Scott Donnell 16:54
Yeah, well, I mean, for me, as a Christian, anytime that I can pray for somebody, I can lift them up, I can encourage them, share a verse, I love Jesus, he’s probably the greatest adder of spiritual value to ever exist. But that’s not the only way that you add spiritual value, you know what else did, we’re gonna bring a man, we’re gonna send a man to the moon, and bring him back safely by the end of the 60s. Think about that, that took a whole country and set us in one direction and lifted us above ourselves. That’s incredible spiritual value for a country to connect and unite. Arguably one of the last times we were all united. So there’s a lot of ways to increase spiritual value. The goal is to rise somebody above themselves think higher than themselves bigger than themselves more than themselves. That’s immense spiritual value. And that’s needed then.
Jeremy Weisz 17:49
You were mentioning the five things. Could you repeat them again, you said earn, invest, save, what were the five items?
Scott Donnell 17:56
Yeah, yeah. So these wealthy families, these legacy families, they focused on the five money skills, earn, save, spend, share, invest. They made sure that their kids starting at an early age had a system of understanding all five of those, they never gave them freebies, they did not do allowance. Allowance is socialism, it’s free money. A kid will never spend your money in the same way they would spend their own hard-earned money. Okay, a kid does not need to learn how to earn or I mean, to learn how to spend, they don’t have to learn how to spend, okay, they’re either going to hoard it, or they’re going to spend it all. A lot of kids just they’re naturally wired that way. But what you have to do is create a system in the home where the kids are earning funds they’re doing, they’re expected and they’re covering their own expenses early on. And that’s what’s in GravyStack. The home economy system. This was probably the greatest learning we got from these families was the three E’s. Okay? You want me to explain him? Okay. So allowance doesn’t work because you’re just giving free money. And if even if you’ve make your kids do chores, they’re half the things they’re doing for chores you should never pay for. Why would you pay your kids to make their bed, clean their room and brush their teeth, and do well in school like, you should not pay for that. But the other half the stuff you should pay for individually, so they can learn to create the material value created from each job. Parents that have their kids do a list of chores, and then pay allowance. It’s like a salaried employee. They’re not actually learning value creation that the parents still have nagging and conflict and fights to get the chores done. The kids often forget, they still know they’re getting the allowance anyway. It doesn’t work. The worst problem is when parents, they’re like I don’t pay my kids anything. They’re the good kids that do all the chores, well, okay, they’re compliant, but now you’re paying for everything for those kids every single month, spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars and they’re not learning anything about wants and needs and tradeoffs and budgeting and financial competency, okay, those kids are arguably the worst off. So what we created with all these families and they all do this, they do the home economy system, three E’s. Number one expectations. Here are the seven things that you’re expected to do in our home that we’re not paying for. This is your rent kid, right? Anything in the room, dishes and trash doing well in school, like the simple stuff, you’re never paying for that and that’s like your table stakes. The second E is where everyone goes wrong expenses. At age six, you should start passing off expenses to your kids. Toys, trinkets, souvenirs in-app stuff, technology, extra sporting equipment, birthday presents for your friends, by the time they’re 10, or 12, social outings, trips they want to go on with friends, okay? By the time they get their car, gas insurance, half their car, like pass off the expenses, because that’s the only way they have motivation to earn. And they do tradeoffs and monthly budgeting and planning ahead. All right. So when you do that, guess what mom and dad, you just saved hundreds of dollars a month, maybe $1,000 a month, that you can now pay your kids to cover their own expenses. And that’s the third e extra pay. We have 55 home gigs, we call them in the app in GravyStack that are auto repeating daily, weekly, monthly, or one-off in a printout for your fridge every week. So your kids know exactly what they need to cover exactly how they can go make money. We even have 50 brain gigs, Jeremy, they can do fun educational gigs to make a few extra bucks on top of school. Because kids need to learn that they can make money with their brain. That’s the reason. They need to learn that it’s more than just hands and feet, you can create a lot of value with your brain. And so we have brain gigs and action gigs that kids can do inside of the app. And it’s an automated system. So the parents set at one time and it’s set forever. And they can edit it as they go. But it’s a print-off for the fridge. And now the kids never ask for money again. That’s the key to GravyStack. That’s what all these families did. Like the bank a dad is closed 10-year-old from now on, right and there’s a lot more we can get into. But that’s the point is like get these kids thinking about creating value, covering their expenses, and no more being the bad guy or the pushover. They will never ask you again. They know how to earn it.
