In this episode of Build Momentum, our guest, Samuel Reed III a.k.a Reed, shares his expertise in teacher-preneurship.
Reed is a teacher-preneur. He specializes in not just in teaching but also helping studetns and adults learn how to start a business and get it up and running.
Sam Reed, after getting his MBA, joined the Peace Corps as a Business Development Volunteer in Botswana. After finishing his tour, he started an information service and training company in Africa and Botswana but went bankrupt before they could make it on their fifth year mark. So he came back to the US and decided to become an educator and he realized that he has this entrepreneurial mindset and wanted to bring his entrepreneurial background into teaching.
Some Questions I Ask:
In This Episode, You Will Learn:
Quotes:
“I want to teach young people because I think it's going to have more impact and I want to teach young people to not necessarily have to chase money.”
“I'm an entrepreneur, how can I bring this entrepreneurial background into teaching?”
“Don't go big, go focus.”
“If you're going to pitch your business, your data, your story has to be there. But you have to have some numbers that go with your stories. And those numbers need to be able to tell a story.”
Connect with Samuel Reed III on:
Website
Blog
Stay in touch with Sarah Williamson:
Free Case Study Guide
SWPR GROUP Website
LinkedIn
Stay in touch with Chad Bolser:
LinkedIn
About "The Secret to Transformational Leadership," which Sarah co-authored with Dr. Quintin Shepherd:
Transformational Leadership Secret website
Purchase the print or ebook
In this episode of Build Momentum, our guest, Samuel Reed III a.k.a Reed, shares his expertise in teacher-preneurship.
Reed is a teacher-preneur. He specializes in not just in teaching but also helping studetns and adults learn how to start a business and get it up and running.
Sam Reed, after getting his MBA, joined the Peace Corps as a Business Development Volunteer in Botswana. After finishing his tour, he started an information service and training company in Africa and Botswana but went bankrupt before they could make it on their fifth year mark. So he came back to the US and decided to become an educator and he realized that he has this entrepreneurial mindset and wanted to bring his entrepreneurial background into teaching.
Some Questions I Ask:
In This Episode, You Will Learn:
Quotes:
“I want to teach young people because I think it's going to have more impact and I want to teach young people to not necessarily have to chase money.”
“I'm an entrepreneur, how can I bring this entrepreneurial background into teaching?”
“Don't go big, go focus.”
“If you're going to pitch your business, your data, your story has to be there. But you have to have some numbers that go with your stories. And those numbers need to be able to tell a story.”
Connect with Samuel Reed III on:
Website
Blog
Stay in touch with Sarah Williamson:
Free Case Study Guide
SWPR GROUP Website
LinkedIn
Stay in touch with Chad Bolser:
LinkedIn
About "The Secret to Transformational Leadership," which Sarah co-authored with Dr. Quintin Shepherd:
Transformational Leadership Secret website
Purchase the print or ebook
Sarah Williamson 0:05
Hello, and welcome to build momentum where we make PR easy for education organizations. This show was created to help edtech startups, research institutes and schools learn how to develop simple, replicable PR strategies and how to execute on those strategies. I'm your host, Sarah Williamson. And I've spent the past 15 years working in VR, where I've been able to understand what works and what doesn't when it comes to making an impact. I will share my tips for success and interview others who have done the same to provide you with the framework that you can use within your own organization, be sure to grab my free guide how to create a killer case study, even if you don't have data at casestudy.swpr-group.com. That's casestudy.swpr-group.com And today we have Sam Reed, who goes by read on the show with us. And Reed is here. He's a teacher printer, and he's here to share his story with us and I cannot wait for you to meet him. He's a true gem read, would you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit more about your background?
