Today, I’m thrilled to speak with Kathy Boyd and Kim Goodwin, two inspiring leaders from the Orange County Department of Education, who have embraced this entrepreneurial mindset to make a real difference. We covered a lot in this conversation, and I was blown away by their energy and enthusiasm, as well as the innovative ways they’re using entrepreneurial thinking to improve the student experience.
One standout example is their collaboration with a local entrepreneur to create Spyder Lab, a student-run business generating over a million dollars annually for the school district while preparing the next generation of innovators. Even more exciting, the students are asking for more!
Kathy and Kim embody entrepreneurial leadership by piloting ideas on a small scale before going big, collaborating across teams, and pushing boundaries while respecting the necessary guardrails.
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Listen to the podcast here
Entrepreneurial Mindset In Education With Kathy Boyd And Kim Goodwin
Welcome to another episode where I tease out the hidden logic that enables ordinary people to accomplish extraordinary things. I’ve always believed that an entrepreneurial mindset isn’t just for entrepreneurs. It’s a powerful way of thinking that can empower leaders at every level, even within large organizations and government institutions, to drive meaningful change and thrive amidst challenges.
I am speaking with Kathy Boyd and Kim Goodwin, two inspiring leaders from the Orange County Department of Education who have embraced this mindset to make a real difference. We covered a lot of ground in this conversation, and I was blown away by their energy and enthusiasm, as well as the innovative ways they’re using entrepreneurial thinking to improve the student experience.
One standout example is their collaboration with a local entrepreneur to create Spyder Lab, a student-run business generating over $1 million a year for the school district while preparing the next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs. Even more exciting, the students are now asking for more. Kathy and Kim embody entrepreneurial leadership by piloting ideas on a small scale before going big, collaborating across teams and pushing boundaries while also respecting the necessary guardrails. Without any further ado, I hope you enjoy this conversation with Kathy Boyd and Kim Goodwin.
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Kathy and Kim, welcome to the show.
Thank you. It’s good to talk to you.
Thank you for having us.
The Intersection Of Education And Entrepreneurship
I’m just really excited to learn from you, guys. It’s a little bit of a departure because normally, I’m interviewing entrepreneurs trying to download from them, like what is the underlying logic that drives their behavior. I’m intrigued by your interest as educators, as academic leaders in California, how you became interested in entrepreneurship or entrepreneurial mindset development. Personally, how did our worlds collide?
Yeah. I’m going to start and then let Kim jump in. Because she tends to do that for me. Our stories tend to be sometimes even in different like school districts and school sites, but we have a very similar approach. When we started working together many years ago, we really saw that alignment. You see it evidence in evidence throughout the work that we do. I want to start with I did not know that I had an entrepreneurial mindset back when I worked at a previous district, I worked at Orange Unified School District as a coordinator. I remember coming, moving from a counselor position at a school site into administration. I was an associate principal. Finally, I moved into the district office. When I moved to the district office, I was given a new position.
They had a great coherent job description. It was like, “That fits me.” Pretty much I look at any job description and that fits me. Anyway, I looked at it and I’m like, “I’m going to apply for it.” I apply for it, and I get in and I have the quick realization through the process. Certainly, when I actually hit the ground on the position, here’s your new salary, etc., nobody had any idea what I was supposed to do.
Finding myself in that situation, the reality of my bosses not knowing what I should do, I was like, in hog heaven for the first time. That’s because I naturally have this underlying entrepreneurial mindset, I believe. One of the first things as I was looking at the load of work and the things and the vision from a 50,000-foot perspective on what I could do and make an impact for students to thrive, I thought, “I need a little bit more. I need another body. Who else is going to help me with this?”
Coming from a counselor mindset, I automatically wanted to do that yin yang. I wanted to find somebody with a teacher mindset because I knew there would be some gaps that I couldn’t fill. I knew my district wasn’t going to gimme a fund for a position, so creatively, I looked at this $2 million budget I had, which came from a bunch of different sources. I’m like, “I’m going to reutilize somebody.”
I look at a teacher who’s paid for a 6, 7 or 8-period day, and I decide I’m going to take one of those teachers and only have them teach part-time at site, and I’m going to have them work with me part-time. I found the one I wanted the most, like who met the needs, who already had a reputation for this great work, had a great conversation with her, and she’s like, “No, I’m not going to leave the classroom. I love kids. I’m not going to leave that.”
I go, “Can we just negotiate?” We give it a shot. We start that first semester, if you will, and she promises me, she’s going to do three sections with me. Three sections of pay of worth of time. I give her an office and we end up starting to work together. Within that first year, by the end of the year, she was ready to be outside of the classroom and in this work. I basically created a staff that way. I did it with multiple people. I just really creatively looked at the funding model I had and how it wasn’t going to be intrusive to the business office. How that might keep everyone happy, and calm within the compliance mindset, but mindset also really creative and doing things that nobody else could do.
