Lisa Illingworth — CEO and Batman at Futureproof SA Entrepreneurial Training For Children

It is time for what's involved on a Monday night as we do each and every Monday. We're doing it, we're starting a little later, but I couldn't miss tonight because of my special guest, Lisa Illingworth. - Hello. - So special. - Hello. Well, yes, and I'll tell you why. And regular listeners to the show know that I always moan and go on about, I wish they taught this entrepreneurial thing in schools, et cetera, et cetera. You are the CEO and Batman of Future Proof SA. - I love that you know that I'm Batman. - Well, you see, I didn't get to do enough, as much stalking as I normally do, but I did. I did some. And I want to ask you about Batman and about Lisa, but I think what you're doing is absolutely fantastic, which is one of the reasons I wanted to speak to you and get you on the show. And you came highly recommended from several people, and then those are people that we-- - It's not from anyone I've dated. - Well, probably, I knew. - No, probably not. - He puts his hands up in there and waves them like, "I just don't care." - Backs off from the mic, slow. - Not going to be tiptoeing through minefields here. No, probably not people you've dated, but very, very highly regarded, highly thought of.

And, you know, when I was chatting to some of the guys, they were like, "You got to get Lisa on. You have to chat to Lisa." And I was like, "Who is this Lisa chick anyway?" - I don't know who these people are who are whispering behind my back like this. - Well, it's good things they're whispering. So it's okay, I'll share with you. - As soon as it starts to change tone, you just let me know too. - Yeah, yeah, until they get that, you know, she's a bit dodged that, Lisa. Then we bring out the Batman. - Correct. - Okay, so let's start-- - The Dark Knight. - Let's start at the very, very beginning with who, before we get into future proof essay, what it does, who is Lisa? Where does Lisa come from? - Sure. So Lisa born and bred in Joburg for a bit, and then a bit of time in Derbs. - I noticed this, you've still got, I get accused of it as well. You've got very much that Natal accent. But then-- - Which one, Bach? - Well, you know-- - Laff. - Yeah. (laughing) Not like the Capitan one. - No. - But similar, but-- - Raff and Taff and I come from the bluff. - Yeah, but you've also got the English, you know, your inflections, but that does become clearer as we get into your story. - As we get into the story, yes.

Mom was from Westville Girls, and so yes, you did have to pronounce your theirs and your hairs and all of that, otherwise you've got a jolly good hiding, which we can't do anymore. So yeah, Joburg mostly studied education, so I studied my B. Ed.

And then I went on to do a post-grad in curriculum design. - Okay. - Okay, so I studied those two things in correlation. I was an English teacher, surprise, surprise. - See, make sense now about that. - Yeah, English and Zulu, actually. - Well, yeah, so this is Zulu. (laughing) (speaking in foreign language) (laughing) My general response to that is (speaking in foreign language) (laughing) Translated for the non-Zulu speaking, no, but I try. - But I try. (laughing) Yeah, so Zulu, and then I taught primary school for a little bit, and went and taught high school, and high school I taught all the sort of economic subjects, so accounting, business studies, all of that sort of stuff. And that's where it sort of dawned upon me that what we were teaching was highly irrelevant and outdated, and this was 15 years ago. - You must have been very popular. - I make a great educator. I make a terrible employee. (laughing) - Funny, so many people of an entrepreneurial nature get told that at one stage or another. - I've been told on several occasions I am unemployable. - Well, exactly that. I would try and unpick the way that we did it because I could see how to do it better. I was the worst nightmare.

In fact, the kids often used to say to me, Mrs. Ellingworth, you spend more time in the principal's office than we do. (laughing) 'Cause I was always in trouble. So that's where I come from. I left teaching, I left the country, actually, and went to South America. I did a stint in Peru. - For why? (laughing) - Not for what Peru is famous for. (laughing) Pero habla español. So now, yeah, my then husband had an opportunity to be posted there for mining. It was during the 2008, 2009 recession. Peru had the fastest growing economy in the world, and so the company tried to diversify its assets and put me and them there. And so he went along and, well, he went, I went along as an expat housewife.

- A home executive. That must have sat well with you. - Oh, completely. Can you just see it? - Yes. - Going training, you know, if the trainer comes to the house three times a week and you're a driver and you're made and you live in this massive household and it's a complete bubble. And I was totally under-stimulated and literally just unpicked that too. So I came back to South Africa with no job and no means of earning an income. And like many, many entrepreneurs fell into survival entrepreneurship. This necessity. Are you feeling this? - No, we've talked, I've talked about this with guests before is when, you know, it's like people go out and the amount of them and I said, "Did you plan on doing this?" No, I mean, it's like my first business that I started was an events company and they're like, "Why, do you have a patent?" No, it just seemed like a good idea at the time. Someone saw an opportunity and they were like, "I can do that." - Yes, yeah. - Yes. - My famous, my famous, these words have got me into so much trouble. He's like, "Yeah, how hard can it be?" Oh man. - Biggest mistake ever. - I found out very quickly how hard it can be. - Very much and how expensive it can be too.

