Register for the Educator Therapy Virtual Summit!

Speaker 1:

Welcome, advocates, to another episode of the Leading Equity Podcast, a podcast that focuses on supporting educators with the tools and resources necessary to ensure equity at their schools. Today's special guest is brother, Henry McDavid is here with us today. So, without further ado, Henry, thank you so much for joining us.

Henry McDavid:

Thank you for having me. It's a great honor to be here and I'm honored to be here.

Speaker 1:

Pleasure's always mine. I'm excited because we're going to be talking about the importance of entrepreneurship, but before we get started, I'd love for you to share a little bit about yourself and what you currently do.

Henry McDavid:

All right. Absolutely. So, I'm 39. I'm a, I guess, what they call a serial entrepreneur. I'm a business coach. That's what I do. I work with service providers to help them increase their revenue without having to work 24/7. One of those businesses, probably my baby of all businesses is that I own a national private school. It's called Kikifers Entrepreneurial Academy. And the basis of that school is that all of the students in our school have to start small businesses that generate revenue as well as they have to publish a minimum of one book a year.

               In addition to that, it has black history, it has STEM, all types of things. Our school was featured at the hundredth Centennial for Black Wall Street, and it was featured as the future of Black entrepreneurship. So, very excited about that. That's really my passion, the thing that drive-

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Henry McDavid:

Lots of other things too. I own other businesses and things like that, but that's the most important.

Speaker 1:

How'd you get into that? What was the vision to start a school like this?

Henry McDavid:

It came together. I can't say that I sat down and wrote it down one day. My wife is the bigger component. Long story short, we own a beauty supply store and on our second and floor, we have this space that we would do rentals, but we never made money Monday through Thursday, nobody would rent, especially during the daytime. So, we were looking for a way to generate revenue in the daytime and we thought about doing a school, but when we ran the expenses, we were like, "We can't afford to run a school." The operations cost too much.

               Long story short, my wife met with a lady and developed a way through a curriculum that we could have a school without teachers. And that was the first sign of innovation. And so, we started this school with no teachers, just going off of spirit. We started with seven students and from our seven students, we ended up growing to maybe 15 by the end of the first semester. And then around 30. To the point where in our city, we're the fastest growing private school in the history of our city. And we also due to COVID, we're able to expand nationally having a virtual program. And so we were able to have students now in California, Texas, Michigan, Georgia, all over. So, that's how the school came about.

Speaker 1:

All right. So, I got questions. So, you said school without teachers. So, my audience is primarily educators, so I'm sure they're all thinking the same thing I'm thinking, "How does that work? How are they held accountable? What type of assessments are being done?" I'm assuming there's some sort of facilitation that students are doing, so help us understand how that works.

Henry McDavid:

Absolutely. Because it sounds revolutionary in a sense, right? So, your teachers don't have your traditional teaching responsibilities, right? Our students, the way our curriculum is set up, our students is think Montessori and how students come in and they work at their own pace. So, our students work at their own pace and our education is customized in a way where each student has a customized education that allows them to cover gaps. So, one of the big issues in our city is that there was only a about 40% graduation and rate. And the superintendent of the public schools spoke at one of the high schools and he mentioned that only 40% of students in our city come into kindergarten, kindergarten ready. And that trend carries through all the way to senior year.

Speaker 1:

Right.

Henry McDavid:

So, we're in a city that according to Forbes has the third worst educational system in the country. And so, one of the problems we faced was how do we take these students who maybe we have a seventh grader, but they're reading at a third grade level, or they're performing at a second grade level and we got to catch them up, so we got to be able to shoot the gaps. So, each student has a customized education. They have a customized curriculum that allows them to work at their own pace. And then what we do as staff, as the teachers, right? "As the teachers," instead of writing lesson plans, instead of having to prepare out that portion of it, we can assist them in their core curriculum, and then all the teachers that are present are responsible for their additional electives, right?

