Creating useful people - the childhoods of entrepreneurs and business leaders - from Clever Tykes

Decision-making frameworks for a successful career and lifestyle.

Katrina Owen is an ecosystem engineer at GitHub, the world’s leading software development platform. She accidently became a software developed whilst pursuing a degree in molecular biology! Katrina is also the creator of Exercism, a platform for code practice and programming mentorship that has helped over 200,000 people all over the world learn new programming languages. Katrina mainly works in programming languages Go and Ruby, and she’s a Ruby Hero, which is an award given out by Ruby to their top programmers. Katrina is committed to creating beautiful code and has co-written a book about this called 99 Bottles of OOP.

In this episode we discuss Katrina’s life before and after the pivotal age of 25, her younger self’s approach to decision-making, how introverts become exhausted and putting lifestyle and routine at the centre of success. More from Katrina on her website.

The importance of attention to detail when creating a global sports brand

Benjamin Banks is the CEO and founder of SBD Group. Started in 2013 under the name SBD Apparel, the company develops superior strength clothing and equipment with world class athletes, coaches and health professionals. The products are made in the UK, predominantly in SBD’s factory in Rotherham. The group employs over 50 people, the products are distributed in over 40 countries and SBD received the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in 2018. SBD is also the official partner for the World’s Strongest Man and the International Powerlifting Federation (IPF).
Ben himself had a successful powerlifting career – first competing for Great Britain in 2007, winning multiple British Championships then going on to represent team GB in the open team at the World Championships and European Championships, retiring from competing in 2013, the same year he started SBD.

In this episode we discuss Ben’s incredible attention to detail, where it came from and how it has helped him build a global sports brand. We talk about how he fitted in at school and the advice he’d give to his younger self.

The making of a mayor

Andy was elected as the first mayor of the West Midlands in May 2017. Prior to that, he was the managing director of British retail giant, John Lewis, where during his tenure at the top he oversaw a 50% increase in gross sales to over £4.4bn, a doubling of the number of stores and the growth of the company's online business. Alongside this, Andy held a host of high-profile economic development roles including the chair of the Greater Birmingham and Solihull Local Enterprise Partnership. Andy was awarded a CBE in 2015 for services to the national economy.
In this episode we discuss the influences that have shaped Andy's leadership style and his career from business to politics, how his parents supported and encouraged him and the advice he would give to his 10-year old self!

From buying a badge-making machine to hiring 100 people.

Charlotte heads up the creative and marketing at Awesome Merch - a custom print and merchandise business she co-founded way back in 2005, when business partner Luke and she went off to university in Leeds. Since then, Awesome Merch has gone from 2 people in a bedroom, to over 100 people in two locations across two continents, and from one product to over 650, almost all produced in-house.
In this episode we discuss Charlotte's favourite subjects at school, rewarding effort versus rewarding achievement and creating an awesome business that scaled rapidly whilst Charlotte was still at university!

We are so excited that today is the launch date of the brand new book - How To Raise Entrepreneurial Kids.
You can find the book and accompanying resources here: https://clevertykes.com/book
This episode is presented by Clever Tykes cofounder Jodie Cook. Here's the transcript:

Hello and welcome to the Clever Tykes podcast – creating useful people – if you have been following this podcast since the start and listened to the interviews with amazing entrepreneurs and business leaders you will know that we are fascinated by childhood stories and what happened when these people were younger that led them to being the amazing leaders they are today.

Well, back in 2018 I used a programme called HARO which stands for help a reporter out – and it’s where journalists and writers can get sources for their stories – and I used HARO to ask two questions.

One of these was: “how were you raised to be entrepreneurial?”, and one of these was: “how are you raising entrepreneurial kids?”.

Honestly – I wanted to write an article. I was looking for a few great responses that I could turn into something bitesize for parents and teachers to read. Instead, I got 500 amazing responses.

500 responses with so much detail, from people telling amazing stories of their memories – and the childhood experiences that led to them being entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial - and what they were passing on to their kids or nieces and nephews to help them do the same.

So I was reading these stories... about 40,000 words of them, with such amazement thinking – this is gonna be a long blog post – haha. I started to think that maybe I had something more here.

So I called up a friend – Daniel Priestley – who is something like a 5-time bestselling author and who works with entrepreneurs in the work his business accelerator does. Most importantly, he’s raising three kids of his own. And I was like hey, do you want to write a book? I told him about the stories I had, told him the title would be how to raise entrepreneurial kids... and he couldn’t say yes fast enough! It was just a case of yes – I’ll call my publisher – let’s do this!

And that’s how it started. We went through all those stories and grouped similar ones together. We drew out the themes and then created a 4-part framework for raising entrepreneurial kids which consists of: entrepreneurial mindset, entrepreneurial skills, entrepreneurial opportunities and finally the parent-mentor.

We included stories from our own childhoods – I was definitely raised to be entrepreneurial whether or not my mum and dad meant to do that or not – and Daniel was too but he’s also got kids of his own now. So our stories are part of the book and we’ve framed the key ideas we put forward in 46 different mini-sections – and each has explainers, actionables, and some of the stories that we collected. We also included fascinating stories from well-known entrepreneurs and business leaders about how they were raised. And now – as if by magic – today we have reached the launch date of the book and it’s available everywhere that sells books.

It also has an accompanying playbook, which I just love, where we’ve taken each of the 46 sections and pulled out exercises and fun things to fill in together to explore the concepts further and just see! See how conversations go, see what you come up with and see where it leads.

I’m so excited for you to see the book and read it and turn it into amazing conversations and fun things to do that will help someone grow up with this fierce sense of wonder and independence and creativity and resourcefulness and all those things associated with being “entrepreneurial”.
For the rest, listen to the episode :)