They're Paying Indiana High Schoolers to Start Real Businesses

Entrepreneurs are not created in the classroom. Most of them suffocate there. We are joined by Scott Lingel, co-founder of High School Hustle, a non-profit that has helped over 2,500 Indiana high school students launch real businesses and they've generated over $1 million in student revenue across 50 high schools statewide. He built this by replacing every textbook with one thing, a real business, real mentor, and [music] real money on the line. Today, Scott is breaking down how the program actually works, real student stories that prove it, and where he sees the future of education going in America. Scott, I'm a freshman day one of High School Hustle. Ready to go, excited, don't know what this is about at all. Walk me through exactly what I'm about to experience. Yeah, High School Hustle started by me and a guy named Peter Sorbos. And we have one employee, his name's Hunter Beal. And Peter and I, when we started started this, we really didn't want to like recreate the wheel. We went out and looked for, okay, what exists in the world to help kids become entrepreneurs? And all we could find were pitch competitions and like, you know, hypothetical theory. And so, High School Hustle is just plain and simple, learn it by doing it. And what we want you to do as a freshman is we want you to find a business. We're going to give you a list of 200. And these are things like car detailing, pressure washing, lawn mowing, window washing. Literally, we have a list of 200. The common denominators are you should be able to watch like four or five YouTubes and figure out the skill. And either your parents have all the supplies in the garage or for 100 bucks, you can go on Amazon and buy them all. And then get started literally this weekend. And what happens to every kid is they get all fired up and they sell mom and dad and they sell grandma and grandpa, and then they tell us, "Oh, I'm out of gas." [laughter] And so, we want to help kids do is get over their fear and go knock on a door. And it's scary as crap for any high school kid, especially a freshman. But if a kid can get over their fear and lean into that and overcome rejection, there's no stopping that kid. And that's really why we exist. have a few specific success stories that you'd want to share? Yeah, first one is Jackson Nunnery. Talking about door knocking. So, kid from Carmel. He's a freshman, couldn't drive. I did pressure washing last year and finished eighth in our statewide competition, made $25,000. And keep in mind, this is only as a freshman, no car. This is June and July only is when we run the competition. He literally every day mom or dad had to drop him off in the front of the neighborhood with a wheelbarrow full of his pressure washing supplies. In Carmel, and he would just go door knocking until he found a job, and then he would do the job, and then he would door knock some more. Because he was 15, he couldn't buy a car, but he was smart enough halfway through the summer he had enough money to buy a golf cart, and he attached the wagon to the golf cart, and he could drive himself to the neighborhoods. Well, we get to the end of the summer and he looks at the leaderboard, and he's like, "Holy crap, I'm not going to make it unless I make like five grand this week." It was final week. Quick break for a second. If you're doing any kind of renovation work in Indy, you already know finding the right vendor partners is half the battle. It might be the entire battle. Best Flooring is one of those partners for us. Phil Nelson and his crew offer the best selection out there from a single bathroom refresh to a full gut job. Check them out at Best Flooring on Lake Plaza Drive. Use Apple Maps to get there or Google Maps, whichever one of your choice. Phil's got floors and you need them. Call them up. He's in the richest neighborhood in Carmel or one of them. There's a lot of them. I think he was in Bridgewater. And he sat one of the wealthiest houses in the neighborhood and he walks the property with the owner and he knows he needs to make five grand. So, he drops. The guy says, "What do you think?" He's like, "Six grand." Cuz he thought, "Man, I got to leave room for negotiation." And the dude, uh, wealthy dude, owns like three businesses. And the dude pops his head in the house, said, "Honey, what do you think? Six grand sound good?" She said, "Sounds great." And he makes six grand. Now, also, what you should know about that story, uh, he figured out like halfway through the summer, if he did both the jobs and the door knocking, he was not going to make it. So, he hired like two buddies, and he taught them how to do pressure washing, and he paid them 30 bucks an hour, which is like double what you can make at Mike's Car Wash. That one job that he made six grand on, he outsourced to his buddy, and it