Ep. 73: From Dorm Room Idea to $1.3 Billion Raised for Schools | Chris Carneal

Chris Carneal is the founder and CEO of Booster, the nation’s largest elementary school fundraising company. What began as a college dorm room idea has grown into a movement that has helped raise more than $1.3 billion for schools and now serves thousands of schools across the country.

In this bonus episode of Interesting Humans, originally recorded for 20-Minute MBA, Chris shares how a simple idea from his childhood turned into a national company, why listening closely to clients helped shape Booster’s growth, and how one piece of advice changed the direction of his life.

He also opens up about one of his biggest leadership mistakes: avoiding hard conversations. For Chris, growth has required not just vision and optimism, but courage, self-awareness, and the willingness to run toward conflict instead of away from it.

This conversation is also a powerful look at business as a calling. Chris explains why he believes companies can do more than make money — they can shape people, strengthen families, and promote human flourishing through timeless virtues.

Key Takeaways

•  How Chris turned a childhood fun run experience into Booster 
•  Why client feedback helped build and refine the company 
•  The advice that pushed him to follow business momentum 
•  Why avoiding conflict became one of his biggest leadership lessons 
•  How marriage and family became foundational to his success 
•  Why Chris believes virtues are more powerful than company values 
•  How business can be used as a force for human flourishing

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey everyone, Jeff Hope here, host of Interesting Humans Podcast. Before we jump into today's episode, a quick note just for context. This conversation originally aired on another podcast I used to host called 20 Minute MBA, where I sat down with business leaders and entrepreneurs and asked the same four questions to uncover the lessons behind their success. As I've continued to build Interesting Humans podcasts, I've decided to bring some of those conversations over here as bonus episodes because great people and great stories deserve one home. Today's guest is Chris Carneal, who you may also recognize from his full-length feature that happened right here on the Interesting Humans podcast. In this conversation, you'll hear a more focused look at his journey, his mindset, and the key lessons that have shaped his success. Let's get into it. Hey everyone, my name is Jeff Hope. I'm the host of the Interesting Humans Podcast. And it's a podcast where I ask the exact same four questions to men and women out there that are just crushing it in the business world. They could be founders, presidents, CEOs, they could be consultants and managers and everything else in between. But the whole point is that the podcast is 20 minutes or less. It's four questions. And they're the four questions that I wish I knew in college and certainly when I graduated college. So what are the questions? The first one is how did you get to where you are? I want to hear the entire journey. Because we think it's lit like this straight line. It's not, and it's the farthest thing from it. Second question, what is the one single best piece of advice you ever got? And I keep these to one because it's real easy if you're asked that question to answer with like a handful of things, but I want to know the one. And usually it's a pivotal piece that maybe changed the course that you were on. Third question. What is the absolute number one biggest mistake that you ever made? And lastly, what is the single legacy or life lesson that you want to pass on? Now, there's a cliche statement that says, you don't want to miss this, folks. But I'm not saying that. I'm saying you can't afford to miss this, and I don't mean just financially. Now, seated with me here today is Chris Carneal, founder and CEO of Booster. And I'll be honest, I thought that was always a cute company that set up races in schools. Oh no. Well, it's cute, but folks, Booster is raised to date over a billion dollars for schools with their innovative approach to fundraising. And seated with me here today is the man, Chris Carneal, who started the entire thing. Chris? Question one. How in the world did you build that?