Jeremy Weisz 22:30
I want to talk about an example maybe one bringing example one home good example. But Scott, I’ll tell you where I failed. Okay. During COVID, obviously everyone was at home, there’s virtual schooling and I said listen, we wanted to do a MasterClass, watch one MasterClass video a day or something, and they could choose whichever one it is they have a lot of amazing stuff on MasterClass. So I said, listen, I’ll give you $5 when you finish each master class, and my wife was like you crazy, like, they’re gonna start going through these things. I’m like, yes, they didn’t finish one of them. Which I was surprised about. But we would do one a day. I don’t know if it’s a failure. I mean, they would get through some of them. They never finished one complete one. So somewhere I failed along the way. I mean, they did some of education, but I love to hear a home game example in a brain game example.
Scott Donnell 23:35
Yeah, well, I mean, the quick fix to what you were doing is you just cut off expenses. Just cut it off. Like, hey, guys, if you do this, here’s your money you’re making and here’s the expenses that you got to plan for that are coming up. You put those five expenses on the list, guess what? It’s like, the light switch turns on and then once they’ve started to earn their own money, that’s the independence, the freedom, the responsibility. They take the personal ownership, the delayed gratification, all that comes from that switch, right? So for us, the action gigs are things like sweep the garage, wash windows, pump the tires, make a meal being a bathroom, clean the common areas, mop, vacuum, whatever it would be organized closet alphabetize, my books yard work, put together furniture pack for the next family trip all that stuff, right? It’s all automated in the app. You can set a price, you set how many kids you want to give it to when it renews daily, weekly, monthly, it’s right there. And they just check it off in a box once a week. And then their pay days on Saturday at midnight, right there into their money machine. It’s brilliant, right there into their bank account. And it autosaves auto shares auto goes into spend jar and auto investing, right? You got to set up those habits. The brain gigs are like TED Talks. Articles, read a book. No sugar for a week. Right? There’s so many awesome things and I like this one because grandparents love to give brain gigs to grandkids, they love and the only way to get the brain gig is to send responses that you completed it. Right? Here’s my three things I learned. Here’s my two paragraphs of what I learned that’s right there in the app. So we’re setting up an entire, like family tribe, or an inner circle, where it relatives and grandparents can be like giving these challenges to the kids. And I really have to stress this, they need to know that their brain can make them money and create value as well. That’s critical. Most of the time, we only give our kids hard labor. But what they really should know is like, hey, there’s other ways you can make you and I are making money by using our brains, right? We’re creating value immense value, by using our brains, and we got to teach our kids that and so that’s why we have action and brain gigs.
Jeremy Weisz 25:47
Yeah, maybe I fail because it was too big of a chunk, or something, like a TED talk, like you mentioned is smaller to bite off than maybe 12 videos on something, so I appreciate that.
Scott Donnell 26:02
And there’s also a supply and demand curve, maybe five bucks wasn’t enough.
Jeremy Weisz 26:07
Yeah, exactly. They’re like, I want more they negotiate. I’m gonna share my screen for a second. So if you’re watching the video, part of your listen, then you can watch the video, there’s gonna be a YouTube video on this. And then we’re looking at GravyStack here, you can go to gravystack.com to check everything out. You said there’s embedded nine healthy struggles in there. What’s an example of when you say healthy struggle, give people context?