took 30 hours. Big job. But, he paid 900 in labor and made $5,100 in profit. Wow. Incredible. Just for Incredible. Just for getting over his fear to go knock on the door. [laughter] Do you find most of these kids are have the, um, chops to go out there and do that? Or how do you help them get over that? It's about 10%, and again, going back, it's like A players in the making. And, um, I think it's mostly, I hate to say it, they already have it in them. Um, I think we bring it out by encouragement, by We have a ton of contests and incentives, and competition, these leaderboards. We help nurture it and get the the spark into a flame. But, I think these kids have a little bit in them already when they show up, if I'm being honest. That has to be so true. If you would have come to my high school when I was in high school, I would have signed up immediately, right? Like, uh, you you just have that fostering of like, let's be an entrepreneur, and then being all the light, uh, the little tiny spark that they have, and kindle the flame. Yeah. Amazing. That's such a cool story. One more story I got to share. One of my favorites, and then it actually involves Tyler and I together. Year one that we were doing this, we only worked with kids that came to us from Shepherd Community. So, Shepherd Community is a ministry um on the near east side downtown. Uh work with a lot of like Tech High School kids, Purdue Poly kids, Washington High School kids. Um there was a kid named Alden Combs that Tyler and I mentored. Both of him and I together were like his main mentors. And this kid was stud. Like week one he comes in and he's like, "Hey, I got an idea. I want to do mobile bike repair." And he had a he like he had it figured out. And so we coached him up. Um he didn't need a lot of coaching. The kid was a beast. And um sure enough he started making money. Didn't didn't kill it, made a couple grand or something, but um he came to us uh at the end of the summer and he's like, "Hey, I've hit a wall. I'm I'm realizing like I I've got enough knowledge to do like 80% of the jobs, but I got like 20% I can't do them cuz I don't have the knowledge." He said, "I've done my homework." He came to us with all this, by the way. He said, "I've done my homework. There is a bike mechanic certification course for 1 week out in Oregon. Here's the cost." And it was like two grand and we said, "Absolutely, we'll pay that." Uh we also had to pay the airfare and the hotel. It was the first time Alden had ever been on a flight in his life. He didn't even have a suitcase. We bought him some luggage. And uh comes back and he's able to do more work. Long story short, he puts that on his resume. And by the way, he knew exactly what he wanted to do when he graduated. He wanted to be an auto body mechanic and fix like a body shop guy. And he was already uh he got a job right out of high school working for Ed Martin. Um but like 1 year after that uh he calls Tyler and I and he says, "Hey, my dream job just opened up. I saw it on whatever Facebook and it was um um Tesla. It was open it up the new Gainesville uh body shop. And he's like, "I would absolutely kill to work at Tesla." And so he put on his resume founder CEO um Bike Fix Pro, I think was the name of his mobile bike repair. You know, made couple grand. Showed all the things he did. Even though he had one year experience, they called and he ended up getting the job. And he was like, "How did How did you hire me? Like about all the applicants?" And they said, "We love the fact that you were an entrepreneur and we hire entrepreneurs first and that's why he got that job." And I think what I love about that story is that's the majority of the kids we serve. They're not going to go straight into entrepreneurship, but I think having that life experience is going to help them level up in all areas of life. For the students, it's like, "Great, I can go on YouTube and do this on my own. Why do I need high school hustle? What are the specific benefits for Why this really needs to be national?" I think a couple reasons. One, we will match the first 100 bucks they post on our website on the leaderboard, we match 100 bucks in supplies. One, all we're trying to do there is engagement. How do we get them hooked and engaged in the in the platform? Two, ton of resources. So we have a library of these YouTubes that are like all the best YouTubes we could find. Like a a library of Here are three on pressure washing. Here are you know, three more of the best ones we could find on car detailing. And then I think environments matter. It's surrounding them with all these other kids that are kind of A players doing what they're doing and creating this fun leaderboard where we're handing out money and achievement for, you know, them raising up on the leaderboard. I think it's all about overcoming their fear and we create