We really didn’t have a rule book yet. We had energy and vision and students were at the heart of what we wanted to do. With that, we just started having conversations. The conversations led into X, Y, Z. That would be the premise of me starting the work in Orange County. I moved to Orange County Department of Education, and Kim and I joined.
Kim’s probably going to have a tangential-ish type of thing. What I really wanted to say from a formal perspective is somewhere along the road, when I was at Orange County Department of Ed, somebody introduced me to ELI Entrepreneurial Learning Initiative, and I had no idea what it was about. I didn’t really even understand the Ice House and all of that. I went in very blindly because I say yes to everything. That’s also part of my underlying entrepreneurial mindset. I don’t believe in the word no.
It’s like your arm goes up before you have to pull it back down.
People are like, “She’s insane.” I did this opportunity to become a facilitator of this mindset work, and I was finally sitting in a Zoom meeting with you, Gary, and hearing how you were going through this coursework, if you will. This mind shift for me, I’m like, “There’s a name to this.” This is who i’m, but I didn’t have that formal understanding and attachment of this group of people or this mindset that exists out there.
Ever since, it just gave me permission to really formalize and scale up even broader for the entire county of Orange, how you approach people you work with and the work you do at the very core. Solve people’s problems. I don’t care if it’s your mother, if it’s your sister, if it’s your son or daughter, or if it’s just somebody you’re working with, but everyone has challenges that they’re facing. If you can approach every conversation with helping them solve those challenges, therein lies your success in whatever you’re going to do. Kim, I don’t know if you wanted to add to that.
If you can approach every conversation by helping people solve their challenges, there lies your success. Share on XKim, before you do, Kathy, I want to throw back some questions for you to think about. Were there entrepreneurial people in your background? Do you have entrepreneurial parents? Where did that entrepreneurial attitude come from? As you said, it was already there, you just didn’t know what it was. I want to hear from you later where that came from. Kim, how did you get all mixed up in this?
In this greatness? It’s interesting that you asked her that question, Gary, because I was going to start with that. I actually come from a background of two teacher parents. They were in education their whole life, whole career, retired at that max age. They enjoyed what they did. They were my influence to go into education. However, my path was a little different and my story is a little different. I think that’s where the entrepreneurial mindset came from.
When I started in my career, so it’s a little personal note that I’m bringing into why I work the way I work currently. When I started out, I got hired. As with Kathy, I was a school counselor, really there, student-centered, very excited and eager. The first year, I got laid off and the second year I got laid off, and the third and the fourth and the fifth and the sixth and the seventh.
I got laid off seven years in a row. My entrepreneurial mindset started then because not only did I get laid off, I got brought back every year. When I got brought back every year, they brought me under grant funding and under grant funding, I was able to be very creative. Nothing was defined, kind of like Kathy said. There weren’t are those parameters that come with education at times. There was creativity. There was how do we get to yes. How do we create something from nothing?
That’s where I became more of an entrepreneurial mindset and having that background in education. It started out as a very sad and kind of tragic thing for me when I started in education, just to be so excited and laid off so many times. I turned that into an opportunity to look at education in a bureaucracy of sorts, to be more creative and to push through various boundaries and be more creative. That’s kind of my background.
I love that, Kim. This is what I hear over and over from entrepreneurs. The adversity sort of forces you. I think there’s an important point to be made from your comment, Kim, that like, if things are going swimmingly for you, there’s no reason to be entrepreneurial. Just keep doing it. I’m not advocating that it’s all entrepreneurial all the time, but the point that you’re making that’s so important is that it’s the adversity.
The Influence Of Models In Developing An Entrepreneurial Mindset
There’s some kind of a challenge, some sort of dissatisfaction with the status quo that causes some of us to say, “I’ve got to figure this out,” rather than just allowing it to crush us or become cynical or defeated in some way. It’s really an important part of the conversation that people often miss. Kathy, coming back to your story, I hear people tell this all the time. “I was kind of already entrepreneurial,” but I think every single time I’ve interviewed someone, there’s an influence. There’s an Uncle Cleve or an Aunt Cleve back there lurking. Do you have that in your life?
When you asked that question as we went to Kim or shifted over, I have to say, I, nothing is coming to mind as a really easy example. I am 1 of 9 children. I grew up here in Mountain Valley, in Orange County, California. I do think coming from a big family is an interesting aspect to how you approach this mindset. To be fair, I had a stay-at-home mom for most of my young life and a working dad. One person’s attention can only go so far. You’re left to become a little more resilient than the average person possibly, and find solutions to things without getting maybe the attention a two-child home would have. I don’t think there’s any one individual, but I will say, when I decided, I started in business before I was in education. I was actually working for employment agencies doing both temporary and permanent placement. I became an operations trainer for one of the companies.