- Yes, school fees. My one friend always used to say it's school fees. You're paying school fees. - I call it school fees all the time, exactly. - And I've paid a lot. - Yes, but they will be the cheapest school fees that you will ever pay for those lessons. - Yeah. - 'Cause you will never pay them again. - No. - No. - Well, in my case, maybe one of the clients again. - Okay, maybe one of the clients. Well, we don't know each other that well. So that's where it all landed up and I ended up having to start a business to support myself and two kids and fell into entrepreneurship, survival entrepreneurship, and then sat back and did some introspection and went, "Just hang on a second. "I have two degrees in education "and this experience of entrepreneurship. "Why am I learning this stuff after the age of 30 "when it's more difficult to rebuild my neural pathways, "to build habits and behaviors that entrepreneurs need? "This can and should be built way earlier." - Yeah. - And so out of that designed, what now sits as the future-proof curriculum. And it's a curriculum from grade one through to grade 11 based in a strong behavioral framework. So not a content framework, which is what you would experience today in a classroom.

This is a behavioral framework because that is the only defining success factor common in all high-performing entrepreneurs is their behavior. - Which explains a lot in my case, I guess, 'cause my behavior is generally bad. But anyway, so you did this. And I mean, this is the other thing in terms of entrepreneurship. When I get to chat to entrepreneurs, particularly successful ones, you gloss over a lot of the stuff and you go, "Well, I've done this and I've done this." And it's wonderful. And now I own Future Proof South Africa. And we've got a great website, great presence. Everybody talks about what you don't talk about. And I challenge you tonight to talk about this is the struggle, the difficulty. Because yeah, how long has Future Proof SA been running now? - So version one for three years and version two going on 18 months, nearly two years. - Okay, so it's-- - Five years. - It's been a five year overnight success. - Yeah. And this is the problem is that the way our narrative, our national narrative has been designed to draw people into entrepreneurship, it's grass to grace. It's, "I was here and now look at me, rock star." - Yeah, yeah. - The clouds parted, the angelic voices beamed down and suddenly I was an entrepreneur.

- And people started throwing money at me willy-nilly. Good Lord, it never happens like that. - No, it doesn't. - And this is, and so I will be very transparent with you and I will give you all of the very hard lessons that have been learned, the SCARS and the PTSD as we go along the way, because I believe that's what inspires people. - Absolutely, and this is what I wanna do on the show is I wanna give the real nitty gritty, but I also want people to be inspired and to go, yeah, if I'm sitting in my car or maybe I'm at home or maybe I'm in my workshop, wherever I may be listening to something like this, I wanna know that there are other people that have gone through this, that have struggled, that I'm not the only one, that I'm not alone and that it will get better. - Absolutely. - Listen, I say this freely to anybody, it's the most exciting, scariest thing I've ever done and I've done some scary things in my life, but just running your own business, you cannot explain to a non-business owner or entrepreneur that feeling at two a.m. in the morning when you wake up and you have vultures doing slow loops in your stomach and you're thinking, am I going to be able to pay people? - Listen, we're your mental band with this red lining, like that's, I know exactly that feeling that you're talking about right now.

- Something like, at two o'clock in the morning, you're like, oh, and then what do we do? You gotta run to the computer, 'cause you gotta get into the office now, to your desk now. - 'Cause it has to be fixed right at this moment. - And then I've had to learn to sort of control myself because I have, for a long time, I've had very strange working hours, so my day will start at about two, three in the morning. And then there's my brain's working, everything's firing, I can do it. And then I realized a lot of people, which I don't do, but a lot of people have their emails and everything come through on their phones. So I started getting some very irate messages about me emailing people at three, four o'clock in the morning, so I've had a, now I hit send at about 7.38. - You know, you can just program that. You know, you can just be like, send later. - I know, took me a while to figure that out. Anyway, so we're gonna be talking more about that. We're gonna be talking about this curriculum and who else you work with, because you're involved with a couple of people and I wanna know how it works. We'll be back, my special guest, and Batman in the house tonight, Lisa Ellingworth from Future Proof Essay.