               So, whether it's computer science, foreign language, whether it is entrepreneurship, whether it's authorship, the structure looks like students come in, first thing they do is set their goals. Once they have their goals set for the day, they work through those goals that they set. Now, those goals have to be realistic. A student can't come in and say they want to do one page of math and then be done for the day.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Henry McDavid:

They have to have realistic goals, but we help facilitate those goals. And then it allows our teaching staff to actually be more free because now the lesson plans already done for them. And so, they can come in and now the teachers can focus on giving one-on-one help, they can focus on additional tutoring if necessary, and they can focus on whatever their passion is that they're passionate about to give to the children. And so, it enriches the curriculum.

Speaker 1:

Okay. That makes more sense. And I like that it's student led and that's what I'm hearing with the way that you're presenting the format of the school. Now, I want to talk about entrepreneurship, especially for our folks of color. Is part of your vision being able to serve as a mentor, because you said you have a background and experience with businesses and things like that. Is that what your goal was with founding the school?

Henry McDavid:

Absolutely. So, it's my personal belief that in my experiences, entrepreneurship literally was able to save my life, right? Entrepreneurship positioned me in a way when everything in my life was going south, that it was the one thing that I found that took me from where I was at and was able to elevate me. And so, our goal with our students is that we are striving to produce six figure earning students while in school and from every age. Our youngest published authors are four years old. So, whether it's the four year olds, and of course at four, you don't understand the [inaudible 00:07:26] counting, things such as that, in your learning.

               So, it's very village oriented because the parents have to be involved with the children. But the goal and the vision is to feed entrepreneurship to the youth at a young age so as they're growing, those who it clicks for early can begin to make money or start a business or change the trajectory of not just their personal life, but their entire family life, as well as for those who are, maybe it hasn't clicked yet. As they're growing at a certain point, it will click. And so, one of the things we do is we're very heavy on bringing in guest speakers. So, we brought in everybody from billionaire Antonio T. Smith, Jr. From ATS Business University, Marquel Russel, the King of Client Attraction. We bring in big name people and we also bring in entrepreneurs who maybe just started a business six months ago, so they can talk about the struggles and things they're going through.

               And we're really heavily focused on entrepreneurship because as children get out of school, if they want to go to college, that's an option. If they want to go into the workforce, that's an option. But if they have a successful business that's generating revenue to the point where they can take care of themselves, it gives them a third option. And with the other two options, they can still pursue entrepreneurship if that's what they desire. So, it's like creating another option, even if maybe they get a skill or a trade, but they still have this option that if you're going to be a carpenter, well, why don't you own the company of carpenters that work for you, versus just [inaudible 00:09:03] carpenter? Or if you want to be a doctor, cool, you can do that, but you don't need to have a degree to own a clinic. You can own the clinic, hire and facilitate the doctors, while you're doing whatever it is that you love to do in the medical profession.

               So, we just believe, especially in our community with the drugs and the violence and the gangs and the teen pregnancy and the domestic violence and all these issues in our community that rather than point the finger outside the community and blame other people and hope other people do something for us, if we teach the children to do for themselves, then we are creating a solution that's internal versus looking for an external solution. And instead of pointing the fingers and pointing blame, now we can be responsible for our own destiny.

Speaker 1:

That's awesome. And I really love that. I'm going to go back to my days when I was taking some business courses and stuff like that, just trying to figure out stuff myself, in college. And I remember that part of being able to start a business is you have to have capital. And I'm curious as far as is there a pot somewhere of money or is there a loan? Are you doing loans? Or how are you helping the students when it comes to the financial piece of getting started off the ground?

Henry McDavid:

Well, that's a great question, actually. I love that question. We get that. I get that often. And one of the beautiful things about 2021, going into 2022, there's so many businesses that you can start that you can start making money without having to spend a dime, right? And so, we teach our children those type of... So, I'll give you an example, right? For us, when we showed our children how, we put out an ebook that cost us nothing to make, it cost us nothing to produce, we just had to have the knowledge. We put out an ebook, the book wasn't even available. We put out presales. So after doing a few hundred presales, now you can actually go back, right? You put the book out on presale, you sold, I think we put a book out. It may have done 200 in a week.