As I’m going through my MBA, my Master’s in Business Administration, I went into a great program. It was very cohort based, and you worked with a really tight knit group of people throughout your entire program. It was really going well. I was enjoying it. I was doing for the first time A-plus work across every course I took, which was very different from me being a traditional student in the system early on in my K-12 or even post-secondary experiences. To all rights, I was in this new mecca of I’m in my place, but I wasn’t in my place. I was sitting through some of this coursework in my evening courses, daydreaming about what I wanted to do. I hadn’t yet found whatever that was, if you want to call it a calling but I did love what I was doing.
I chose to start interviewing people. Honestly, my own intuition told me to go into the environment. I thought I wanted to enter education, but I had no idea what I wanted to do. I went and did some job shadowing and I took some relationships that I had and I said, “Can I come in and just watch you and talk to you about what you do?” I did that across the spectrum, about five different positions in the education arena. I landed on wanting to be a school counselor. I switched over from an MBA program to a Master’s in Counseling at another university and finished that and had a really tough time getting a job as a school counselor because I was not somebody that you hire typically to be a school counselor.
You more come through the ranks of education in some other way. Coming from a business is not usual. That’s not a normal. I don’t even think it’s normal now. It was much less normal in the year 2000 when I was trying to go about that. I really struggled. I struggled to get hired. I had a lot of interviews. I felt like the interviews were great. I felt like the people liked me, but I was an odd duck to them. I didn’t make sense in their system. My dad told me when I got hired at my first district, he said, “Are you sure that you want to do this? You are not the bureaucracy type.” At that moment in time, I had no idea what he was saying. I’m just like, “Dad, what are you talking about?” He goes, “I just don’t think you’re going to thrive in a bureaucracy.”
He must have talked about an uncle who also worked for the government, if you will. How I am sure he shared some story, which again, I don’t remember. I do remember the moment because I was really perplexed as what was he talking about? I was so naive to this concept of what he was talking about. I wish I could pull back to what that was or who that was. However, I do now fundamentally believe that my dad and my mom in their own ways, probably raised me in a way to become very independent, very young, and to become somebody who solved my own problems because there wasn’t necessarily somebody around to help solve those problems. Maybe that influenced it. I took that with me as I learned through my journey.
I also hear that story a lot. I just interviewed a guy who was like, believe it or not, a circus clown who became a super successful entrepreneur. Go figure, his name’s Bob Kramer. He’s making chef’s knives now that auctioned for $7,000 or $8,000. He talked about being in a large family and having to figure out how to fend for himself pretty early in the family. There’s not a lot of love and attention to go around. You’ve got to kind of find your place in that mix. Kim, did you guys go through the Ice House training in the same cohort?
I didn’t go through it. I went through when we were bringing it to the region. Kathy went through it and influenced me, but I haven’t gone.
Using Entrepreneurial Mindset In Educational Work
How have you guys used this entrepreneurial mindset in your work as educators or administrators in education?
I want to have Kim talk because I want to let her talk a little bit more since I don’t want to dominate the conversation. Kim, would you be able to shift and help him understand, or help our group understand here that the use of strengths-based from an entrepreneurial mindset perspective and how we’re approaching? The meeting that you had, Kim, with your colleagues and what you’re at now, I believe, because you are applying an entrepreneurial mindset to your work in the construct of a county office of education. Job title, strengths-based.
Yeah, sure. I hope I answer this, but I have a couple thoughts in my brain already. Back to my background as well as the counseling and psychology and why people do the things they do, and Gary, you said something kind of struck that when that comes to entrepreneurial mindset. I really look within education specifically our team and the people we work with really on strengths-based. We are in a bureaucracy. We’re in a system in which people really want to be, come in and be told what to do, when to do and how to do. I think that’s comfortable for people. What I’m really trying to build here, along with Kathy, is that we’re comfortable with being uncomfortable. We are comfortable with the unknown, and we are comfortable with not having the answers, but finding a solution and a way to get there.
Working with our team, we’re really strengths-based here and looking at that. We need to celebrate all the differences in ourselves and our team. The beautiful thing is that we are not the same and that we are unique and that we should tap into that. Having conversations around that within our team is an important piece of our work. I think it stretches people’s edges. I don’t think that’s comfortable for people. It’s a harder conversation to have, but that’s what we do day in and day out. We really push people beyond those limits of comfortability to really thrive and find and seek those things that are deep within themselves that they may not know are there.
We need to celebrate all the differences in ourselves and our team. We are not the same, we are unique, and we should tap into that. Share on XJust an example, Kathy was saying, I had a really productive meeting with the team and really just it’s about vulnerability and trust as well in all of the work we do. If we are trusting in being vulnerable with one another, how are we supposed to get to the most productive environment that we can be in? We really tried to find how to get to the word yes. Our team doesn’t say no. I think maybe Kathy may have said it once in eight years, and it was for a good reason. It was very good and we’ll leave it at that. Other than that, it has never said on our team. It’s how do we get to yes, because there is a solution. I think often in education, people, there are a lot of barriers. It’s automatic that, “No, we cannot do that.” People shut down and creativity stops.
