Essentially, what the program does is it teaches pre-teenagers, 7 to 14-year-olds, that age range, how to make money in their neighborhood. So, we’ll just keep that short. How that happened was you know, coronavirus came, economic shutdowns came, schools got shut down, and we’re in our house for like weeks, right? So, my kids are doing online school and they’re getting done in like an hour to two hours, And so, instead of laying around on the couch, watching movies, chilling playing video games, and like just whatever they might do, you know?
Take Action
We did that for the first couple weeks and then after that, I was like man something’s gonna change. I don’t want this to be the habit that my kids grew up in. This is not our new world, you know? So, then I was like man, what can we do? So, I was like well, let’s go out and figure out a way to make money. I took them out and then I got the idea of washing cars because my car was super dirty. I’m like wow, we need to wash cars. So, I actually took my boys out and taught them how to wash my car. I wrote everything down and made a checklist of all the points that they needed to follow. I’m sitting there thinking to myself, if I’m going to if this is going to be repeatable like you got you to have to create a system for them to follow, right? And so, we did that. I took them out, we knocked on doors and got some appointments set up, and they went out and washed cars. They made 90 bucks on the first day. Dean is 11, he was 11 at the time, and Isaac was 14 at the time. So, 11 and 14. Yeah, so they go out and make 90 bucks. No other 11 is out there making 90 bucks in one day. I’m like, you know what? There’s something here. I want to teach them how to repeat this over and over. So, one of the big initiatives with the door-to-door association is to make that grind hustle door knocking. Sales really is a key indicator, a key thing in colleges and high schools because I think it’s something that, if it had been instilled in people from a young age, work ethic instead of sitting and playing video games during COVID, it could have been a good lesson learned for the people that wanted to get ahead in life. You know what I mean? A lot of people took it as a super long vacation and grabbed a motor home and cruised around the country. That’s great, but some people were like let’s capitalize. They realized people were sitting at home.
Open Up Their World
I just figured I get to homeschool my kids a little bit more. I’m home you know what I mean people are stuck but it created innovation. So, obviously, this inspired what we’re doing now. And so, my number one concern was the goldfish theory. The goldfish theory is when you have a goldfish in a bowl and it just swims around in circles. It creates a pattern. So, then when you take the goldfish out of the jar and you put it into a pond, it still swims in that little tight circle and doesn’t know that it’s in a great big pond. That’s the mentality that I was concerned about and I didn’t want my own children to fall into this line of thinking. That’s where the program came in. Then I was like well, this is an opportunity to actually go a little bit deeper. I can teach them how to make money and be entrepreneurs. But, then let’s go deeper level. This is an opportunity to teach young kids the foundations of leadership and some of the key characteristics of being a leader. That was the idea.
Training
So, basically, this program is a series of videos and templates that help parents teach their kids at a young age how to be an entrepreneurs. There are videos for the parents and there are videos for the kids because it’s super important for kids to have their own training. Some parents may look at it like, oh yeah, I’ve got the workbook, no problem. I can take this with my kids and teach them, not a big deal. Then other parents may be like, I want some more direction, so give me some insight and so we’ve got that all put together. It’s called leadersnextdoor.com.
Safety & Community
I talk about safety in the videos and I talk about it in the workbook. The buddy system. My sons, when they go out and work, they’re not working solo. That’s super important. Build that in them early. The other thing is we’ve it’s like when you become a leader next door, it’s like you’re subscribing to something. You’re becoming part of a community and it’s just not something that you purchase. You do it on time. These principles stay with you for the rest of your life. There’s a code that we have and we actually have a certificate that says you know, Jimmy Johnson, will blah blah blah, follow the leaders next door code and the qualities of leadership are… and then it spells out all the qualities of the leader and then they like to sign it and then that’s they live by.
Be Generous
Another Part of the program is learning how to be generous. You’re gonna learn how to make money. What do you do with the money? How do you save? How do you spend? How do you give and what does all that mean? A lot of kids, and even parents, don’t really understand how to spend and save. Let me explain the whole deep purpose behind all this. I thought to myself, how can I inspire a billion dollars of giving over my lifetime? And initially, I thought well, that’s something that I’ll just have to go out and make all the money and give it away. Now, I’m like that’s ridiculous. I can inspire other adults to do that, too. I can inspire other adults to change the way that they look at money or resources to give and be more generous. ?Then I was like well, it’s kind of it’s easier to actually influence children with that mindset and to teach this at a young age because what they’re taught at a young age will stay within the rest of their life. So, that’s ultimately what the program’s about that’s the other deep meaning is how can I teach people how to be generous. This program is for everybody. The mission is for everybody. It’s not just for kids. If you really think about it, everybody knows someone that has a kid so, you could gift the program to another child. Ultimately, what happens is we practice what we preach and we preach what we practice, right?