               So the 200, you can take the 200 and invest that money into the actual product. But now, you actually have profit on your hands. You have an asset that you can always sell to generate revenue, and it didn't cost you anything, right? So, now you're an author. You have a ebook that's out. Now, maybe you take some of that money and build a website around your book. Maybe you start small with a Wix website or something that's very cheap that you can get into. Now you have your own domain, you got your own professional email, you have your own ebook, and it cost you nothing to create it. But now you're generating revenue based on this one asset that you created.

               And so in 2021, we are teaching creativity and imagination as the number one business tool. Because if you come from a family that doesn't have a lot of money for you to jump into a business, then how can you be creative and sustain that? And one of the beautiful things about our school is we have a vast network. So, Every.Black International, which is a huge entrepreneur group out of North Carolina, is partnered with us, ATS Business University out of Houston, Texas, The Morning Meetup with David Chance, that entire entrepreneurial movement out of Atlanta is partnering with us in. And so, we have some huge networks and people that can show the young people. It's not just me, myself. These other entrepreneurs that can show young people, "This is how you do this. This is how you do this. This is how you do this."

               For another example, we brought in CEO, Sean, who's an 18 year old options trader who works 45 minutes a day and showed the children, "This is how I make a thousand dollars a day doing options. I started with $0. Now I use my money, but it doesn't cost money for you to get into this game. Or maybe take a hundred dollars, buy a hundred dollars worth of options, build your way up to 600, do it in a week. From the 600, you can flip that into a thousand dollars, trading options, know your risk, know what you're getting into." So we have that laid out for the children and it's been successful thus far.

Speaker 1:

This is great. And I was wondering about that because especially with the community and how you describe some of the challenges that are within your community. And I love that you're in a position to be able to support the youth and try to help them see some other opportunities and some other directions that they can go that they may not be privy to. So, I love that this is the space that they're available to do.

               When it comes to creating a business, let's say I'm 12, 13 years old, and I want to start a business, in addition to creating a product or whatever service that you're wanting to do, what type of other skills are the students learning? So, I have a good friend. She does a lot of work with helping kids create their LinkedIn profile, for example, to be able to help them understand the importance of having a LinkedIn. You don't have to be an adult. You don't have to be at a certain place in order to do so. So, what type of marketing skills, what type of maybe social media presence are students learning as well?

Henry McDavid:

Oh, that's a good one. So, it's a wide range. And one of the beautiful things about a lot of the guest speakers that I bring in is they offer free mentorship for our children. And we always explain to our youth because all the adults that come to the school that visit for whatever reason, always tell the young people, "If I had this at your age, I'd be a hundred million dollars strong right now, if I had this at your age." And so, one of the beautiful things about the network that I've established in business, that I'm able to share with the young people, is that a lot of our guest speakers offer free mentorship. And that mentorship allows our young people to get different skillsets.

               So, I know my skillsets and my limitations. I'm not the best at a lot of things, but I know people who are good at what they're good at. And so, it allows us to spread the wings, per se, of the school and give children. So, when it comes to social media, I mentioned Marquel Russel, King of Client Attraction. Well, Marquel Russel is making about $10,000 a hour doing social media. So, that's a great person to have as a mentor, working with the school and supporter of the school. Then we brought in just last week, his name is slipping my mind. Blame the COVID. His name [inaudible 00:15:39] mind, but the brother is a social media manager. And he has about a million followers and manages other professional people's pages. And it was giving our children the skill sets. "This is how you do this. This is how you run Facebook or Instagram or YouTube or LinkedIn," or whatever your pick of the litter is. Maybe you're TikTok, whatever your pick of the litter is.

               And however you want to structure that, these are skill sets you need, because social media is a huge, huge thing when it comes to marketing nowadays. And so, teaching marketing, teaching social media, teaching graphic design. My daughter, for example, she just turned 12 on Christmas, but she's illustrated upwards of maybe 13 books or so, and she's published. I want to say she published one book and she's publishing her second book within about a month. So, those type of skillsets, every student doesn't want to illustrate books. So, for her specifically, she likes illustrating and graphic design and art. That's her leg.