Scott Donnell 26:38
Well, any athlete knows this. Academics know this. Business owners know this. But we go through a huge list of soft skills, hard skills, negotiation, persuasion, public speaking, real estate, finance, car maintenance, kitchen use, cooking, like, these are all healthy struggles that a kid needs to do on their own and push through so they can learn capability, confidence, and value creation. All these things, and most of the 90 are not taught in schools. So these are career prep skills, technology skills, finance skills, practical skills, right, like very practical life skills, not just taxes and insurance and budgeting and what’s a check? In fact, we threw out checking accounts in our bank on GravyStack, because no kids ever gonna write a check, right. So the whole thing is built on a gaming engine, by the way, because it’s fun. Like go down here you see this watch your money flow. We have 30 patents on this app to basically show anything that’s related to gaming and banking. So the money machine, that’s their bank account, that’s there for bank accounts that we auto split the money, they watch the bubbles pop over the revenue streams, as they earn money, they see it automatically fall into the different buckets as they make it. When they spend it, a red bubble comes out and they lose their coins and their accounts and it goes down because they have to connect physical cash to the digital world. And that’s how you do it, you’ve got to feel that pinch of spending, right. So that’s why we set it up this way for kids is because fun and real-life experience. In the first level of the game, the kids are doing money model quizzes and emergency expense water balloon fights, and wants and needs challenges. And they do a subscription hunt where they cancel unwanted subscriptions in the home and they save mom and dad hundreds of dollars. Right? These are practical skills and practical things that the kids can do.
Jeremy Weisz 28:41
Walk me through a little bit about how it works. So, does someone go to your website? Or do they log in at Apple or Google Play?
Scott Donnell 28:53
Yeah, it’s an iOS and Android app just went live week and a half ago, we’ve been in beta for six months, we’ve been building it for years, two and a half years of building this thing. It’s a beast. And so they download the app, they can go to our website, if you go to gravystack.com/scott just my name, you’ll be able to see a demo of how the app works. Okay. And then you can go right to the app store from there and download it. It’s 23 cents a day to get the whole banking all four accounts, the home economy system, the pronounce for the fridge and 100 games for the kids. And we have scholarships available if they can’t afford it. But if you’re not making hundreds of dollars saved with your kids in the first month or two, like it’ll pay for itself 10 times over I promise. So it’s 23 cents a day at seven bucks a month. Most of that covers our banking costs. But yeah, that’s the setup. You get in you set up the kids account. They get their debit card, you can hook up any bank account to it in the world for them. And then you just start creating their brand out for the fridge their expectations, expenses extra pay at auto revolves. So you set it once, and then the kids start playing. And these levels are powerful man, we took 50 of the top like financial planners, wealth management took all this content from all these families, and we gamified it in this whole world. You go down to the bottom of this page, you can see the games. It’s the world of windfall where all these characters and kids, yeah, there’s level one right there, savings beach, that’s the homepage of the kids. It’s just super fun. They’re learning everything about how to save, earn, spend, share, invest, how to protect themselves safely online, there’s 10 games around that borrowing and the issues of borrowing and how to do it, right, creating value in the world skills and traits of grit, personal responsibility, delay, gratification, all that stuff is in the game. And the fun part is we have older people, college kids and parents are playing these games just as much as their kids. So that’s the fun part is, we thought this is just going to be for kids ages six to 18. But now their parents want to play more because they’re learning alongside the kids. That’s the fun part. We have insurance games and tax games and real estate games. And we have a dinner budget challenge, where the kids have to make dinner on a budget and they get to make profit if they go under 10 bucks per person, but they have to get a four out of five-star rating, right? We have a travel planning challenge. I could go on for an hour on all the fun games in here. But they’re all practical, not taught in schools. And they’re really fun for the kids to do.
Jeremy Weisz 31:36
You’re in beta for a long time to smooth everything out. I’m curious some of the feedback you got in beta of what people loved and what people want an improvement on. And you made those improvements when you released it.
Scott Donnell 31:51
Yeah, the biggest win in this app is it solves the money conflict. It solves the chores nagging it solves the bribing kids feeling like you’re bribing or you’re the bad guy. Parents wanted a really clean user experience to create these home gigs. And get this printout for the fridge like we didn’t have the printout that’s coming like with right now for families. It didn’t have like setting expectations and expenses. We just wanted them to do that off app. But now it’s all in there. The games they wanted to tweak and make them more fun. And kids competing with their friends inside the games, just all those little bells and whistles to make it really fun and engaging for the family. But I think the biggest benefits are it solves the nagging it solves the bribing, it solves the parents fear that their kids aren’t learning the true money skills to succeed. That’s the real solve here. And I will say like there’s other debit card companies for kids, a lot of them, you got green line step and copper until and busy kid all these things. That’s just a debit card. It’s just a bank account, kids never even log in, they rarely ever log in, they just asked mom and dad to put more money on their debit card so they can spend it. And that doesn’t teach a kid anything. In fact, if you give a kid a debit card, it’s just more of a weapon than cash. Unless they learn to use it correctly and earn it well. And so that’s what GravyStack is. It’s that full system where they actually learn and move the needle.