environments to help them overcome that fear is mainly why we're there. Quick pause here because if you're an investor in Indianapolis, access matters. That's why we work closely with Tony Boutros at Indy Homes Reborn. He's one of our main sources for off-market wholesale deals and consistently bring strong opportunities to our agents in our investor network. Click the link in our bio to get access to what Indy Homes Reborn has available. Well, I know a huge piece, too, is the meetups. Yeah. So, it's not only do they have the community within the mentors that are usually present within the schools and the other students in the competition, they're meeting with literally the top entrepreneurs and business owners in Indianapolis. Yep. How do you plan to take this national? Is that one of the goals? Like Yeah, the goal is um try to automate as much as we can online with the you know, the main thing we're doing is we're creating these incentives. We'll match first 100 bucks, uh library of resources, which you know, the world doesn't lack that. YouTube's got all that. All we're trying to do is curate a little tighter. Right. Uh specific to our lanes. And then um I think the the leaderboard competition is what's going to make it go viral. Uh last year we gave away 100 grand uh just for the months of June and July to the top 10 in the state. Uh eventually we want to give away a million across the country and we think that will be a big enough magnet to get kids interested. Let's say I'm in Oregon. I got a mower. I can go mow my neighbor's yard. Maybe I want to buy a trailer and hire some guys. Can I join High School Hustle? When When is this rolling out? Uh probably next year. Right now, we are mainly focused in Indiana and we do have a couple test markets where we're going outside the state. We're doing one in Louisville and one in Cincinnati. Uh it's probably going to be next year when we go when we go national. But, if we have a kid that's like We're we're looking for hustlers that are willing to like cold call us and hit us up on like DM us. Right. And we might make exceptions. That's huge. Are you guys on YouTube? We just started. Hunter Beals putting out a ton of content right now. Let's go. highschoolhustle. org Yep. Look them up. highschoolhustle. org and if you've got that mower in Oregon, start cutting grass and call Scott. Well, one last question here. I I think I know the grander vision, which is traditional education is very bureaucratical. You're sitting in a classroom. The real studs are like bored out of their mind. You know, they're waiting till they get out to go like you know, get competitive with sports or video games or maybe entrepreneurship. How does High School Hustle fit into education for the the next generation? I'll go back to my passion. I feel like God's put me on this planet right here and right now to raise up the next generation of entrepreneurs in a kingdom-minded way. And I think two things change the world. One is Jesus and two is entrepreneurship and you combine those together like literally you can change the world. So I I'd start there. And then I think um what the world lacks is learning by doing. Uh if you go back, I I think a better model than our current education is apprenticeship. I think that worked like 10 times better than what we're doing now with education. And if you think about anybody that's had success in the real world, like you probably had a mentor and an apprentice that told you everything you wanted to know specific to that lane and that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to bring the apprenticeship model back. Mhm. I think that model works extremely well. Most trades still operate in that model and the unions like seem to thrive pretty well in the state of those industries. I don't think there's Is High School Hustle going to take out college? Uh [clears throat] I don't know that we're um we're not necessarily anti-college. Um I think it's got its place. I do think it's broken and needs a lot of repair. Um but I think for the right kid, like we got 10 kids last year that made like you know, 30 grand or more during the summer. Like half those kids don't need college. Right. No, not at all. This is for that that 10% that wants to learn unconventional, figure it out themselves, and they probably will just go straight into entrepreneurship. But, a lot of people need the the training wheels of the community and relationships built through college. So, I think there is definitely still a place for that. Yeah, I love that you guys are changing the word entrepreneur. It's from a a stigma or yeah, you know, filthy cash machine to this like faith-driven, faith-oriented uh vision and purpose. So, Yeah, keep doing that. I love watching it. Thank you. being a part. That's huge. Ascoso. org, check it out. Thanks for coming on the podcast, Scott. guys. Thank you.