Tell me your first and last name and your business.
It's John Foster.
And my business is middle school MBA.
Got it.
Tell me a little bit more about that.
I did read on it.
I didn't want to act as if I didn't read on it at all.
But tell me some more about that, please.
So we're a SaaS business, service as a software.
OK.
Or software as a service, I should say.
So we sell software.
But the cool thing is the content.
We teach business and economics to kids younger and faster
than anybody in the world.
And we've really achieved the promise of blended learning.
Online education has a lot of problems.
Particularly, the way it's typically done
is you read a paragraph, and you answer some questions,
and you click that.
And that's awful.
Nobody likes that.
What we do, blended learning is supposed
to be a situation where you use internet resources combined
with a teacher who's there in the classroom.
And that often just doesn't come to pass.
It's either what I just described
or it's queuing up a video and playing that.
Neither one of those is very good.
What we do is we bring the materials and the understanding
to the teacher.
So we do a mind meld with the teacher.
And then the teacher delivers our stuff to the classroom.
We're actually in the teacher's head.
When we're writing curriculum, we
don't think about the students.
We think about the teacher.
And that's where we're going.
So we're able to drop into any classroom.
We don't need a subject matter expert.
We're like an executive MBA for kids.
So we're teaching college level business and economics.
But we do it through their teacher.
So everybody's punching way above their weight.
And everybody loves it.
And it's just been a huge amount of fun for everybody.
OK, so because I'm trying to grasp it all together,
you sell the software.
And this is pretty much a teacher
who wants to be able to teach what you have.
And then that teacher purchases that software.
And through that software, they're
able to teach their class your curriculum.
Right, we give them a new superpower.
Nice.
I was wondering how that works.
So tell me about your vision and where it came from.
Where did this vision come from?
Well, I started many years ago, I guess
even further back than that.
I graduated from school with an engineering degree and an MBA.
And I went into the corporate world.
And I built plants and managed plants,
and then ran businesses and did M&A and all that stuff.
But along the way, I volunteered with Junior Achievement.
So I was teaching business in classrooms as a volunteer.
And I just kept adding things to the curriculum.
Until one day, I just had my own program.
And I was teaching that in schools.
And everybody loved it.
And then one day, I was walking to class.
And I said to myself, why am I teaching 14 kids?
I should teach 14,000.
And that's when Middle School MBA was born.
Wow.
That's awesome.
How long has this program been?
We've been, as Middle School MBA commercially,
we've been doing about six years now.
OK.
Many years prior to that in development.
Right, right.
And how many teachers or schools are you currently in at this moment?
We serve between 1,000 and 2,000 kids a year now.
We haven't gotten to the 14,000 mark yet, but that's coming.
We've got some very big customers in the pipeline.
So I expect to get there in the next one to two years.
OK.
That's very different.
That is very different.
I tell you, as I was reading your information,
I was thinking about how now high schools have the dual credit, right?
And that credit is to be able to have your associates by then.
What's the biggest difference from this?
I did see that it was from the age of 11 on up.
Is that correct?
Correct.
OK.
So what's the difference between a teacher being able to provide this,
or the difference of them actually utilizing the dual credit?
Well, so we're not so much in the business of awarding degrees
as it is as equipping kids with life skills that they'll use forever.
Got it.
We were predominantly in middle schools,
but it's not too young for high schools.
We do have high schools that are using it.
But our goal is not to be a me too.
OK, we're going to award you this credential that
is already sitting out there.
We're bringing something entirely new that basically isn't even credentialed yet.
I mean, you can get AP economics credit for college,
and that sort of thing.
But there's really not an executive MBA kind of curriculum like we have.
We integrate business, economics, and entrepreneurship.
And we have both the practicalities of business stuff,
negotiating, making a P&L, et cetera.
And we have the theoretical stuff of economics,
the subjective theory of value, supply and demand, that sort of thing.
So by integrating them, it makes them all relevant and useful
and just part of a kid's tool set.
They start adopting business lingo into their own speech
and thinking in terms of a principal recently told me
that she overheard two sixth grade girls in the lunch line.
And one says to the other, how much you think the profit margin
is on those neutral-grade bars?
We're in their heads like 24-7.
That makes a lot of sense.
They definitely have a child thinking on a different level,
a completely different level.
Yes.
Teachers tell us that they become more serious about all their classwork
because they develop this vision for the future.
This is where I'm trying to go, and here's
the things that I need to get there.
So it's a different mindset.
Absolutely.
Interesting enough is myself and some family.
I just came from a family reunion, and we
were talking about the younger adults taking over
for the older adults.
Absolutely.
They are so scared of us, and I can't say I'm on the younger side,
but I'm younger than the elders.
And we were just talking about technology
and how different that is.
And so we're utilizing other areas to figure out
how to fund the family reunion.
I tell you, John, they were blown away.
But yet I think that they probably
didn't trust us a little bit more because we
have a business mindset.
And so at the end of the family reunion,
they said, don't forget about why we're here with the family.
And it's interesting you said that you're probably even
in my head, and I don't even have your program.
But it's the thought process of they're asking for donations,
and we're like, we'll do a GoFundMe.
We'll sell popcorn across the states
and things of that nature.
So when you told me the little girl said the profit
margin on the neutral bars, absolutely.
It's definitely a different mindset.
But I wonder, is it even just a little scarier
to know that we're going into the thoughts of, do you think?
So this leads me to a question.
Do you think that there's a challenge
between finding relationships and having this business
knowledge, if that makes any sense?
Say that again?
Between?
Creating relationships with people, right?
And then having that business mindset.
Because as I was saying.
No, not at all.
Absolutely no.
That's a great question, but there's no conflict at all.
In fact, all of business and economics
is about interactions between people.
And that's one of the reasons that we build our course
the way we do with a lot of activities,
where kids are doing things together,
they're negotiating against each other,
they're building parks, they're pitching companies,
is to create those interactions so that they can feel that.
The way we discover prices is through negotiations.
Many different kinds of negotiations.
But it's always a negotiation to, nobody knows in advance
what a price is, right?
We have to discover that every day.
And so it's not just some sterile number that
sits out there by itself.
This is the outcome of interactions between people.
And so we create those interactions
so that they feel that.
And then they see that a price is not just some number that
fell out of the sky.
It's kind of flexible.
And you discovered it between two people.
And there's a lot of things around it.
So once they've experienced that and felt that
and had to tell somebody else, I'm
sorry, that's not good enough, that's what they think.
Then we explain, here's how that happens.
And here's how those laws of supply and demand
work in the larger market to find prices.
But everything is about, if there weren't people,
there would be no reason to have an economy.
There would be no reason to do business.
Business is about serving other people.
And profits are the result of having done that well.
Profits are a badge of honor.
It means you've served somebody else better
than anybody else could.
Because if somebody else could do it better, they would have.
The customer would have chosen those people.
So you brought something to that customer
that they couldn't get anywhere else, at least not
for as good a value.
And that's actually something to be proud of.
And that's reflected in your profits.
And if you don't make profit, if you have losses,
that means that you've wasted society's resources.
And if you continue to make losses,
you're going to be pushed out of business.
And your employees and your assets
are going to be used by somebody else who
can do a better job with them.
So it's all about people and relationships.
It's all about that.
There's no conflict at all.
That is an amazing answer.
Because we tend to think that technology
is going to take over everything, or businesses.
And we'll move aside.
And that relationship will be damned between the two people.
But people definitely have to know that we're still here.
Like you said, there's no business without relationships.
And there's no relationships without people.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision
and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.