Jeremy Weisz 33:17
Scott, is that connected to bank accounts. Like when you said you put money in and it kind of distributed into those different ways that they should use it. How does that work on, I’m gonna have to go into technical details on the back end. But I’m just curious, is someone is that going into like a checking account somewhere? Or how does that work?
Scott Donnell 33:36
Yeah, we’re a real bank. It’s a real bank. So the parents go through the setup, they do the KYC real quick, they hook up the plan there any bank account, Chase Wells, whatever they have, they can connect it in and fund the kids and pay the kids through the gigs. And so the kids get these bank accounts for save, invest and spend and share. And they get their debit card for the spending portion of it. And so it’s a real bank, this is going to move with the kids all the way up through their teens and college. And the parents get full visibility, set permissions, then the kids are earning it. That’s the key is the kids are earning the money. They can do allowance if they want to. But we’re not big fans of it. So we really push people towards this home money system. This is what really moves the needle.
Jeremy Weisz 34:21
Are there any things Scott that you kept with any app or software, there’s a hole to include more and more features as people requesting them. Is there anything that you go you know what, we just decided we made a definite choice not to include this for whatever reason?
Scott Donnell 34:45
Yeah, the biggest one was this like allowance piece. It’s where parents press the easy button. They just give their kids money every week, because they think that that’s helping, and it’s not and so we really want to errands to take that extra five 10 minutes, create the system create the calendar of gigs. And once that setup, it’s auto repeating, it’s going to take a little more work. But once it’s set up, it’s just as easy as allowance. But now you’re seeing all the benefits for your kids, less problems in the home, less stress and conflict around the nagging. A lot of parents do like the chore chart, the whiteboard, the tickets, and stickers and points and quarters and stuff. That’s a hassle. Nobody can do that sustainably for the long term, it’s very difficult to do. And so we just automated it, we made it really easy. And we really want to push families to this because it’s what gets kids ready for the real world. It’s what prepares them with these money skills. So that was a big one that we did. The other one is, most of these features are just requests from parents, they want more and more. None of them want stuff that we don’t want to give them. Right. They want more flexibility. They want to be easier. Yeah, I mean, I can’t think of anything else. We said sorry, guys, we’re not doing that. But oh, the other thing I might say is, some people wanted to hijack us, because we were going for 50 million kids. I mean, this is gonna be one of the biggest apps in the world, right. And so some people wanted to jump in, I won’t say their names, but you probably know who I might be talking about some of the biggest money people in the world, they wanted to come jump in and take this over and be the face. And we’re just trying to say, some of these people are too polarizing. And we had to just really take a stance to say, look, we’re not taking sides, whether it’s political, or religious, or all these other things, we’re just trying to teach good money skills to everybody. And we don’t want to give somebody all the power to look like they’re the one that did this, because that might alienate people. Right, everyone can unite around teaching the next generation good money skills, and that’s what we want to focus on.
Jeremy Weisz 37:01
It’s interesting, Scott, because one of the ways you’ve been successful seems, is partnering, and creating really amazing partnerships. And you already have amazing partnerships with GravyStack. Is that something to consider in the future? Like, obviously, we see the George Foreman Grill or someone, or you think that’s not really in the roadmap.
Scott Donnell 37:29
We have a lot of partners, we have hundreds of partners that are going to get it out to their audience. So affiliates, if you want to go to gravystack.com/affiliate, you can just sign up and become an affiliate $25 payouts, send it out to your audience, email it, post it, get the word out to help us out. So we have hundreds of those folks that are helping us share the mission. But again, it’s not like one person that’s like the X named GravyStack, right? And we’ve had to say no to some mega influencer type 50 million type people, but they’re still gonna represent this to their audiences as a partner affiliate, we just want to make sure the larger mission is the focal point.