I was disappointed that she didn't come here wearing her Batman outfit or her Batgirl outfit, but she has the mug, she has the mug, so it must be her, she must be Batman. So there we go, we'll be back with her in a bit. My special guest in the studio. - Is these really special ones that are going to-- - Yes, yes, no, they, oh, you just, yeah, you see now? - See now, look at that. - See, look at you now. No, all you need is the wiki, wiki, wiki in front and you're good to go. - This is gonna be a dog shark, can you see it? (laughing) - My guest in studio is Lisa Ellingworth, CEO and Batman of Future Proof Essay. It's such a fantastic concept. I mean, when I saw it, and obviously, as I said, you came highly recommended, but when I saw it and I did some research into you, do you wanna hand those over this way while we talk and I'll see if I can un-confuse them? - No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. - Wait, wait. - Wait for it. - Wait for it, you see? All of those years spent studying paid off. - I can untangle the cans. High five me, model mom, no hands. - There you go. But just looking at it, I was like, and I think that's part of the thing that excited me so much is I looked at what you were doing, I was like, I wanna help in whatever way I can, however I can, whenever I can, 'cause this is awesome.

And then I was like, well, we'll just start off with interviewing you and we'll take it from me. - That's very sweet of you. And we know we get that reaction a lot. - I would imagine you would. - And I think that's part of why social enterprises and social entrepreneurship, there's such an uprising of this sort of business model. And I mean, it states that in all of our documents, in all our collateral, it says they're for purpose, for profit. So we are a PTY. We teach kids to start and build sustainable businesses. We have to run a sustainable business ourselves. - Well, yeah, it could be. - In everything, even the build of the business, it must be authentic. So we're not a nonprofit, we're not a charity. - But you have it there upfront. I mean, you said upfront, this is gonna cost you, one way or another, it's gonna cost you, we're a business, but we're giving you this. And you said something very interesting of it is that, when you are teaching these kids and it's from grade? - From grade one. - Really? - Yes, six years old. - Wow, so from six years old, right up until what we, in the old days, used to call 'em a trick. - Almost, yes. - Okay. - Up to grade 11. - All right, so it's dead at nine.

- Yeah. - Best three years of my life. (laughing) Anyway, but you were saying that they are not, we call it entrepreneurship, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to go and start a business. Now explain that a little bit more. - So this is where the misconception of what entrepreneurship actually is. So if you refer back to, I'm gonna just dive a little, I'm just gonna geek out slightly into the research, just for a second, 'cause I am an academic by training, and so I can't help it. But Alan Gibb, who's kind of the godfather of entrepreneurial education, he wrote a paper around the pedagogies behind entrepreneurship and how to educate kids in entrepreneurship. And one of the things is, is that there needs to be the separation between entrepreneurship as a discipline, and then entrepreneurship as a trade. And if you're looking at the discipline of entrepreneurship, it's steeped in behavior change, in mindset. And if you're looking at entrepreneurship as a trade, it's how to start a business. Now not everyone who starts a business is going to think like an entrepreneur. - Yeah. - Does that land? Does that make sense? - It does, it makes a lot of sense. - Right, 'cause you can manage a business and you can be an exceptional manager, but you may not have tenacity, grit, opportunity, awareness, an internal locus of control, self-efficacy, all of the things that are needed to be able to be an entrepreneur.

And entrepreneurs typically are not, their first idea's not gonna be their last. So those that run, yes, I know David's rolling his eyes, they're surreptitious, 'cause he knows that he's got multiple businesses under the belt. And this is the thing, is that pivoting, changing, being able to spot those opportunities and chase them. - I'm sorry to interrupt, but I mean, you're using a buzzword there. We now call it pivoting. - Yes. - Okay, I call it getting the crap scared out of you and doing something else. - Well. - But pivoting is a nice word. I mean, we can use that. But I mean, this is where we're going, is this idea of pivoting and being able to learn stuff fairly quickly and to change because this world, and you're an educator, that's your background, but this world that we live in is changing at such a pace. - Exactly, so what we, there's two terms that we introduce to pivoting. The first is what we call social mobility. So being able to be socially mobile and socially adept, having the ability to interact with multiple people from different backgrounds, cultures, religion, socioeconomic strata, to be able to gain value and add value in those transactions, social mobility. So pivoting within that, the relationships that you build within a business, chasing down relationships and seeking out relationships that are going to build your business.

The second thing that we add to pivoting is this thing called emotional dexterity. Does that make sense? - Listen, I had Steph Vermeerlin in here. I don't know if you know who Steph is. She's like the EQ queen. - Okay, so emotional dexterity is exactly that. - Yeah, I know. - Recovering from failure quickly, recovering from success quickly. - Which is a massive thing. After years, it struck me the other day. I always used to go, ah, it's this fear of failure that I have, I gotta deal with it, fear of failure. No, no, no, no, no, no. What it turned out for me is the fear of success. 'Cause what happens if it does all go right? What happens if this thing happens? - And what did you say to me? You know, careful what you ask for. - You might just get it. - You might just get it. That's exactly right. - I'm very careful what I ask for these days. - Yeah, no, definitely. Don't ask for anything that you can't handle. But the emotional dexterity is that agility of being able to move from one emotion to the next without letting it set in and impacting upon the momentum for you and your business. - Which is, I mean, this is fantastic stuff. And the stuff that you're offering these youngsters, I think is absolutely brilliant.