SPEAKER_01 2:58

Well, uh, there's that's a complicated, complex question, but let me get to it quickly. Uh I'll tell you how we built it, how I started it, and then how we built and scaled it where we are now. Right now we're the nation's largest elementary school fundraising company. Okay. We've raised about $1.3 billion. We work with 6,500 schools, which is 15% of America's elementary kids right now, which is awesome. This is our 25th school year, so uh it's taken uh two and a half decades to get to this point. Right. Started as a college student, literal college dorm room idea. Uh I saw that schools were doing what they had done for 25, 30 years, which was selling a product. Yeah. Cookies. Cookie dough, magazines, wrapping paper, like Amazon and e-commerce was emerging, and like people don't need a kid to go to their door to buy wrapping paper that costs twice as much. What are they gonna do? Store it in their house. And so that I could just see that model was changing. When I was an elementary student, when I was a kid growing up in South Florida, I participated through my PE department as a kid in a fun run that the that the school hosted, and it was super fun. And then my dad, as the booster club president, kind of made it a mini fundraiser. So I had that concept in my head from 15 years prior. So when I one day was uh giving a baseball lesson, I played college baseball, and then when I started my first business, which was getting one-on-one lessons, one of the kids I was tutoring wanted me to buy magazines and wrapping paper, and I just had this flashback to I did that, but I also did a fun run through the PE department. Yeah. That lesson ends, I call my dad, and my dad encourages me. So you know, the encouraging words of people, especially fathers or father figures, is huge. Hey, Chris, you got the energy, you could promote it. Uh schools need this. We had to run that on our own, get a ton of volunteers, it was so tough. You should see if schools would be interested in having you organize, promote, lead, communicate a fun run. So what we do now doesn't look too much like it did when I was a kid or even 25 years ago. Uh, but it's taken 25 years. So, one, it starts with an idea, it starts with a big idea, and it's an idea that I couldn't shake. Yeah, like I I immediately thought I can do this. I know it. I know I can deliver value to a client. Yeah, I know I can, and then the next 10 years was basically how do I differentiate my value? How am I unique? How am I distinctive? And I really learned that from in-person one-on-one meetings. Like, what are you currently doing? I learned to ask uh big picture questions that would just kind of give me clues to what the problems I needed to solve were. Yeah, yeah. And I just kind of read facial expressions, and whenever I saw, I still use the phrase, when I saw the eyebrow raise, I'm like, I got it. That's it. That's something they need that I can provide that they don't have. Wow. So we want to include every student. We want to do all the work for you. We're gonna raise you twice as much money, we're gonna handle the communication, the setup, like great. So I would just ask open-ended questions. Tell me about your fundraising experience so far. Walk me through the last five years. What are the pain points? What doesn't work? And then when they listed what wouldn't work, I would say, well, I can do this, this, and this. Sounds like this is the problem, and I'll solve it for you. So that you got to take delight in solving building things, but solving problems for people. When you solve a problem, people will pay you to do it. And then the last so that was the idea. Yeah, then there's a whole lot of open-ended questions and curiosity, client centricity. I've always been client-centric. Like you're you write the paychecks, you're in charge, you're the CEO, client. How can I serve you? What else can I do to serve you? Hey, I want to serve you again next year. What do I need to improve? So I gotta have enough humility to say, I'm sure you like last year, but I want to keep you as a client for life. Tell me how I can improve. Tell me how I can improve. So you tune your ear to clients and they will build your product for you. You gotta be willing to do it and to listen. But it starts with that curiosity. Were you a born entrepreneur? Yes. I didn't know it until probably high school, college, but looking back, I always started things. Yeah. Always liked taking risks, I always liked selling things. You know, it's your original question. I just want to make sure I'm clear. I don't think uh anyone fully pulls themselves up by their bootstraps or and accomplishes anything singularly. Everyone has help. So how I built this is really how we built this. And we would be my wife, of course, uh, early on team members, current team members. Yeah, I did a good job recruiting a great team and then letting them run in their lanes, but we wouldn't be here without our 7,000 team members of the past 25 years and currently a thousand. So it took it took all of us for sure. I just happened to have the idea first. So cool.

SPEAKER_00 7:30

All right. Question two What's the best piece of advice, single piece of advice you ever got?