               Then you may have another student that... One student I have does a comedy on TikTok. So, he just lost his account after he's trying to get it back. But he had like 30,000 followers on TikTok and trying to grow to your account out. So, there's so many different options available to the children when it comes to social media of marketing, whatever their business is. One of our students has a newsletter, and I connected with another multi-millionaire in our city and his thing is he does a million dollars of free promo. And so, now our newsletter student now is learning how to take advantage of all the free publicity that exists to bolster her business. And it's working out lovely. So, there's just so many options available to our students.

Speaker 1:

That's awesome. And we probably should let the audience know, you're currently recovering from COVID. So, that's why you hear some coughs every now and then. So, just showing that you're a hard worker and I think that's a great example for your students and staff as well. I want to touch on your staff, right? Because you said that you do have mentorship. What are some of the qualifications of your staff? Are your staff business owners as well? How did you kind of get them together to be part of the school?

Henry McDavid:

So, we're growing, right? So, I'm excited about next year because we at the same time while my staff that's present, and I'll get to that with a complete answer, but we're also building more schools across the country. So, right now we're working and we'll be open in Atlanta, in Houston, next year and possibly St. Louis as well. So, when it comes to staff, it's a very unique situation, right? Credentials, you want your basic credentials, but where as a private school, if a teacher's not a certified teacher, we can still pick them up, right? It just depends on their skillset. And it's one of those things that you have to judge through... My HR department helps out, and also it's just being a good judge of character. If they don't have the full credentials that you would want in say your top, whatever your ideal teacher is, right?

               So, we have what we consider our ideal teacher and then we have some things that we look for. But one of the biggest things that we look for is if you want to be a teacher within this structure, you have to have number one above and beyond, you have to love the students that you're teaching.

Speaker 1:

Right.

Henry McDavid:

And that comes from when I worked in the public schools, I saw so many teachers that were teaching in these neighborhoods that they weren't from, that they may live a hour or two hours a way to come. They're implanting in just to get a check, but you could tell from the relationship that the students have with those teachers that it wasn't a genuine relationship and it affects education. One of the schools I worked at was three blocks from the projects. Well, when little Timmy comes to school and little Timmy hasn't had food since yesterday, that's going to affect his education.

               But if you don't recognize some of the things you're looking at, because there's no love there, you're going to think that little Timmy's behavior issues are because he's a bad student and you're not going to look for these signs of trauma, the domestic violence, or you don't know if he has to walk through a neighborhood that's dangerous to get home, that's dangerous to get to school, he doesn't have any food, his families being evicted, all these other external components of trauma that a lot of children suffer, especially when it comes to urban and Black neighborhoods, Latin neighborhoods, there's all these external traumas that are going on that have to be built into the system.

               So, when I say one of the things we look for is that a teacher has to be in love with the students they're teaching, because another part of our curriculum is that we have mental health built into our curriculum because there's so many things that our children suffer from that makes the education process difficult. So, we strive to, of course, what's your background? We want to know, have you ever taught before? We want to know all the common things. But, in addition to that, what I listen for is I listen for what's your commitment level to the children, that if we're going to put you in front of these babies to help change the trajectory of their life, what's your commitment level to helping them be successful? Are you here for the long road? Or is this just an opportunity for a quick check?

               So, it's hard to articulate that one thing, but that is the one thing that really can make or break the decision to bring staff on. My current staff, they have some type of entrepreneurial spirit. So, we have a music teacher that used to work for Def Jam. So, he teaches. In addition to being a teacher, he teaches how to do publishing for your music, like putting together music, putting together jingles. They talk about, I don't even know all the music stuff, the ASCAP and the BMI, and making sure your royalties are... All those entrepreneurial things from a new music standpoint, especially since there's so many of our young people that want to be involved in music. And so, that's just an example of, what skillset do you bring to the table to make the meal better versus you coming to eat off the table that's being provided and not really offering something for the young people.