I mean, we're moving very quickly into the fourth industrial revolution. - We're in it, yeah. - You know, we kinda are. And stuff is changing. You hear a whole lot of stuff. We're in Africa, which, again, has got all of the stigma. Although I believe that we should become, this continent should be the powerhouse when it comes to the future in terms of the fourth industrial revolution. But the question I wanna put to you is, and I've had this debate with so many people, entrepreneurs, are they born or are they created? - I knew this was coming, nature or nurture. There are, and we can go studies that support the one way and studies that support the next way. You can find excessive amounts of evidence to support both pathways. So just pick one, right? (laughing) That's kind of what it is. - For goodness sakes, pick a side. - You can go for the nurture side or you can go for the nature side. It's really up to you. My business, my passion, my purpose, everything that we stand for explicitly sticks with the nurture and the research around. You can influence, teach, create and grow entrepreneurs because you are developing behavior. And behavior as a success factor can be taught. - That is probably one of the best ways I've heard it explained very, very well put.

Okay, so it can be taught and it can be, yeah, I suppose. I'm trying to think back to my school career, which sort of is very much involved. I used to get certificates of merit for the days I did attend school. I was a horrible student, horrible. Horrible, horrible, horrible. My English teacher always used to say to me, when she, my sister was disabled, so my mom used to have to go and drop off at the high school and pick her up. And the English teacher of mine used to come out at the end of the day. - To have a check with your mom. - Do you know what your son did today? And then she always used to go, and I threatened that I was going to have Julius Caesar printed in comic strip form for him and the gang, so they would at least understand something. And I often wonder why-- - You probably would have worked. - Yeah, probably would have, but I often wonder how that sort of thing translated for me. I mean, I always, I grew up in a very strict family. You know, there was like, if you want something, dude, off you go. - Go get it. - Make your own money. - Yeah. - But dad, everybody else is getting a car when they turn 18, I don't care. Nobody bought me a car. You want a car, go and get one.

You know, you want that fancy pair of shoes, go and get one, you know. And if it means, do you want some X20? Yeah, well, there's a very big lawn outside, buddy. Off you go. - And you know where the lawnmower is. - Yeah, so I used to do that, but for me in the beginning, it was all the hassle. It was like immediate gratification. I needed X amount of money to do this, so I would go and do something. Then I would need money to do that. So-- - Short of pointing off your sibling. - Yeah. Well, it was this one time. (laughing) But, you know, and I often wondered, can it be taught? Because you need to have incredible resilience. I mean, I think it's that ability to get back up. It's not how many times you were knocked down. It's how many times you were able to get back up and keep on keeping on. And I remember, I mean, one of the things that, and I got lots of negative programming as a kid, but one of the things my mom always used to say, and she still does, to this day, she says to me, if something bad happens, you pick yourself up, you dust yourself off, and you keep on going. You know, and I often joke about it, just not with you. I said, I'm probably just too stupid to quit. But-- - Well, there's that fine line, right?

- Well, you know, I am on radio, so there's a lot to be said there. So how do you go about, I mean, you must have had resistance. - Oh, plenty. - From the schools, the education institutions. Like, who is this woman? What do you want to do? So how have you coped with that? - I think, first of all, my training and my background gives me a bit of credibility in the chops, to say so. But I do come up against plenty of resistance all the time, and sort of my team, and so does everything. Because we're threatening the role of the educator, and I hate to say this, but I'm sorry, the birth of the internet started threatening the role of the educator. - Yeah, I would agree with you. - The teacher is no longer the all purveyor of knowledge. - No, no, no, no, no, no. - You know, Google is. - Yeah, well, I mean, ah, look, we've got, okay, he's not a teenager now, he's almost 21, and we've got a 17-year-old at home. If they want to find out how to do something, YouTube. - Totally. - They just say YouTube, it's done, sorted. - It's the University of YouTube. Now, but what it does is it repositions and reframes what the educator's there to do. And you know you've got a beautiful opportunity, and I'm speaking in entrepreneurial terms, because every problem is an opportunity.

