes through a story of like
emailing and going door to door like a hundred times and getting rejected.
Right, and so I think like the things that they learn
out of building their businesses are phenomenal. You know, Abigail walks through this like
horticulture issue which is like way above my pay grade where like the moms were getting over watered in one area and like
Just the problem solving they're doing is unreal compared to like
Anything they might do like in an academic setting, so
Yeah, no, it's super I'm gonna send you guys uh a copy of our boy Nick the Huber's book, The Sweaty Startup, How to Get Rich Doing Boring Things,'cause you guys are all doing sweaty startups. This is great.
I'll uh I'll send you guys g get us your addresses, I'll send you guys a copy.
And uh
Thanks for coming guys. Um
You're w you're way ahead of the curve. And uh, you know, we'll joke and we'll we'll tease you guys and give you hard time, but you're you're
doing amazing stuff and uh I hope you're proud of yourselves and thanks for coming on the pod. All right, that's it.
I feel like I can root
Well
be what I want to
Uh
But all in it like no day song On the roadless travel never looking back