Reed 1:09
Hey, Sarah. Yeah, as you said, my name is Reed aka Samuel Reed III and my tag is that I teach students to read, write and make sense of the world. And our side hustle for social good the rest of the time. Love it. I came to teach-preneurship, not by accident. It was actually planned. Before becoming an educator, I actually ran a business, I got my MBA, and I wanted after receiving my MBA, I wanted to go in business right away. But I realized during my MBA time that I didn't have the social capital or the real financial capital to kind of do their business that I wanted to do. So I decided to incubate myself and I joined the Peace Corps. My mom and my friends, they thought I was crazy. But there was a method to my madness. I joined the Peace Corps. As a business development volunteer in the country, Botswana, I stayed, I extended my peace corps tour. And then after finishing my peace corps tour, I started Information Service and training company in Africa and Botswana. It's kind of like an african.com, right? Yeah. And we had a good run, we ran for four and a half years, and we went bankrupt before we could make it to the fifth year because they normally say if you can make it to the fifth year, you have a good chance of having a sustainable business. We were undercapitalized. And there wasn't like proper venture capital infrastructure in the country at the time. Like if we were set up in America, we might have been able to get some venture capitalists to like back us. And so that didn't happen. We grew the company too fast, we blew up. And next step, my wife decided, hey, you have to go back to your country, my wife's from Botswana. And we had to re engineer reboot. And when I decided what I wanted to do, I was thinking about doing a PhD in business. And I'm like, you know what, I want to teach young people because I think it's going to have more impact. And I want to teach young people not necessarily have to chase money. So I became an educator in that first few years of being an educator, like super, super challenging. It was my teaching craft kind of got stable, I realized, you know, I'm like, Hey, I'm an entrepreneur, like, how can I bring this entrepreneurial background into teaching. And so I started writing a few grants, I start writing and doing a couple of programs. And next thing, like I have a viper in practice as a Teach for Noor in my classroom, doing awesome projects, galvanizing resources, brands, partnerships. And fast forward the school where I worked previously, we were set up for closure, I work with the community and partners to stave off the closure. Wow. But it was temporarily though, okay, free, but eventually the right was on the wall, they were going to close. And at the same time, there was a new school that was developing in the making with the current school, where I teach now is the new school. And the new school was like a perfect school for my disposition. Because we lean into design thinking, Wow, we lean into youth development, it was a school that was giving permission kind of to be an innovative school, or actually a part of the Innovation Network in our school district. And so I met a happy medium of being an innovative school space, were doing teacher innovation, design thinking. And then as that was progressing, last year, with COVID, there was this opportunity to do some pivots. And we can talk about that as we get into the conversation, but normally have a six word story, but that was a little bit more than six words, but that's my little story.
Sarah Williamson 4:28
All it's a pretty good story. I think it deserves more than six words. That's great. Okay, so what are you up to now? And tell me, I'm curious, what role has innovation played in what you're doing now? So tell me more about that.
Reed 4:41
Yeah. So as I was saying, during COVID, you know, my school and colleagues we'd already been doing work around providing opportunities for asynchronous and synchronous learning opportunities for young folks in our school. And simultaneously, I participated in this program in Philadelphia, part of the art in Business Council, it was a design thinking boot camp for artists and corporate partners. I participated in that program. And simultaneously we had COVID going on, and then we had the ratio unrest going on. And at my school, unfortunately, we lost one of our students, the gun roll is not because of wasn't a police violence situation was just a really unfortunate situation. And this young man, right, the only time he would get excited and juiced up in my classrooms, when I will talk about finance, economics, because typically, school can be boring, honestly, right, praise young folks. School is just a drag. But when I will talk about money finance bitcoins, like his, you know, he would perk up, right? Yeah, like, I need to do some programming that's going to engage like this young man who had his unfortunate demise and losses like, right, and I said, I'm going to do this business one on one accelerator, side hustle accelerator, what I'm going to do is I'm going to bridge young folks, and not so young folks together and provide them with a training program that's going to do soup to nuts