But you've got a beautiful opportunity to shape this human now, the way they think, the way they behave, you know, what is important to them. Now you don't have to start splurging out, you know, we call it the knowledge vomit. You don't have to vomit out knowledge anymore, because they can go and find the knowledge. Let's teach them how to learn. Let's teach them how to critically evaluate. Let's give them these higher-order thinking skills that make them valuable members of society. The role of the educator can be that now. It's no longer just being able to teach them how to do maths. I mean, you did maths-symmetric, I did maths-symmetric, and this is one of my favorite things, is that delta equals B squared minus four AC. I don't know what that means. It's in my head. I don't know what it means. - Well, you know what's stuck in mind? The square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of, and I'm like, why, why? I've never gone and decided I need to know what that, never. - These islands of knowledge, of neurons, that sit in our brains that are not connected to anything, we don't have to do that anymore as educators. Now we can take this human and we can develop this human because someone else, something else, has become the purveyor of knowledge.

- Yeah. - Which I think is a great opportunity. - I think it's brilliant. We are chatting to CEO and Batman of Future Proof SA, Lisa Ellingworth. So what's involved? Monday night, my special guest in studio, Lisa Ellingworth from Future Proof SA. And I've said it before, I'll say it again, probably said it a hundred times more. I often wish that we got to share the stuff that happens off air as well. We were talking about Matt Brown. You've been on the Matt Brown show as well. Now with Matt, you get the whole lot because they set up, the first time I interviewed Matt, to get the life out of me. 'Cause I'm a radio person. Face for radio, voice for print media, and they come and they stick these lights and cameras. Did they do the same? - They did exactly the same on me. - And did it not intimidate the life out? Oh, no, but you're okay. Look at you. I mean, you sat down here like you own the place. - Did not. Don't say things like that, people. - I had to move around to the other side of the desk and go listen to me. - I took such rubbish. I took such rubbish. Spin the yarns, damn it. No, I love Matt. And you know, I think credibility-wise, like he's also, he's got the skies. I mean, he's been through several businesses.

He's done it all. And he's so gracious about all of his successes. - Oh, he's amazing. I mean, he's absolutely amazing. He's even humble about his million downloads. And I'm like- - Really? I know, I know. We start clawing at the walls, pitching our eyeballs out. - I do that behind the scenes though. But now let's get back to you in future proof essay. So I said to you, one of the things before when we just started talking is that I want to give value back. I always want to give value back to my listeners. They are the ones that I do this for. Which is entirely true. And a nice side effect is I get to meet awesome people and learn stuff as well. So that's great. But I said, I want you to give something away. And you just came back straight away and you're like, okay, done deal. So what are we giving away and what do people need to do to enter? - Right, so we are giving away two tickets to our upcoming workshop, which is happening this Saturday. It's being hosted very graciously by Crawford Italia, which is near the Italian club in Bedford View. And they are hosting what we like to call Bake a Business. It's a very cool little workshop. It's run from the ages of six to 12 years old. So this is the age group.

So please don't enter this competition if your kids are older than 12 years old 'cause they're not going to have that much value. - And it is for your kids, okay? You can go too, but you need to send the little yeas. - You have to have kids to attend this one and they have to be between the ages of six and 12. Now what you need to do is you need to send us an email. All it needs to read is Mix FM. That's all it needs to read in the title, okay? - Title of the subject Mix FM. - Subject Mix FM, that's all we need. And it needs to be sent to start@futureproofsa.com. It is also listed on the website, which is www.futureproofsa.com. So if you want to enter Mix FM in the subject line, your name, your details, the kids, all of that, and we will do a lucky draw for two tickets. - And you will then contact the winners. - We will contact the winners. - It's this coming weekend. - This coming weekend. So if you're not here, please don't enter. - All right, how many tickets are we giving away? - We're giving away two tickets. They are valued at 350 rand. Each for those and parents are welcoming. In fact, we encourage parents to come and learn with their kids. - How long is the workshop? - It's from one to three in the afternoon.

So it's two hours. - It's two hours? - Yes. - And what are the little ones gonna learn? - Oh gosh, it's so much fun. I probably have more fun than they do around this. But what it is is that the kids come and I mean, my kids love baking. I don't mind yours, but mine are little and they love baking. They love doing the muffins and the donuts and everything. This is baker business, the cupcake class. So they're gonna come and they're gonna bake cupcakes. They're gonna bake a set of cupcakes as their product. But before they even head into the baking, they learn about customers and they identify who their customer is for these cupcakes. They learn about the customer's needs. The customer's wants. Do they want flavor? Do they want size? Is price important to them? So they learn about who they're selling these cupcakes to. And that's a really important lesson for entrepreneurs. 'Cause typically we go build it and they will come. You've heard this one? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Build it and they will come. So no successful scalable businesses do not start like that. It's do you have a customer? Do you have a customer who's willing to pay more than what it costs you to make? If you don't, you do not have a business.