Speaker 1:

I think that should be the number one goal though, right? When it comes to staff, are you committed? Are you invested in this community? I like how you mentioned how sometimes our teachers don't necessarily come from the neighborhoods that they're serving. And so, being able to see that commitment and see and understand this is not just a paycheck, this is not, "I needed a job, but this is something that I really genuinely want to support and show whatever skills or whatever I have to help the community to help the school that I'm working with." I think that's really important. So, I like that that's the overarching theme behind hiring practices.

Henry McDavid:

Absolutely. And it's been working out well for us, so I'm going to push that harder actually, as we continue to grow and expand.

Speaker 1:

Good. Good. So, all right. What would you say? Help us understand maybe what is any six figure businesses some of your students have produced, or what is maybe a really strong, successful story that you have from some of your students?

Henry McDavid:

Absolutely. I can give you a story that... Actually, we took a young man who did not have any entrepreneurial background and actually was not sure what he wanted to do with the program. And so, he published his first book and as he published his first book, I don't know if you're familiar. There's some people within our network though, that are big on authorship and marketing books. And so, we [inaudible 00:24:03] that system, and he was able to average about a thousand dollars a week selling books.

Speaker 1:

What was his book about?

Henry McDavid:

It was a fiction book. What's it called. I'm trying to think of what it's called. It's a fiction book about him and his friends hanging out or something, just a regular, everyday book, but it's just a system that he used because one of the things we expressed to the children is that, "At your age of you producing books, it's not so much what you wrote about," right? We can get to those types of books for the older students, but it's not so much what you wrote about. The fact that you might be a young, let's say, 10 year old published author, people are going to support you based on your age and based on your presentation. So, if you present properly and you give them the benefit of your book, people will buy your book. And so, running that structure and running that marketing plan, a lot of our children have found success with that, where they've made thousands of dollars selling books just based on that.

               So, every time we go into a new market or every time we market the school, one of the big things we always market is, our children are published authors from four years old and up and these are what they have. Now, it's on the children at that point to use what they've learned to help get their books out. But systematically, what made him so successful was that they set up a system and the system they had running was very easy, and it's a super simple system. All right, sell a hundred books. If you sell a hundred books a week at $10 profit a book, you're going to make a thousand dollars, and he just ran the play. And so, it's just that simple to run the play. And the crazy part about it is I want to say he was maybe 12 or 13 and crazy thing about that young student was he was like, "Eh." It didn't click for him, the position that he was in, it was like, "This is school." So, that's a good thing. That's a great thing actually, right?

               Because it's not necessarily so much about the money at that age. You can buy a car, but you can't drive it, probably not about to go buy a house. And so what happens is, now we have our students and we bring in other young students around the same age that have been successful. We got one young brother we're bringing in this semester from Atlanta, who's a multi-millionaire and he does stocks and he does client attraction university. He's a business coach and I want to say 13 or 14 now. To sit down and meet with him is like 5,000. So, the best way I can explain it, it's like the example of the flea experiment, where the fleas are in the jar and they only jump two inches until another flea is introduced into the population. And that flea, being able to jump six feet, shows the other fleas what's possible.

               And that's how our students have been with business. Because most of us in our communities, we don't know what's possible. Because we've never seen it actually done. But once you see it done and you experience it, now you're like, "Okay, that's a great thing. And not only can you do it now, you can teach other people to do it." So, each one, teach one is that model.

Speaker 1:

I love that. All right. So, here's the thing. Here's a question I have, right? Because when I'm thinking about you have some students that, again, maybe they didn't come from money, right? And then, now all of a sudden they're making a thousand dollars a week or whatever it looks like in individual situations, how are we helping the kids understand how to manage that money so that they're not just blowing it on nonsense, right? And then the next thing you know, they're broke or whatever, whatever, right? So, what is some of the, "Okay, so now you have a business, you got your product, you got your service, whatever it is, you have your capital, you got all this, and you market it," but what is the training that students are getting in order to manage their money?