from starting a business to getting it up and running, like registering the business coming up with your mission statement, learning how to track your income. And at the end of the program, they develop a one to two page I call it a shorty, a little short business plan, like operational for them both for internal operations, or if they want to go out and get some funding and the like. And so I started that accelerator program. And Liz, one of your previous guests, was a participant in the program, along with five high school students, right. And of those five high school students, three of them are still operating their businesses, right. One has a sneaker design business. The other young person has a social entrepreneurial, motivational merchandising business. He just recently launched his website, wash his merchandise, and another young lady, she has a health and beauty merchandising business. And so they were participating, I continue to provide them support and even provided them with some micro startup funds. Wow, yeah. And then the adults that we're participating in the program, many of them are still operating their businesses, some were educators at a food entrepreneur in their group, teacher entrepreneurs in our group, some artists in our group. And because of the success of the pilot program, in the summer, after schools got settled this winter, in spring, we started like a second cohort is a smaller group on purpose. Because my capacity, I have to, you know, manage my capacity. We have a smaller group in our accelerator program, but I'm also providing coaching to actually more folks in the summer, I had folks that I was coaching, but I have more folks in the accelerator. And now I have fewer folks in the accelerator have coaching more folks. Yeah. So I'm excited about the prospects of expanding this word. I'm in conversations with some other local organizations, universities that are looking to do more programming around youth development. And so I'm looking forward to expanding my work as well.
Sarah Williamson 8:00
That's fantastic. What are some of the themes that you see arise out of those conversations you have with both the adults and the students? Is it like some of those common challenges? and positive outcomes? Or transformations? I should say? Are there any transformations that you're continuously witnessing?
Reed 8:18
Yeah, the big thing with the young folks, some of the things that we ended up the sparks that happen in the classroom, lead them to like business opportunities, right. And so the young man who does given a shout out to Brill, he does the sneaker rebranding, he started drawing and doodling in the classroom, and from those drawings and do love like, Man, you're onto something like you should keep this up. And he had something but then when he participated in the program, that thing that it gave them structure, because they come up with a watch statement, right? What's your passion wasn't important, what impact is going to have they move from their watch statement to their mission statement? And then they come up with their story for their business? And then from the story we get into the tactics of like, how are you going to manage it? How are you going to track it? How are you going to come up with an operational benchmark to see if you're having success? and building the confidence is been really transformational? Right. As I mentioned, Liz, who was one of your previous guests participated in accelerator, and she was doing it like I say, at our own pace, we'll have office hours or check in with her. And I was like, wow, we have this open source material. This is amazing. Like, keep working at it, you're onto something. And that just gave her the confidence. So it's not like I'm doing anything special. I'm just giving people permission to believe in themselves because it's already there. Right? Yeah. And you give them space and permission. And there were some moves that we did around design thinking so we do this thing called rosebuds. thorns, right? Where we look at like the opportunities you look at threats and we look at potential, and like having them do that in a structure where they see where their roses are. They see where the thorns. They see where the funds are. That was like a really transformational experience for Liz and other folks as they were doing the accelerator program. And I bring in that design thinking approach has been really powerful, as well as bringing in my practice as an educator, because I also do a lot of work around project based learning. Project based learning, you're looking at discipline, you're looking at collaboration, and then you're moving a project from ideation to prototypes.
Sarah Williamson 10:28
Yeah.
Reed 10:28
And having folks go through those processes have been really great. And then for young folks to see like, oh, what we're doing in school has some meaning has some value like it's transferable? That's been really, really exciting.
Sarah Williamson 10:41
Yeah, that is so exciting. I'm curious to how COVID has impacted some of your programs. Has that changed at all? Do you do everything virtually? Whereas you once did it in person? Tell me about that.