Entrepreneurial Mindset: Often in education, people encounter many barriers. It’s automatic to say, “No, we cannot do that.” People shut down and creativity stops.
That’s super interesting to me, Kim. The way I think about it is like this. Human beings are simultaneously growth-oriented, opportunity seeking organisms, and at the same time, we’re uncertainty avoiding or stability seeking organisms. I think a lot of us just default to the latter. There’s no discovery. There’s no growth. What you are doing as leaders, which is so damn exciting to me, is pushing people like into the growth-oriented side of it, because it’s there. What I’m sussing out from your comments, Kim, is you are both operating on the assumption that that desire to contribute, to grow, to push a little bit is in there. You’re operating on those assumptions, whether you know it or not. That’s what I’m hearing, which is so beautiful, specifically in a bureaucracy, in an academic bureaucracy. We could just clone you, guys.
I don’t know about that.
It’s not an easy road. I want to be fair and say that, and I think that’s where I’m so tremendously grateful for the allyship I have in each of the team members that have come along. Kim and I are so well-versed at this practice, if you will, that we can actually see when the light bulb hits. When I sat through your training for ELI Mindset, so many light bulbs were going off throughout the entire time, but each time it was just like I declare a moment. You would say something and it’s like, “Yes.” It would be a really clear example of what that was like in my work environment or how that applied. As we work with people that come onto our team and have an automatic discomfort with everything we are, to be honest with you, because it’s uncomfortable. They really do want to just be given a piece of paper or whatever, a program, like, “Just give me my checklist. I’m really good at it. I’ll do it. Just tell me.”
I’m like, “Why would I do that? That checklist is for my brain. What if you applied your brain to it? How many of those items would be the same or different and how would that grow us as a community and grow opportunities for students?” The strategy around it isn’t so much to say, “We want you to think like an entrepreneur.” It really is like how do we want to serve students best? You can only get there by getting rid of that thing that you’ve been trapped in the institutionalization of working in a bureaucracy. That discomfort is raw and we still work within agencies or I would say even departments within our construct that are really uncomfortable with us.
Entrepreneurial Mindset: How do we want to serve students best? You can only get there by getting rid of that thing that you’ve been trapped in—the institutionalization of working in a bureaucracy.
It’s not a defined thing. It’s not like, “The state said you can, here’s the thing that says that. Go ahead. That’s really rare for us.” Nobody said we can, nobody said we can’t but they also did say we can. I’m not going to be able to give you that in writing from the California Department of Education, but I am going to say, “I did it this way two years ago. It worked and this was the outcome that made us drive forward and scale this work. We’re going to replicate that and we’re going to go forward because it was good there and it’s going to be good here.” It’s a lot of that really creative, open-minded lifelong learning that that comes from the real asset in this work.
There’s another important thing that I’m hearing here, and I talk about this in my new book. I describe the managerial mindset as the other side of the coin. Managerial mindset is important. The underlying values of the managerial mindset are rooted in efficiency. We have to replicate something that we know works and execute on that. We need that. I’m not disparaging it, but it’s different. The managerial mindset assumes we have the correct way. The entrepreneurial mindset is going, “Maybe we don’t. Maybe there’s a better way.” You can’t always be in that mode because you’ll never get anything done.
It’s a balance.
Challenges And Downsides Of Entrepreneurship In Bureaucracy
That’s what I’m saying. That’s the beauty in what you guys embody in your work. It’s to know which situation you are in so that you know which mindset to apply because all you have is a managerial mindset. You’re going to suffer in times of change. It’s like all of your problems are going to look like names. That’s the real beauty I think in the work you guys are doing and the synergy between the two of you, that’s not to be overlooked. You have an ally and I want to talk about something that you both alluded to, which is this isn’t all roses. You guys come up against the status quo and the reluctance and the machine. It’s not like you walk out of your office with a new idea and everybody embraces your ideas.
Rarely does that happen.
It takes a lot to get that buy-in.
That’s true for any entrepreneur. They think, “I have the best.” You become enamored of your ideas. You think you’re going to walk out the front door and you’re going to be rich. It doesn’t work that way, right?
No.
Talk to me a little bit about what that looks like. What’s the downside of doing this in a large bureaucracy? What are some of the dark moments look like? What are the challenges look like? Let’s not see through rose-colored glasses.
I happen to be a Director. Kim is a Pathways Coordinator. There are 2 or 3 notches above me. There are many notches below me. Even one of the higher levels of leadership in this kind of a construct here at county office. I think a product of me having entrepreneurial mindset is I make people very afraid above me. Usually not the top leader. Usually the top leader is like, “I don’t get one of these very often. This is cool,” because it’s neat for somebody to be generating new ideas all the time. When you do have compliance centered offices, because you have audits and program monitoring and things that are just part of our system, this person who is really great at generating ideas and income, Kim and I collectively have brought $92 million to Orange County, that’s not small.