- I'm laughing now because even though this is grocery stuff, I mean, I've just recently, but this friend of mine who own, he owns Sales Institute, him and I work together. We've just recently, in light of build it and they will come. We put together an entire online training course on selling motor vehicles. Built it, it's beautiful. It's automated, there's audio, there's everything. And we went go live and we built it. And nobody came, nobody came. - Right, so you can't make a business with us. So they start off with-- - Gonna do cupcakes. - Before they've even touched an ingredient, a spatula, anything, who is your customer? - Tested. - Find out who your customer is. Identify your customer, go and collect your ingredients and they run around healthily. They're collecting all of their ingredients and while they're collecting it, they're writing down the cost of their ingredients. They add up the cost of their ingredients. They're divided by the number of cupcakes they make and they get a cost per cupcake. - And then obviously they know what they need to sell them for. - Then they come up with a price. - Because entrepreneur day, I mean it's not a new thing, but it's school, entrepreneur day.

We used to go and they're like okay, what are you gonna do? Well, just go and ask mom and we'll whack it out. We'll do cupcakes, whatever the case may be, fudge, whatever. And then we're gonna go to school and we're gonna sell it for five cents each and we get to keep the money and yay. And you don't really think that mom's shelled out for all of the ingredients and everything. - And you're not really making a profit. You're making a big fat loss. - Correct, and that's what market day is. The tick bucket exercise, they don't actually, and I always speak about going beyond the market day where they actually understand what goes into it. By the end of the workshop, they've got marketing material, they've identified their customer, they have their product and they're going to go and sell it at a price and they know what profit they're making per cupcake. And this is from the age of six years old. - I think it's absolutely, so six to 12, it's this coming weekend, okay? If you wanna win, we're giving away two tickets. All you gotta do is, in the subject line of your email, put mix FM and then email start@futureproofsa.com, start@futureproofsa.com. You know, give us your name and everything and the little names as well.

There are still tickets available though. If somebody doesn't win and they'd like to go, how do they find out about that? - Again, on the website, www.futureproofsa.com, all our programs, Cape Town, Durban, Joburg, they're all up there. So anyone who wants to come and join us, there is a teens workshop that's happening at the end of the month as well. There's a bootcamp for them, so they can come and join us there. But any of those details, you book, you pay online. It's all very automated and easy and then you've got your ticket. - Now, is there a particular way that you need to, let's say, I mean, if I had children of that age right now, I would sign them up straight away, without even thinking twice. - Purely because of the thinking aspect, the entrepreneurial thinking. Whether they start a business or not is immaterial because you can literally run a, you can think entrepreneurially within a business. So if you're in charge of a section or a department or whatever, you can still think like an entrepreneur in that. So is there a way, is there sort of a curriculum that you have to follow? - There isn't a curriculum that you have to follow and anyone who's written the textbook, has written a textbook and many people have followed it and that market is saturated by now.

But I think the curriculum should be building the baseline behaviors of the opportunity, awareness, tenacity, grit, perseverance, self-efficacy, self-agency, at the bottom, at the base level. Anything that you scaffold or skills on top of that will be sustained by that base level of behavioral methodology underneath it. Then you can add skills, pivoting, networking, pitching, all of that sort of stuff on top of it. As long as your base level behavior and characteristics are built. So that's our methodology right the way through our curriculum. But our grade ones are starting with the in-school program. So the stuff that we do with schools in schools, they start off with money orientation, learning about currency and value. I know. - Yes. - David throws up his arms. - Somebody had taught me that. - Yeah, currency value, how to ascribe value to something, supply and demand. They say to us you can't teach supply and demand for macroeconomics to a grade one. I tell you what, you can. And we set up a whole little tower of cups. If you can picture this and I'm gonna describe it, tower of cups, right? Top little cup, two below it, three below that. Almost like the champagne tower that you would have at a celebration.

Very similar to that. Top cup has got shop written on it. The next cups have got the different suppliers to the shop. The next cups underneath that have got some of the, maybe state-owned enterprises. You pour water in the top and you explain. This is how money goes into the shop. When the money comes out of the shop, it goes to the suppliers, the transport. This is how the money flows. That is the multiplier effect in the economy. A kid looks at that and sees a little picture of the shop and sees a little transport. - And they're like, yeah, I get that. - They're like, I get it. I get how many flows in an economy. - Yeah, 'cause we were brought up with money doesn't grow on trees. There was no education around it. - You just knew that they didn't grow there. Didn't know where. - Didn't grow on trees, but somewhere people were growing money. - Growing money. So you show this to a six-year-old and they understand it. So six-year-olds are doing things like money orientation and understanding currency and value and our grade 11s are simulating board meetings. - See, that is brilliant. I mean, you know, a lot of times you hear, and I've been sort of, a lot of people have spoken to me about this in the past, about being on the board, being a board member.