Reed 10:53
Yeah, so honestly, COVID has been like a blessing in disguise, in my case, but partly because I was at a school where we were already incubating doing this, like playing around with how do you deal with time and learning and content with students? Right. And so we'd already been doing digital learning, we've already been doing this asynchronous learning models. So when COVID hit our school was kind of in a better position as a school space to do the work. But then the equity issue was a problem with our district, because although our school might have been in a position to kind of like get right at it, other of our colleagues at our schools in the city weren't as ready, right. And so yeah, to kind of hold tight during COVID. And while we're holding tight, I began to incubate not only at school level, but out of school, what are some things that we can do outside of school. And so that's when I started designing and developing the business one on one side hustle accelerator program. And then from developing the business, one on one side hustle accelerator program, I started up my medium blog post where I blog for medium showing the intersection of like innovation, intersection of teaching, and the intersection of just like living a life. And so like setting up routines have been really important as well. And so even though it was COVID, when the routines that were like valuable, non COVID still became valuable, so like mindful as a practice, I provide those opportunities in my classroom, but also provide those spaces when I'm working with my business. I call them side hustlers, right when we're hustlers. Because, like, those are the things that are going to sustain you because like running a business is hard work, right?
Sarah Williamson 12:36
Tell me about it.
Reed 12:38
They're challenges. And if like, you don't know how to just pause and breathe and like, look at the positive side, going back to that rules, buckthorn exercise, those are the things that sustain folks.
Sarah Williamson 12:49
Yeah. And side note read did that for me. When we first got on this podcast, I was having a moment. So you sure did. Thank you. Good. Okay. So I'm curious. You said you have a blog. What other ways are you creating buzz for your program and promoting what you're doing? How are you sharing your message? Aside from places like this, this podcast?
Reed 13:07
Yeah, so part of it is sometimes as an entrepreneur, you can go big, or you can go focus, right?
Sarah Williamson 13:14
Mm hmm.
Reed 13:15
So I realized that going big wasn't the best approach going focused. And so I have a mailing list of folks that are already engaged with me, I have a bigger mailing list of folks that I send out general information like, because I'm a teacher, and I do teach programming, and I'm connected and have networks. I have like a big mailing list of like, 2000, folks, right?
Sarah Williamson 13:34
Yeah.
Reed 13:35
But when it comes to this program, the business want to run program, I'm not blessing to that whole group, targeting folks that are already engaged with me folks that already know that are interested in business, folks that have engaged with me at a certain level. And by using that approach, the word of mouth is actually more powerful, because those folks are going to spread the spread ability of what I'm doing. And I engage with them on an instant constant basis. In fact, I'm applying for the University of Pennsylvania's graduate school education, their education business competition program, right? My envision would be to like develop an app called hustle app that, again, is targeted and focused towards specific side hustle, ethos, and dispositions and communications. But it's again, it's targeting the right people. And so my word of advice is like, don't go big, go focus.
Sarah Williamson 14:25
So true. It's funny, I used to kind of be a PR generalist and try to reach everyone with Oh, I can help you sure I can help you, I can help you do PR. And as you're never really very successful if you take that approach, because people don't really know who you help or how you help them. Whereas when I really decided to focus on education, technology and education, it was transformational for both me and my business. A total game changer.
Reed 14:50
Yeah. So I've decided to lean into this. I'm calling it the side hustle market. But again, I'm not isolating to side hustle. I'm also focused Support the side hustlers, right folks that do sell to them as well as work with them in terms of business development and you know, workforce development folks that are trying to like, particularly with young folks, how do you engage young folks that are like checking out in some ways, right?
Sarah Williamson 15:15
Yeah.
Reed 15:15
But they're jazzed up about something, just how do you get them connected?
Sarah Williamson 15:19
How do you tap into that? So almost like shifting their mindset, just think of school is something that you can get excited about? What are you excited about? and tapping into whatever that is? right? Exactly. I love that you're doing that. And I'm curious, I know that we touched on failure. But failure is such an important part of being an entrepreneur, it's an important part of being human being really. So how has failure impacted your career? So tell me about that.