There’s that. That’s a beautiful thing for people that are leading this work at this level. It comes with a lot of pain points. It’s like the speed with which we need to move, the flexibility, the nimbleness, those aren’t things that you hear in our kind of organization. The people that are protecting the legal and the audit and the compliance, we become not great people to them because we’re troublesome. We create more work for them, in a sense. And so I want to acknowledge that. I think that’s where Kim and I have tried to become a lot more cognizant of, and the humble pie, if you will. Approach them before this new concept is coming and reassure them and back them up and let them know. Show them the ed code. Let them know that we’re still okay
You’re letting them know that you are taking into account their perspective. That’s super important. You’re acknowledging their worldview, but also, is it fair to say that you guys are micro experimenting? You’re not making big, bold budgetary leaps, you’re trying things on a small scale. Talk to me about that.
Kim, do you want to say it your way? I was just going to talk about starting with smaller amounts of funding. We’ll we seek funding. We seek funding from a variety of sources. When we first started, we would seek grants in a very traditional way. “This is where you go to get grants. You go to California Department of Ed or you go to a very safe organization because this is what our institution is used to doing. We are used to getting these types of grants with this construct, and this is how you do it.” Great. That’s where we played, but then we are successful with that. During the implementation or the pass through, or the whatever of that grant over the years, we would take liberties and we would do some things with that, that were a little out of the norm or out of the comfort zone. We then would have those little successes. Eventually we’re at a place now where we go for very untraditional grants that education people have never applied for.
We’ve started a whole apprenticeship program. We are the host agency for both federal and the state of California registered apprenticeships in non-traditional and youth apprenticeships. That is completely requiring a growth and a entrepreneurial mindset because a county office of education doesn’t do this. This isn’t something they’ve ever done or probably ever wanted to do. We are becoming a economic and a workforce engine as a county office of education alongside our partners.
The region is thriving as a result of that because we’re again thinking, how might we play a part in this to help this move forward and more students have opportunities. Now, we work with the Office of Public School construction. We are work with a Community College Chancellor’s Office. We work with federal innovation grants. We do things that usually a typical K-12 agency or employer would not necessarily even think to apply for.
We get there through trial and error. Instead of us spending the money for the bureaucracy, we just kept getting money. That’s a really nice way because it allows our people who have to stretch their edges in our business offices to see, “They are bringing in this funding.” This unit that I run, I have about 30 people and it’s either revenue or grant funded. I don’t use general funds and nobody else in this organization has that or can say that. We have constantly built a stream of revenue simply because of an entrepreneurial mindset. We build our staff under that. If I want more staff, I must go seek more funding. I don’t go ask my boss. Does that make sense? That’s another weird thing, but it’s a good way. It’s like, “You’re bringing us money, though, so we can’t be that mad at you.”
What I love about that, Kathy, is what I’m advocating in in my new book is that anyone, regardless of who you are, I’m saying don’t disrupt the apple cart. Don’t destroy the system. Don’t mortgage your house, don’t drop out of school. Don’t quit your job. Don’t take big risks. Preserve the core of what you’re doing, but orient, reorient some modicum of your discretionary effort, time, thought on the margins, out on the edges, figuring out new ways to make yourself more useful. It sounds like that’s what you’re doing.
That’s a great way to describe it. I’m going to steal that.
Yeah, I love that. I wanted to just add one deeper layer to exactly what Kathy said, but I wanted to give a prime example. We have requests for proposals when it comes to our grants, and they’re very strict. You have to be this kind of agency, you got to do this, this, and this. Over the years, Kathy and I have discussed, we are like, “We hear what they’re saying, but might we push the boundaries a little bit more?”
They say that these kinds of schools can apply for this grant funding. We have a rationale for why elementary schools can too. We were very confident in that. We turned in proposals and we were awarded funding that’s thinking outside the box. They could have said no, but we just pushed it. We pushed it and they said yes. They’ve continued to say yes for our region in that area. We continue to do that because we’ve seen that it works and we can back up the work with our data and outcomes that it is being used in the right way.
Gaining Support For Entrepreneurial Ideas
I can only imagine there’s got to be people that periodically pop into your office and say like, “I’ll have what you’re having.” Is that happening to you guys? Are people seeing there’s energy here, there’s excitement. Part of the entrepreneurial mindset is like we shift from, thank God it’s Friday to thank God it’s Monday. It’s like work becomes like fun. It’s something to look forward to. It’s not just soul sucking. Are there other people that are saying like, “I want to get onto Kathy and Kim bandwagon?” Is that happening?
If we have time, I have one more little story, and it’s a student based story and I think it really encapsules this like extension to students first and always doing this from a mindset of making sure it’s their students. Yes, we get that in our office where we work the physical building from coworkers across the division and things like that. This is the student story where we created something that we refer to in our region called Spyder Labs.