SPEAKER_01 7:38

So um I'll I'll hone in on the professional career business advice, and it really goes back, it isn't profound, but it goes back. I had the idea of Booster, I had run about four or five programs. In my mind at the time, I'm a person of faith, I was a religion major. I went to grad school in seminary because I always had a passion that I wanted to change the world and make a difference. So for me, in my context, spiritually, was well, I'll work at a church. You know what? I'm kind of entrepreneurial, I want to start a church. So I was gonna move back to South Florida, where I'm from, and plant a church. Because that's from my perspective, that's how I could use my gifts and change the world the most. Make a difference. Uh, human flourishing, love people, you know, encourage communities. That from my context of where I was, that was the way I thought I could do that best. But I really enjoyed entrepreneurship, sales, competition, creating something out of nothing, the business world. So I thought, wrongly so, this was my bad philosophy at the time, that I had to choose between changing the world, making a difference, mission, ministry, do good, or business, growth, make money, use my gifts. I thought I had to choose. And I even heard language growing up, especially in like the faith community. Like these people go into ministry or they do this, and then everyone else just makes money. And now, and I could talk about this for a long time, but using your daily work as your mission, as your calling, as a place to create human flourishing in the world. Yeah. And I could do it every single day. So the best piece of advice was when I was a seminary student. Now, my mom was a uh college professor, my dad's an attorney, they have a combined nine degrees, so like you know, education, family. I all got multiple master's degrees, doctorate degrees. So now here I am in and I'm contemplating dropping out of my master's program in grad school. My parents said you don't want to pause educational momentum, you're in the zone, it only gets tougher if you have kids one day, like it's just tougher. Keep it going. Yeah. I called, no joke, over the course of a month. I called my 25 most influential people in my life. And I said, This business is kind of going. It wasn't even a business. This idea is moving. Yeah. But I'm in grad school. What do you think I should do? The first 24 said, Oh, you gotta continue your education, you gotta finish it. And one person, my friend Keith, best advice I ever got, he said, Our friend, you have business momentum. Follow that momentum. You could always go back to school. You might never recapture the magic you have right now. Clients are asking for your product. This is the early stage. Follow business momentum. That's the best advice I ever received. Oh my goodness. Everyone was telling me go this way. But my gut, I was looking for one person. I was gonna keep calling Jeff. I was gonna call 50 people until someone said that I just needed a little, I was 23. One person confirmed what I thought, and uh friend of mine, Keith Nick, said, You have business momentum, chase it. Wow. And then here we are. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:46

That's incredible. All right, now let's turn that on its head. What was the biggest mistake you ever made?

SPEAKER_01 10:53

Yep. So uh a lot of singular mistakes. Let me wrap it into a overall, probably two-decade series of mistakes I made, all tied back, tethered to the same uh we'll call it character flaw slash um not I wasn't as holistic of a leader, and I kept making mistakes in a certain category. Yep. And it's two sides of a coin. Our our gifts and strengths. Often there's something under on the other side of the coin that hinders us. I am a uh Myers Briggs ENFP. I'm an Enneagram 7. Uh I love motivation, joy, fun things. The and I put on our program is putting on a fun run. I mean, it's literally the name of our program, the boost for the fun run. It's fun run. We pop confetti cannons, we have six virtues as a company, our six virtues celebration. Like, I'm good at that stuff, I love that stuff. Let's create a party, let's host events, let's have a great time. That's our business, that's my DNA, that's what I love. Love it. The flip side of that is for too long I would avoid conflict, either with team members or with clients or with vendors. Uh, and I think the motive was like, let's work this out, let's figure it out, let's find a compromise, let's, you know. But what happened is too often I would delay hard conversations, and it didn't help it only delayed it. It ultimately was a lack of courage early on. Like not seeing what it could be, probably an over-optimistic, like I can win them over or woo them over, let's just do that. It's okay. But I could have and should have, and it's still not naturally my DNA to be conflict first. And again, there's an appropriate, respectful way to have conflict. But I would have run towards challenges numerous times. Hey, here's what I see coming. I just want to address this early. So too many conversations that I saw conflict, I avoided, and that didn't help. So every day now I pray for a heart of courage. I try to see things coming, I think about the best tactful way to have a conversation, and I try to lean forward as opposed to leaning away. Most of my big mistakes uh I could tie back to that. Now there's all kinds of business tactical mistakes that if I could go back again, I would do. Sure. But in the moment, you know, you kind of only can work with the information you had, but but most of the big mistakes were people mistakes, and most of the people mistakes were me avoiding conflict early on.

SPEAKER_00 13:15

That's so awesome.

SPEAKER_01 13:16

All right. That's personality driven. So and it's usually people's mistakes are sometimes tied also to their giftedness in some ways. You create great moments, so I avoid bad moments. So for me to kind of see that. And someone has a different personality, might be the opposite. They might be so conflict they don't create great moments or joyful moments or whatever. So you you gotta kind of know yourself. It's all about self-awareness, right?

SPEAKER_00 13:42

It's awesome. So life lesson, you got one to pass on to whether it be other people in this building, younger generations, one life lesson. What's your favorite one?