Reed 15:43
Yeah, my word that I tell my students is like, Yo, I celebrate my failures, and I celebrate their failures. Like you have an epic failure around me. I am so gonna juice you up and make you feel so amazing, right? But I mean, it's one thing to celebrate the failure, but like, what lessons are you taking from that? So number one, you're building up this resilience, right? Yeah. And then you're looking at this a pivot, like, Okay, this is gonna work. Now I need to try this. Again. I mean, my experience of like, going bankrupt in my own business colors, my experience, but even that experience is like the best experience of my life. It taught me so many valuable lessons. And then it made me the person the teach printer that I am today. Yeah. And I think one of the common denominators of every failure is you tried, you did something, you took some action. And that's what's so great about a failure, right? Yeah. Particularly when you feel and then you reassess, and you get back up, right? So if you go and like, Oh, it's over the world is over, oh, I'm done. No, like, my wife said, Hey, Sam, the business is done, you need to go back home, and you need to reboot. And so in my rebooting, I didn't discount the business experience, I put it there. And then I develop my education experience, and then combine them together. And so this energy is really, really paying off. For me, I feel super, super blessed.
Sarah Williamson 17:11
Yeah, that's amazing. I'm so passionate, like you that the two worlds of education and entrepreneurship and just having an entrepreneurial mindset, it's really a match made in heaven, if you can combine those together. And we can really help our students and our future, it doesn't mean that kids have to be business owners, it means that kids have to learn how to think for themselves, right, and be problem solvers and analytical and come up with solutions to help make create a better future for everyone. Right,
Reed 17:37
And that's the thing that I'm pitching to the workforce development industry that's looking at ways of trying to engage you from like, hey, let's do these, let them attend my side hustle accelerator program, and they will actually become better workers. By having this experience as an entrepreneur, even if their business doesn't ultimately thrive, right? The disposition entrepreneur has, but those dispositions are going to be useful in the 21st century, right? Because actually, as educators today, we can't prepare kids for the job, that they're going to have 15 years, right, we have no clue. Right? We can prepare them with disposition. Like this week, I was using kids up about like data literacy and digital literacy, and why is it important that Okay, we're going to go to the playground, and we're going to play around with data in the World Bank, and we're looking at all this data from the World Bank, like, why does the World Bank have all this data, this is the world we live in, they're mining this data to make decisions and understanding data and being able to manipulate it, understand it produce it presented is super important. And yeah, those are the dispositions that you learn. Like, even if you're going to pitch your business, your data, your story has to be there. But you have to have some numbers that go with your stories. And those numbers need to be able to tell a story, right? These are the skills and dispositions that I'm carrying in my business accelerating, but these are also some of the dispositions that I'm providing with my students in my classroom as well.
Sarah Williamson 18:58
Yeah. Oh, that's super amazing. I'm super impressed with you reed. I'm so glad you stopped by the show. Would you mind telling our listeners more about how they can find you and track you down? And maybe take your business accelerator class if they're interested?
Reed 19:11
Yeah, so my website is pretty easy. It's www.sriiiconsulting.org. And I can send you the link. Yeah, I can put it in the show notes. Absolutely. But yeah, if you visit my website, you can learn all about the different programs and offerings that I have. And then you could also go to my medium blog, which is medium.sriiiconsulting as well. Then you can read many of my posts about mindfulness, but not only about mindfulness about project based learning, design thinking, the whole intersection of teaching, hustling, and everyday life.
Sarah Williamson 19:46
Yeah. Oh, that's fantastic. Well, I really appreciate your time. I think we're all going to go check that out. Maybe I should take that course. And thank you and have a wonderful day. Thanks for stopping by.
Reed 19:56
Oh, thanks a lot. I appreciate the opportunity to share with you and your audience.
Sarah Williamson 20:00
Yes and build momentum listeners, don't forget to grab my free guide to creating a killer case study even if you don't have data. Again, that's available at case study.sw pr dash group comm case study.sw pr dash group comm thanks so much for tuning in today. And if you've enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast and write us review on iTunes, Spotify, or whatever platform you choose to listen. We will be back with another episode of build momentum next week. Thanks so much and have a fantastic day.