Spyder Labs are basically a concept where an entrepreneur happens to be based out of La Brea in California or Orange County. He had a business where he was creating, and he started it in Diamond Bar High School. He created an afterschool type of experience for students to come in and really understand how to work large print manufacturing equipment and learn different skillsets around that and possibly become an entrepreneur or learn a skillset where they learned this one printer format really well.
They go work for that company who sells that printer format. They train companies on it. There’s a lot of different avenues. Basically, these students were doing this after school. I walked into this situation, found out what they were doing, and I’m like, “Why isn’t that a course? Why isn’t that an elective in schools?” We came back, I worked with him, we wrote an A through G, which is a California thing. It’s an approved course for PE students who take it to be eligible to admit straight into a four-year university. We wrote a typical course, got it approved, it’s A through G. We basically said, “Any district who wants to do this, you can offer it zero period through seventh period, whatever. They don’t just have to take it after school.” They can still do it after school.
What happened with kids as we implemented these across, and I think we’re growing, but I think there’s 30-something in Orange County right now in middle schools and high schools. Now it’s going into some college settings because these are micro units of just innovation and entrepreneurship and learning. It’s beautiful. What happened with students, and this happens in every single environment, is they walk in just like they would a typical class and they’re there for the 1 or 2 hours they’re supposed to be there and they go home and they do homework.
Not in this class. They are asking the teacher, can they come in on Saturday? Can they come in after school? Can they do this work? They feel that they are given now an environment where they can make the most of their own personal strengths, interests, talents inside a physical workspace where all the resources are given into them.
What it did for a school system is it changed. We tend to go out to vendors to buy t-shirts, trophies, things like that. Now you have a fabrication lab in a classroom, in your school site, so you go from spending $700,000 a year to vendors and now you’re making $1 million a year in product. You get my point. Now it’s become a revenue driven system for schools where they used to have to spend that money. You just saved all that money, now you’re making money.
It pays for itself, obviously, where you have to buy consumables and potentially do upgrades to equipment and stuff. I just wanted to give you a small example of this isn’t just about the work environment that we get to come to every day and live in and thrive in. It’s about how we pay that forward into our school systems so that students as early as middle school and high school get to have these experiences where they understand the value of learning and the value of school. This is now about them applying their interest in a setting that they have a lot of choice and voice in. That’s not typical in a traditional public school system.
It’s about creating a system where students are learning the value of school and applying their interests in a setting where they have a lot of choice and voice. Share on XThat’s such a beautiful story, Kathy. What I want to say is what not only did it flip the revenue model for the school, but it flips the student from extrinsic motivation to intrinsic motivation. The real power of what I call entrepreneurial mindset education, which is distinct from traditional entrepreneurship education that’s solely focused on startup. A mindset education creates a really powerful incentive to learn. That is the real power of it. You beat me to the punch, which is to talk about like why kids need this. I think what’s missing from the curriculum is discovery learning. There’s no discovery. It’s just the transfer of knowledge. There’s no discovery.
In my new book I talk about entrepreneurial discovery learning as something that we can just add on the periphery. We don’t have to bulldoze the system. We don’t have to start over. We just have to start introducing, as you said, Kathy, entrepreneurial discovery learning I’m saying in grade five. I did a little bit of research around the development of a young person. It’s about the age they’re starting to understand how the world works and where they might fit into it.
I want to jump in another story because you said grade five. Kim might jump in a little here, but Kim and I, having been high school counselors, really, we were all the way down to kindergarten or pre-kindergarten, but we spent the majority of our time in high school. You see a lot more opportunity to do some programming in the high school, to be fair, rather than the elementary school when it comes to career readiness.
However, in our seventh and eighth year, we decided to really help another company in our region with using RIASEC, Realistic Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional, the theory behind RIASEC, and teaching those six vocabulary words to as early as pre-kindergarten and kindergarten students from a self-identity perspective. Helping elementary teachers blend the vocabulary of RIASEC into learning across school day parents and educators and students.
When they leave elementary school, they have a self-identity around very clear things like I identify as artistic and conventional, and that means I’m actually interested in either being a web designer or whatever. As a counselor, I can take that sixth grader who has learned about this in various ways throughout their elementary school who has language that can share that means something to me. I can now attach them to those very distinct opportunities where they can have the elective choices that are going to be meaningful to them.
By high school, they’re choosing pathways that include an apprenticeship or an internship in their eleventh-grade year where now, before they even choose a college major or go to college, have this really strong foundation because you started early enough with what they were prepared for developmentally. We call it Career Connected Schools in Orange County. It’s taking off. It’s basically an identity where every district can start with one school. Some of them are going 6 and 7 schools, but it’s a movement in Orange County where we can really do career readiness in the elementary levels through the RIASEC.