Jeremy Weisz 38:08
Yeah. This isn’t your first rodeo. And I’d love to hear some of the lessons you brought from Apex Leadership, because I know you were working with a lot of schools and kids in that business, what are some of the things that really worked in growing Apex Leadership?
Scott Donnell 38:30
Yeah, I mean, Apex is where I learned all this, apexleadershipco.com. If any school is listening, or PTA, it’s the best fundraiser in America hands down. And what we learned there is fun trumps all, like if you have a kid that’s passionate and having a blast and having fun, they have the longest interest span you could ever imagine. Like they will focus. And so we wanted to make this thing really fun. I mean, Apex was all about fun runs and pies in the face and fun awards every day with the kids teaching leadership and fitness and money skills. And so GravyStack, our whole goal is make this the most fun experience for families. And then the other thing is make it easy for parents. They are busy, they are stressed, there’s a lot going on. Our biggest issue here is going to be able to get parents to even know about us, right? We want all parents in America to know about us. And so it’s going to take an army of people to get the word out. And so that’s the thing is making families lives easier so that they have more chances to connect less pain points, more benefits. That’s what we learned from Apex that turned into GravyStack. I will say though, it was hard to watch 1000s and 1000s of public schools not teaching money skills. That’s why we’re doing GravyStack. We want these kids to be financially prepared. So that’s why GravyStack exists is to help 50 million kids become financially competent and it was the biggest hole that I saw in the education system. And that’s why we’re just going hard after this mission.
Jeremy Weisz 40:04
Scott, I have one last question. Thanks for sharing the journey and GravyStack and Apex Leadership. The last question I have is, before I want to just point people, they can go to gravystack.com to learn more is resources, some of your favorite resources, whether it’s an app, whether it’s a book, obviously, people can check out your book, as well. If you go to gravystack.com and the resources, you can check out the book, the podcast, what are some of your favorite, whether it’s app, book, podcasts?
Scott Donnell 40:40
Yeah, I mean, we’ve been bringing in great people for our Smart Money Parenting show, that’s been a huge resource. We also have a parent community inside of GravyStack. So when they sign up to the app, and also it’s on a tablet, right, you don’t have to have your own phone as a kid parents can give their a tablet or a phone to the kids to play the games. And then they’re only playing games for 15, 20 minutes before they go out and do a real-life challenge. So we’re like anti-addiction to phone. We are really against that. So we really rail against that. But the Parent Elite Community is probably the most powerful resource that I can see. And we’ve got a ton of the world’s experts coming in to help families. So that will help a ton. The book, obviously Value Creation Kid is the roadmap for parents, if they like to read or listen to Audible is on Amazon. I love let’s see, Tuttle Twins is fantastic. Connor Boyack one of our investors. He’s got great books for kids to read about freedom, and capitalism and practical life skills. Big shout out to him. There’s also I mean, there’s several groups that we’re going to be bringing in as we launched this parent community to be able to like support them more, whether it’s for long-term legacy planning, whether it’s behavior, whether it’s college prep, whether it’s children’s issues that they can have, whether it’s setting up the home economy system, how to motivate a kid, we’re bringing in those experts as we go to help all our families. So that’s like the barn on this is something I wish I would have had when my kids were born. So that’s why we want to bring them in.
Jeremy Weisz 42:27
You mentioned your podcasts who are so many your favorite guests are fan favorites.
Scott Donnell 42:32
Dan Sullivan was awesome. He was hilarious. We just brought in the college, one of the top college prep guys in the country on three episodes ago. Most of our episodes are just Chad and I talking because we’re both experts in this we’ve got between the two of us nine kids with our wives that are zero to 18. And he’s been in the financial planning space for 21 years. I’ve helped 6 million kids learn money so the two of us it’s just really been powerful to bring in some people and then sometimes just be us on camera.
Jeremy Weisz 43:06
Love it, everyone check out gravystack.com. Scott, I’m gonna be the first one to thank you and we’ll see everyone next time. Thanks, Scott.
Scott Donnell 43:14
Thank you.