Henry McDavid:

Gotcha. So, two things we do. One of them is very unorthodox and the other one is more orthodox towards financial literacy. The first thing we do is that we establish from day one, they have weekly Black history classes, right? And not like, "Rosa Parks sat in the back of the bus and MLK had a dream," not the standard public school-

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Henry McDavid:

... Whatever that they give Black children. We give them a love and affinity for their own culture and their own community, right? Because we understand that in our community, we get a million dollars, we're going to get rims, we're going to get chains, we're going to get Louboutin, Gucci products.

Speaker 1:

I didn't want to stereotype. I just said, if they didn't come from money. But you're right. You're right. Yeah. So, that's what my question was. Like, if they didn't come for money and now they have all this money, how do we help them support-

Henry McDavid:

Right.

Speaker 1:

... So that they're not... Yeah.

Henry McDavid:

So, the first thing we do is, and the reason we use Black history as a tool is because we want to get them interested in owning their neighborhood, right? We want to get them interested in if you own the real estate, if you own the businesses, if you control the community, now you control the politicians, now you can bring something to your religious folks. We're the only community who puts our religious people out front and our business people in the back. So, we have to reverse that thinking. No, put your business people out front, only control the neighborhood, and then you can give to the clergy to help bring the morals up, to help bring the ethics up, to help bring the way people think up.

               So, the first thing we do that's unorthodox is we were very heavy on Black history. But from a standpoint of not just talking about slavery happened, no, slavery happened, but how can you take that and apply that to what you see every day today? So, we ask the questions, how many of your parents are married? How many healthy Black relationships have you seen? How many of you all know somebody that's in jail? Or is a victim of the war on drugs? Or sufferers from X, Y, and Z? And once our children have awareness that they're victims of this social engineering, well, you don't have to be a victim. You can control that, but in order to control it, you got to control role economics. And entrepreneurship, in our opinion, is a great way to control those economics.

               And so, we use Black history to boast of this idea that when you get money, it's very selfish to go take that money and go, not that you can't have nice things. Everybody wants nice things. You want the car, you want the clothing, you want those things, but there's a bigger picture, at hand. And so, the Black history is about teaching the bigger picture versus being so individualized and selfish that you focus only on yourself. "I'm about to go buy rims." "You don't even have a car, but you about to go buy rims," right? Then the second part, of course, we have all the financial literacy, we have financial professionals, we have people talk to them about credit. We have them learn about what is a Roth IRA? How can you start putting your money up right now, even if you're young people. Okay, maybe you want to invest in Bitcoin. Maybe you want to invest in some Ethereum. What are these investments that you can make so that your money actually works for you?

               If you want to go buy that gold chain, it's nothing wrong with it. But let your asset generate the revenue so that it's not your money. It's the money you've generated from the asset you've created that's generating you additional money that you spend on a monthly basis. That money you can go, that can be your play money, right? And so, we have financial professionals that speak to them on these types of things, because you're right. You can't just give somebody from nothing, something. They're going to blow it. And traditionally in our community, we recognize that for the most part, most of us, I want to say Cardi B had a line in one of her rap songs, she said, I never thought I would quote Cardi, but she said something along the lines of like, "I have no idea what to do with all these racks." Like, "I've never had anything." Like, "I have no idea what to do with this money."

               And that's true for most of us. If you give most of us half a million dollars right now, it's going to be gone within a month and we're going to have nothing to show. And so, with our children, we're aware of that. And so, we try to have a heavy financial literacy component to entrepreneurship because otherwise that money that you're making today is gone tomorrow.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that was my question. And first of all, Cardi B has bars. I like Cardi B. So, it depends on what kind of mood I'm in, but I jam out to Cardi B and I love the example and I love that you're pushing financial literacy. I think that's very important, credit, and helping kids understand those things. Now, are students utilizing some of their funds to maybe pay for college down the road once they graduate?

Henry McDavid:

Well, we've talked to the parents about, I think it's the 403B. We've talked to the parents and one of the interesting things about it is when the children make their money, it's their money.