I'm like, I don't think it's something I ever wanna do 'cause I don't know. I don't know how to be one. What do you need to do? Do you need to dress, how? How do you be on, I mean, if you're talking B-O-R-E-D, yeah, I'm there, I get bored very quickly, okay? I have serious ADD. - Squirrel. - Yes, yes, ADD and CDO has to be an alphabetical order. - But this is it is that understand like, what are fiduciary responsibilities at board level? You know, what is the delegation of authority at board level? What decisions can be made? Who reports to who? And give them that insight into it. Even if you don't want to build a business of that size where you need a board, at least understand what it means because if you're gonna scale a business, you need to build it on a framework that is scalable, one of which is a board. - So if I've got kids, children right now, I was always told kids are baby goats. Children, if you have children and they're of that age, could I go onto the website and go, okay, I'd like my child to attend this or maybe this? And obviously, how do the programs run? Is there some stuff after school, some stuff online? Explain that to me. - So there's various ways in which we reach children.

And the first is obviously just the introduction programs, things like baker business, the teens boot camps and that kind of thing. Not everyone's gonna be an entrepreneur guys. You know, it's not. - But to learn certain of those skills, I think is so phenomenally important. - Just even the mindset of being able to be agile in a world like today. - Exactly, I mean, we're now living in something that people are calling the gig economy. But we're on the back end of that gig economy 'cause that's also on its way out now. So we're too next. And I mean, if we think about it, our parents, in our parents' days, you went to school. If you were clever, you got to go to college or university, then you got a job and you stayed at that job for 30 or 40 years until you retired. That's gone, gone. I mean, you know, you sit and tell a child today that, you know, and they're like, wow, that was really the olden days. - It scares me to think that I would have to retire at the age of 65 or 70. What am I gonna do for the next 30 to 40 years after that? Because we're gonna be living so much longer. Like, so what we do is we take them through those introduction programs. Then if kids want to carry on with it, they go into a formal mentorship group.

Then they start their little business, they go from ideation to creating a minimal viable product. They do some pitching in between that. In fact, our kids, our kids, our teams that are coming through mentorship at the moment are actually being given the opportunity to shadow the Business Innovation Awards by FNB. - Wow. - So they go in as part of that week and they go and actually pitch to the exco of FNB business in that simulation to see what it's like at pitching at that level. - But again, that is invaluable. - Totally. - I mean, the concept of me having to walk into an investor meeting looking for investment or to the bank or whatever. It terrifies the life out of me 'cause I've never been shown or told how to do it. - Absolutely. - Now, but you've also got, you talk about your team, but you've really got a team of specialists and a bunch of people that I think must just be as passionate as you that have just pitched in. - They have. So my co-founders, David Wilson, comes from a family of educators and he's just incredible in the classroom with these children being able to transfer his abilities as well as his experience in that. And then I have just, I mean, we call her black superwoman.

She calls herself black superwoman. She's our black business partner and so many people win to address their businesses these days. So Robé is board certified actuary. She sits on the president's commission for the FYR. - I've seen her, I've seen her buy a mane. - I know. - She looks like a little stick of dynamo. I'll say she was the COO of Future Nation Schools, head of innovation at a bank. I mean, she's just incredible. - Can we throw a name around? 'Cause she was with FNB, wasn't she? - She was. (speaking in foreign language) Well, she's not Vuba, she got married this weekend. - Congratulations. - Yes. - If she's not listening, she's gonna be forced to listen to the podcast anyway. - Yeah, she's gonna be tied down and made to listen. - Yes, congratulations. - Yeah, but I mean, the team is also the coaches and I think I have to say a very special word of thanks to all of those coaches. We have 30 around the country active entrepreneurs that have been vetted and trained and who have a real deep passion and they are project-based resources for us. So they get paid to go into the classroom and deliver our programs in school programs as well as after school programs in biz clubs, things like that.

And they're taking not only what they've learned through being with Future Proof, but the real lessons, losing money, getting money, how to acquire a customer, what do you do with negative customer feedback? All of these things that you don't know unless you've actually been there. - And you need that kind of stuff, I mean, specifically in terms of negative customer feedback 'cause apparently punching the face is not allowed anymore. - I don't. - No, it was ever allowed. - Ever allowed. (laughing) - I have to tell you this and it's probably, again, the wrong time for me to do something like this, but I saw, you know, we were talking about corporal punishment, smacking of the children and I saw the most incredible meme there that I didn't know, I just couldn't help it. Only South Africans will do this. It's like, you know, somebody's messaging their friend and going, listen, about this new law, about you're not allowed to spank anymore. Is that for everybody or just for the children asking for a friend? And I'm like, only, only in South Africa. - We have such wonderful senses of humor here, right? And you know what, they're not like this around the world. Peru, I've been to Canada, I've been to Europe, I've been all over the place, we have done 29 countries.