I think like Entrepreneurial Mindset education is the missing link in all of that. We are putting through kids for these systems that we’re assuming that they’re going to become employees. I ask educators all the time in my discourse, “Tell me what you mean when you say career readiness.” That word makes me nervous. If for no other reason, I just want to excavate your deeply held assumptions that you’re operating on, of which you might not be aware. When I hear career readiness or career pathways in terms such as this, they make me nervous because there’s an implication of linearity, of predictability of other directedness that don’t really exist in the world anymore. We’ve got to prepare people to learn, unlearn, and relearn on their own.
This has blown my mind. You guys embody everything I said in the chapter on entrepreneurship in education in my new book. It needs to be at the leadership level as well as the student. It’s not just for the student. I want to mention to you that I’m a consultant to a community college, Victor Valley Community College, up in the high desert at the leadership level, training administrators and part of the president’s leadership team how to identify and solve problems. I am going to send them a direct link to this show the minute it’s done because you guys are doing what we’re trying to advocate up in the high desert at Victor Valley College.
Bridging The Gap Between K-12 Education And Workforce Development
You led me into one more piece of this, and this is just exciting work. You said we could have a conversation, so I’m going to have the conversation. We are doing something kind of unusual as well in the realm of being public education entity. I was voluntold, if you will, at one point in time when I was at Orange County Department of Education to serve as a board member on the Orange County Workforce Development Board, which is 1 of 3 regional workforce development boards.
I have learned a lot over the four years I’ve been doing that. It took me a while. There’s a lot to learn, talk about a bureaucracy in one realm that I work in completely different bureaucracy that I was just baptized into. As a K-12 agency, I feel there’s a need for us to really interlink with workforce and economic development. You heard a little bit in some of my previous examples, but back to my original, I was in employment agencies.
I was being paid a fee to match a person to an opportunity. That’s just scaled up. That’s what happened in education with my entrepreneurial mindset. I went from counselor to administrator to general office or central office, however you want to say it. I’m like, “We, in essence, philosophically can become an agency to the entire region.” We’ve got 450,000 students in Orange County from a public education system perspective, why aren’t all of them getting that free public right from us to utilize whatever experiences we can give them in the free and appropriate public education space to catapult them into whatever opportunity that looks like for them? Into post-secondary education, into military, into entrepreneurial opportunities, into private sector, into public sector, into understanding all of these employment opportunities that exist. Nobody ever teaches that in our system and we should.
I’ve done stopped attending my educational conferences, but I’ve really grown into attending Worker First and economic development summits into workforce development board, both for California and national conferences. That’s really helping me as a professional grow into understanding how we really can draw those strong connection points from a funding leveraging and breeding funding, but also from just a work practice perspective.
Looking at not only the students but the parents of the students because as a captive audience in our K-12 world, we have ELAC and DLAC and school site council meetings where parents are coming to us. Those parents may have needs when it comes to workforce economic development. How might we connect them at the same time we’re serving their student through the school day? I see these entry connection points happening and at the braiding of public agencies, both private and public actually. Of course, the larger extension of funding.
That’s where I want to spend my last ten years. I have about ten years before I retire. When you said community college, that’s a world they do live in naturally. I wouldn’t say K-12 naturally lives in that conversation, but I’m pushing us into it. What I saw when I was a community college student, that’s where I started after high school, I feel like the student nowadays, the 10th grader or 11th grader or 12th grader is what I was when I was a community college student in so many ways psychologically.
They are ready for it. I say that with conviction. Having been a school counselor for a long time, they are ready for more than we were naturally handing them. Building these opportunities in that free, appropriate space where they can fail, they can fall and we can pick them back up with care and guidance, there’s no more greater social justice in my opinion than providing this to our population to the best we can.
I absolutely love that. As soon as we’re done, I’m going to send you guys each a copy. I have about twenty copies of my new book the publisher sent me in advance. I’m just going to send both of you guys a copy so that you can see like I just channeled Kathy and Kim. It’s so needed. I just can’t wait to share this story with other educators.
Can I share one last thing, Gary? I’m so sorry to interrupt, but this is what it makes me think of. I know it’s conversational. When I look at Kathy and she’s so passionate and I want the followers on here to go and look up YouTube the First Follower. I just have to say it because it’s a silly video but it paints it perfectly. For us, we really talk about that because it takes a person out there being silly, and then it takes a first follower, which I think is me a lot of the time with Kathy, and then it becomes a movement.
Entrepreneurial Mindset: It takes a person out there being silly, and then it takes the first follower, and then it becomes a movement.
That’s really what we’re trying to do here in education with all the people that we interact with, ultimately ending up in students’ hands and changing the way that things are. It does take that first person that’s out there a little bit crazy that is mixing things up, followers, and then a movement. I think we’ve done a pretty good job here. I hope we can continue the work that we’re doing, but I do believe it’s a movement at this part and time in our work, in our careers. It’s just really exciting to see others go, “I know I’m not going to say no.” I know there’s a yes. When you see them doing that, I think you’re seeing that movement within that entrepreneurial mindset and not accepting no in the workforce that we’re in. I just wanted to share that little piece.