SPEAKER_01 13:54

Depends on the age that's listening to this. Uh but I, and this might even sound cliche and not, but this is it. This is this is it. And it's not, there's not even Jeff a close second. Everything else is tactical. And it's marry the right person and then prioritize your marriage. Now, if someone hears this and maybe they had a marriage that didn't work out or they're not married, so I'm not trying to split the crowd here. I want to encourage everybody, right? But your life partner is your best business partner. And when I see entrepreneurs that for the long term make it, they feel a sense of support at home, and they are supportive at home, so they can go fight the battles that always come. It's tough to win two front wars. So prioritizing marriage, and I'm certainly not a perfect husband, I've got a near-perfect wife who's gracious and patient and forgiving and kind and encouraging and challenging and all that. But um, there's no way Booster would be here, I would be, if she hadn't seen the vision, supported the vision, sacrificed for the vision, right? Uh helped with all kinds of things, encouraged me, challenged me, redirected me. Yeah. I mean, as she has been my biggest encourager, and this this isn't a this isn't a marriage uh podcast, but business-wise, I would encourage everybody. I'm encouraging myself. This is self-talk right here. Man, when I and I look back the last month, the last year, when I prioritize my marriage, that primary relationship, when everything in life is relationships, this is the one that matters most. Uh so getting it right, the front end, the middle, and then continually nurturing and cultivating. Yeah, right. Cultivating the most important relationship in life. Because that just fills me up, us up, that's the foundation for our family and ultimately for our for our company. So I don't want to alienate anybody hearing this, that like, man, marriage my marriage is tough, or that just hey, let's prioritize the most important relationship. Uh for me, the most important relationship in my life is my marriage, and I'm that's probably true for many. It's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 15:53

Give me give me 30 seconds on your your new book that is coming out soon.

SPEAKER_01 15:57

Sure. I just just self-published uh the virtue-driven business, and it's a little bit of what we talked about. It's what I'm really passionate about. I don't think values, everyone got really fired up about values. I think they've they've served uh businesses well for the past 30 years. I think there's a whole nother level that businesses can get to if the founder, CEO, entrepreneur wants to use his or her business for the good of society and human flourishing. If they want to use and view business as something as a tool to change the world and make a difference, then values aren't enough. Uh virtues are timeless, virtues are aspirational, they're actionable, and uh virtues make you a holistic person in that if the business is promoting virtues, you look forward to coming to work and you look forward to going home. And you're a better person at work and you're a better person at home or in your community. Okay. So the business should not have values that don't fit your everyday life. Give me an example. So our six virtues: gratitude, wisdom, care, courage, grit, and celebration. All of those can be applied to every category of my life, and they make our business better. So I want to grow in wisdom. I want to teach my team to grow in wisdom, I want to equip them. We have a wisdom notebook, we have videos, we have podcasts. We're equipping them uh in wisdom so that they're better leaders, they're better listeners, they're more curious. Well, if you grow in wisdom as a business leader, you grow in wisdom as a son or daughter, a mother, mother or father, uh, a community member, a friend. Like you want to be around wise people from a men's group to a baseball team to your work. So uh they're more transcendent and holistic. So let's I want to use my business platform internally for my culture to promote what I think are the six most important virtues that make humans thrive. Right. And if I if my thousand team members thrive personally, that's gonna produce business results. Yeah, and that's gonna help them be the best that they can be.

SPEAKER_00 17:57

And the the so then the values are the boring things that we see on the walls like great customer service.

SPEAKER_01 18:04

I love I love all that. I just don't know if they hit the heart. I don't know if they do enough. I think they are good but not great. And I'm challenging American businesses to evolve. I have a have a couple friends, um, Sovereign's Capital said, you know what, you're right, let's shift to virtue. So if you haven't formed them, forget about values, just jump, jump the S curve. But if you have values, look at them on the wall. Do they do you believe them fully? Do they embody your people? Are they the absolute best human character traits that heroes and protagonists in every story embody? Well, let's be idealistic and aspirational. Let's pick those and let's drive them home. And there's a lot of ways in which we promote them and drive them home. We have every team member gets a virtue box, we have a different icon for virtue, encouraging people to be the best of who they are. That helps the business and it helps them. So cool. How do people find you then? Uh you can find me at chriscarniel.com. That's got links to our company, Booster Thon. It's got links to a lot of events we do here called Virtue Voices Leadership Event here in Atlanta. So ChrisCarneal.com.

SPEAKER_00 19:06

What is socials on? Everything's attached to that. Everything's attached to that. All right, great. Ask away in the comments like they always do. I'll feed them over to you. I'm sure there's gonna be plenty of questions. That was awesome, man. I want to shake your hand, man. Thanks, OK. Thanks for your time, man.