Speaker 1:

Right.

Henry McDavid:

I always tell the parents, I say, "Hey, if your children making money, tell them make sure they pay their own tuition," but that's neither here nor there. I can't say for a hundred percent sure where everybody's money goes when they make the money. Our job, we can only facilitate so far, but we try to offer options for the parents as well. Because it's counterproductive if you teach the child, the child goes home and says, "Hey mom, I want to establish this LLC or this S Corp or whatever I want to establish." And then the mom and dad have no clue what the child is talking about.

               So, it goes back to that village mentality that you can't just educate the child. Now you have to find ways to educate the parents as well. Because the parent, really in truth, if the child makes that money, the parent's going to be the one that blows it. So, you got to educate the village. You can't just give it to the child. And so, that's what makes our community so village oriented is that we work with the parents just as much as we work with the students, because it's an educational thing that if the child doesn't have it, that means the parent didn't have it to give it to the child. So, you can't just get the fruit, you got to start with the root.

Speaker 1:

So, how are you helping the parents then? Because I'm curious about that. All right. So, students are successful. They're they're doing their thing. They're making money and whatnot. What does financial literacy look like for parents? Is that parent nights or is that stuff during a day? What kind of training or supporter are parents getting?

Henry McDavid:

So, parents get a lot of one on one activity as well as parents get access to a lot of the resources that children get. So, we have a guest speaker come on, we brought Antonio T. Smith on, every parent was online. Because how many Black billionaires do you know that started from nothing that made a billion dollars in three years that you can talk to one on one and ask questions, get understanding from? And so, we have a lot of one-on-one. We have additional resources for them, we created a Patreon page. Say, "Hey, get on Patreon, we can walk through some of the things that your children are learning at school and now you as a parent have access to it." But a lot of the parents, because it's so village oriented, and mind you, this is only our third year in existence.

               So, a lot of our parents call us, email, text. I'll say our parents are not shy about reaching out for help. And even for our parents, we let them understand and let our students understand. Like for me, to book me, I charge 5,000 off the top. So for the parents, I'm like, "I want you to understand the value that what you're getting and the people around you and the people I'm surrounding you with and the people we're developing you with that if your child gets a mentor and a mentor says, "Do X, Y, and Z," you as the parent, I need you to do X, Y, and Z. I don't need you to say, "What about A, B and C?" If you already knew how to do it, you would already have done it. But because you haven't done it, it's manifests proof that you don't know how to do it."

               So, and that happens, time to time. So, but we try to create a very open environment for parents. Parents can volunteer on any day, they can pop into the school. For our virtual students who are across the country, parents are very involved. They talk to us on a day to day basis. And one of the other benefits I did not mention is that because the curriculum is so customized, it allows students to grow at their own pace. So, for my daughter, for example, age wise, she just turned 12, but she's already halfway through eighth grade. So, she'll graduate high school early at this rate and we've slowed her down, but she'll still graduate high school early by 13, 14 years old. We have a little girl in California, six years old, this year she came to us. She completed kindergarten, first grade, second grade, and she's halfway through third grade. By the time she's done, she'll probably be in the fifth grade. And she'll be seven going into the fifth grade because of her work ethic.

Speaker 1:

Okay. So, all right. This is a private school. So, I'm assuming there's tuition in order to-

Henry McDavid:

Yes. That's correct.

Speaker 1:

Okay. So, as far as when we're talking about some of the family, the communities that maybe tuition is out of their range, are there any sort of opportunities, scholarships maybe, or a sliding scale or any of those type of things in which some of the folks that just don't have the money or the means to be able to... But they really want their child in their school. What are some ways that you can support them in order to help them out in those situations?

Henry McDavid:

So, we have a few scholarship programs and we also have a low income program where children can get tuition discounted. We put it like this, we've never turned a family down. We'll figure out a way to work with the family where they're at. We have monthly fundraisers who parents can run the fundraisers every single month and that can help with tuition. We have some families who ran some of the fundraisers to the point where they didn't have to come out of pocket at all. And so, scholarships are available in Illinois. For our Illinois based students, because we're in Illinois, there's a program called Empower Illinois that allows people to donate towards the school and to Empower Illinois. For the donors, the donors get a 75% tax credit.