It’s a contagion, right?
Fostering An Entrepreneurial Mindset From A Young Age
Yeah. A mentor of mine who wrote the foreword to my book, Dr. Steven Post, he was on the board of the Templeton Foundation. He said, “Never a no without a yes.” That was his mantra. That is his mantra. That’s what you guys are saying, the same thing. I interviewed a very successful entrepreneur. His name was John Osher. He became the producer of Jersey Boys. You’ve heard that. He started out in college selling used clothing. When he went to Ohio University, he would go to thrift stores and resell clothing. He became very adept at developing consumer products. The little thing you put over an infant with like a swing set, they batted the toys. He invented that.
He invented the $5 toothbrush, electric toothbrush, which he sold for like $500 million or some crazy thing. It was a Harvard case study about him. The point that I wanted to make about John Osher was he told me in the interview, “I could answer any question you ask me about entrepreneurship with the same three words. Find a way.”
How am I going to do that? I don’t find a way. He said, “I know it’s not that helpful, but it speaks to the ethos.” It’s like, “I’m going to find a way. I’m just not going to accept no for an answer.” One of the things we’re doing in the high desert right now is using the community college as the hub of entrepreneurial activity. We’re going out into the region, to the business community to engage. I want to carpet bomb the high desert with Entrepreneurial Mindset training and development.
Workforce development, middle schools, high schools, small business economic development. One of the ways that I’m proposing we do that is by developing something I call The Entrepreneurial Mindset challenge and modeled after like the Science Olympiad or the script spelling bee, which is include start in middle school, but encourage people to engage in entrepreneurial behavior, have local, regional, state, whatever competitions where we reward kids for the best ideas.
I’ll tell you where this came from. I attend all these entrepreneurial ecosystem conferences. I gave a keynote at an entrepreneurship education conference in Cameroon in West Africa. It’s all university driven. I’m thinking to myself like, “By the time a kid gets to college, it’s too late.” First of all, it’s like if you’re in Cameroon, a college degree is your golden ticket out. You have your siblings, your grandparents, and your parents all counting on you. More importantly, we don’t expect a professional athlete to start training when they’re nineteen years old. We go way upstream.
My point, you guys will understand, is that we all understand the economic value of entrepreneurial activity, but we don’t understand the underlying causes. Right now we’re creating entrepreneurs by accident rather than by design. What happens if we go upstream and start to cultivate this early and often? As you just said with your example, Kathy, where kids switch from being extrinsically motivated to learn to intrinsically motivated, we can make a huge impact in the world. I’m just so grateful to have this conversation with you, guys. I can’t wait to share it with the world. I want to just come and work with you, guys.
You can, Gary. You come any day, we’ll Zoom you in. One more thing to hit your early level that is a great channel for people to look at. There’s something called OC Maker Challenge, and it is exactly what you are talking about. We start at the pre-kindergarten level. What’s amazing, it’s a competition we hold annually where there’s creative entrepreneurial mindset implementation happening through the instructional core in classrooms. No matter what grade you teach or what content area you teach, any teacher can do it. I think it’s design or repurpose something that’s going to solve a need, a want or something else in society. Same prompt every year.
To look at the kindergartners project on what they feel is a challenge in society and how they think they should fix it, the most fascinating aspect at one point is we had this as a pre-K kindergarten through community college. In many of the years that ironically the people, the groups who win, because these are all judged by outside actual business people, are the early and the youngest groups, because that creativity is so right. They haven’t been institutionalized yet. They create one of the most amazing products. First of all, super innovative, super creative, super worthy of being in society. They do it probably the best when it comes to them really putting all the parameters down.
OC Maker Challenge. It’s just something to look at. We’ve been running it for many years and we do it every year in Orange County and different teachers do it, and they usually have a group of students. I actually come to tears when I go through and watch what these students have created to solve problems in society. It’s something that does hit to the ethos of what you’re talking about.
Entrepreneurial Mindset: It’s so inspiring to see what these students have created to solve problems in society.
Thanks for sharing that. Check out the First Follower video. Forget the first follower. When you’re the weirdo out there dancing, that’s a little bit awkward at first. There’s that as well. Thank you, guys, so much for taking the time out to share what the work you’re doing. I got to figure out how we can replicate, clone you guys. I just feel like education is the biggest lever we can pull to make a major economic impact in terms of entrepreneurial mindset education.
Thank you for having us.
Thanks for taking the time, guys.
Absolutely.
Anytime.
Important Links
- Kathy Boyd’s LinkedIn profile
- Kim Goodwin’s LinkedIn profile
- Spyder Lab
- Bob Kramer’s past episode
- First Follower: Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy
- OC Maker Challenge