But quite frankly, they don't have what we have here. - But I think it's because of our past and of what we're dealing with and everything. - This is it. - Which is what makes me so passionate about this country. So many of the people that I know are like, oh, we're leaving, oh, we're-- - Hashtag us. - No, you know what, go, off you go. If you wanna leave, leave. Because leaving is not gonna solve this country's problems. Staying is what's gonna contribute today. - And that's what our business is based on. And our business is based on the trajectory of the future for this country and for the youth. And it's not going to be informal employment. It's not going to be in corporate South Africa. We have to give kids another opportunity that is not a backup plan. That's not when everything else fails. It is a formal career choice. It is opportunity entrepreneurship, not necessity entrepreneurship. - Well, I mean, you know, I think business and entrepreneurship is the future. Not just for this country, but for the continent. Because I believe that we have unique skills. I believe we have unique people in our country, in our continent. And we need to get off of our bats and do something about it and support these people.

And I mean, we were talking again or fair earlier and I was like, I wanna come and see. I wanna come and see. I wanna come and do stuff. I don't care. Just take me-- - Anyone is welcome to come and have a look and be a fly on the wall. - People must, you must get this reaction a lot. - We do. - And particularly from entrepreneurs and business people. Is we going, hell yes, if somebody had only taught us, can we help? Is there a way we can help? - Absolutely, and it just makes all those lessons that you learned in all the school fees that you pay that much more valuable when you're able to say, I did this, let me show you how. - Listen, and by the way, if you're thinking of getting into business, just grab your children, even if they're not really interested in go, 'cause you're gonna learn stuff yourself. That's the important thing. If we want to find out, before I say if we wanna find out more though, your full cost, fourth industrial revolution, whatever's coming next, the gig economy collapsing, South Africa, what do you think, future wise? - I'm a green hat person, so I wear my green hat all of the time, which means I'm incredibly positive for the most part. I think I only had just a little bit of a wobble a couple of weeks ago, but South Africa, where there are massive problems, there are huge opportunities and I choose to see the opportunities.

And that is so many people that I've come across. And particularly, and I think we're gonna be very good at this, the concept of conscious capitalism. I think inherently in Africans, South Africans, that is part of where we're going. And it is this conscious capitalism that I think we should actually embrace and celebrate and do more of it. Capitalism with a cause for a purpose for profit, but we actually give back meaningful stuff. You see, we've run out of time. - No way. - I want you to come back though. - Don't say things like that because you're on air now. - No, no, listen, my listeners know me. I open my mouth to change feet, but I do try and always keep, I always try and keep my agreements. - Say what you do and do what you say. - Think equals say equals do. It's one of my mentor always taught me integrity. Think equal say equals do. And if you can't be in integrity, then you do damage control. And you stand up and put your hand up and you go, "Hey, I had to do it with you." - That's some life lessons there. - Yeah, it was terrifying to have to know you what I did. But anyway, I want you to bring back, I want you to bring some of the children. - Can I bring some of the kids with me, can I?

- Would you? - I'd love that. I would love that so much. - In the next month or so, I think, I'm very, very booked up at the moment. - But little entrepreneurs, can I bring them? - Oh, hell yes. - Oh, they would love that so much. - I think, yeah, let that be part of what I can contribute. - Totally, totally. They would love that so much. - If I can speak to any little person and, you know, if they got something to shout, bring it along. We'll do that as well. - That's amazing, thank you, David. I'm gonna do it. - Absolutely fantastic. Lisa Ellingworth, T.O. and Batman. You know, I'm gonna look out for that spotlight in the sky with the bat calling. - Bring wine. - And I will know what is happening. I wish you, this goes from strength to strength. It's not the last time we're gonna talk. It's not the last time we're gonna see it. If you wanna know anymore, it's, how do people get hold of you? - So, start@futureproofessay.com and the team will pass it on to me with pleasure. You can tweet me @Lisa_Jurno or on Instagram, which is @Lisa_Batman_Ellingworth, I know, right? Facebook, LinkedIn is probably the best way to get a hold of me, Lisa Ellingworth. - Lisa Ellingworth. - If you can't, and if you forget any of this, you know how to get hold of me, David, at what'sinvolved.co.za.

Check out the Facebook page, all the podcasts. Yes, I've got a couple of people asking, yes, this will be a podcast in the next couple of days. We've got a pesky public holiday tomorrow, but as soon as we got that, I'll give it to Lisa. It'll be on her website I'm trusting. - As well. - And of course, on mine, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, the whole lot. I'd love to see you there. Lisa, thank you so much. - You know what? It's been an absolute honor. Thank you for having me. - Absolute pleasure. Drive safe.