               So, being able to write off 75% up to $1.3 million is huge for business owners and our school is very attract of the business owners. So, it allows us to attract business owners to donate to help with scholarships. And then, of course we have external scholarships as well, and our school is a 501C3. So, we strive to make the donation process attractive so that people would want to donate to help out young people or adopt a family or adopt a student. And so, all those different financial options are there. And like I said, we've never turned away of family based on money.

Speaker 1:

I love that. Well, I definitely consider you as providing a voice in leading equity, brother Henry, and I'm really happy to hear that the work that you're doing is expanding and we have all these opportunities for folks of color, students of color to get introduced to entrepreneurship at such an early age. And I know there's a lot of folks that we just don't have that opportunity. I was fortunate enough to grow up where my dad had a business. And so, it's interesting because I have a brother, I have a sister, and we all have our own businesses. And just from watching my dad.

               And I never thought I would do it. I went into education because I was like, "I want to know exactly when my checks are coming in. I want to know what I'm going to be getting paid." And because I had that background, because I grew up in that environment, it really helped boost me to have a confidence to say, "You know what? I'm going to start a business. This is what's going to happen." But again, we know that there's a lot of our students who don't have that type of background. So, I love the work that you're doing. If you were to leave the audience with a final word, what would you say to audience out there?

Henry McDavid:

I would just say there's no limit to what you can achieve in life. Napoleon Hill, author I think in Grow Rich said, "If you conceive it and you believe it, you can achieve it." And that's a true statement based on the level of your belief in yourself. And one of the things that helped me so much is the more I began to believe in myself, the more I believed in my idea, the more the idea expand it and became real. So, there's really no limit to what an individual can do. It doesn't matter where you're at in life, what your education level is, your status, your class, none of that matters. If you hard to believe in yourself, you can achieve anything.

Speaker 1:

I hear that. I hear that. Good words there. If we have some folks that want to connect and they want to reach out, they're looking maybe for school, things like that, what are best way to reach out?

Henry McDavid:

You can always go to our website, I'll spell it. It's tricky. But I'll spell it. It's KikifersAcademy.com. That is K-I-K-I-F [inaudible 00:41:03] A-C-A-D-E-M-Y. KikifersAcademy.org. You go to the website, all the information is there, you can email us, you can get in contact, you can call us, you can set up appointments. And in my personal, if you want to contact me, it's just principal. Common spelling of a [email protected]. That's my email. Feel free to send an email, reach out, and we can always go from there.

Speaker 1:

Love it. And I'll leave the links in there as well. I'm curious, where does the name Kikifer come from?

Henry McDavid:

Long story short, my wife's name is Keshaunda. They called her Kiki growing up and we went to Vegas and at Laugh Factory, this comedian did this piece where the Kikifers came out. So we brought it back. It was hilarious. So, we brought it back. And when we started our first product line, when we first got into business, we named our product line Kikifers Obsidian. We opened a beauty supply store, we named it Kikifers Beauty Supply store, and the school actually started above the beauty supply store. So, that was the last business that we had that we gave the Kikifers title to got it.

Speaker 1:

Got it. All right. Well, brother Henry, it is truly an honor and pleasure to meet you and we'll leave all the links again, we'll leave all the links in the show notes as well so folks can reach out they have further questions, but thank you again for your time.

Henry McDavid:

Thank you so much for the invitation. It was an honor to be here and I hope to be back.

Are you subscribed to the podcast? If you’re not, I want to encourage you to do that today. I don’t want you to miss an episode. Click here to subscribe in iTunes!

Now if you enjoy listening to the show, I would be really grateful if you left me a review over on iTunes, too. Those reviews help other advocates find the podcast and they’re also fun for me to go in and read. Just click here to review, select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” and let me know what your favorite part of the podcast is. Thank you!