Maverick Miles & Musings
Maverick Miles & Musings
Happy Post Independence day greetings from future Mavericks in the making in Charleston, SC!
Here’s a pic of the gang at the annual Family Freedom event. It’s the only event I know of that actually is for parents and kids. The focus of this event is to teach kids about business and how to hit the ground selling. While the children are becoming “entrepreneurs,” the parents are discussing and learning about better parenting and how to raise more entrepreneurial kids. Plus, we throw in a few cool adventures and activities to create a family bonding atmosphere.
Every year we get the kids out on the ‘streets’ to sell. I love seeing how real-world business lessons are created on the spot for them. They have to get attention, handle rejection, deal with customers, figure out pricing, packaging, bonuses and so much more. It’s awesome watching some of the repeat kids like Hudson Ablitt (Sasha Ablitt’s daughter), Austin Marlow (Scott Marlow’s son) and Max Summers (Adam Summer’s son) really start ‘getting it’. It’s like the more exposure they have to the process, the smarter they get about really “getting it”. Over the course of the event, they come out of their shells and get more comfortable with all the business processes.
Kids preparing their signs and figuring packages
We also tried a little experiment this year with the older kids. The kids who were 14-17 got to work with Dima Kozlov (who heads up our young entrepreneur program – Maverick NEXT) to create their own information product in the few days they were there. The 4 older kids who were working on their own project really united and pulled together the different pieces needed to sell their content online.
– Zoey Summers (14), responsible for the editing, filming, recording, etc.
– Emma Larson (14), responsible for social media and site design
– Nicholas Cardaci (14), responsible for content pieces including spreadsheets and examples
– Emily Cardaci (17), copywriting
Here they are working hard
And you can see their finished product here –www.KidsBusinessBluePrints.com
They also worked on taking a little bit of my content and put together a blueprint for parents to create a business lesson for their kids throughout the year. Buy a copy!
They ended up getting the site done and ready to go by July 5th and sold their first few copies that day. After talking to the parents of these exceptional kids, they all reported back how much they really enjoyed the process of working on an actual site and watching what happened to it. I think next year we’ll expand this process of including digital education.
One of my favorite parts of the trip happened during a walk home from one of the restaurants with 10-year old, Anna Larson (Shelby Larson’s daughter in the Statue of Liberty costume above). We were walking home and she asked me, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
I thought it was the cutest and most awesome question. Since she doesn’t think I’m a grown up yet. She told me she wanted to be a geologist and maybe a chef. She loves minerals, rocks and crystals. I told her I want to be an artist when I grow up!
July 4th was celebrated in style by watching fireworks from the deck of the USS Yorktown aircraft carrier. It was a really incredible vantage point and the fireworks were some of the very best I’ve ever seen. The coolest pic I got was of my kids, Zack and Zoe, watching fireworks for the very first time. (Last year there were wild fires in Park City so no fireworks and the year before they were a little too young to stay up.)
Check out these totally non-staged faces
If you have kids ages 6-16, look out next year for another Family Freedom event …we might be changing it up to a “Camp Maverick” format. But stay tuned.
Speaking of families, check out my new personal blog and a post I did about your mission and your family. It’s gotten some really interesting conversations going in different places.
http://yaniksilver.com/your-mission/
All the best!
Yanik
