Hey folks, how are you? Kurt here with Manana. Nomas and oh. I got home. I took a little bit of a rest. My eyes are still a little bloodshot. I, they, I’m getting up, but hey, I just wanted to check in and today was, today. Today was a good day. Today was a good day. The high school, oh, a couple of months ago, announced that they were gonna do this thing called Salt Hawk Career Talks.

Boom. Right here, right. So Salt Hawk career talks and they asked if I would join, and I of course said yes. I’ve offered to speak at the school before and I’ve spoken before to to the automotive classes and stuff like that. You know, I’ve got a background in, in automotive and service writing, and I published that book and, and all those things.

So, so talking in that, in that realm, that, that made total sense. Absolutely. Right. And then this time it was like, Hey, you run this agency here in town and we were wondering if you’d, you know, come to talk to the kids on career day about, you know, how you got started in, in what you do as an agency. And the timing couldn’t have been better because I’ve already been in touch with a thing that they call Startup Hutch and with the city, and I proposed a.

An apprenticeship program that would encourage these young people to stay in this little small town, take advantage of this high-speed internet that’s here, and launch their own agencies,s and yeah, I have an agency, right? So that sounds crazy, right? Like, so I have an agency and I wanna encourage other people to open up agencies, folks, there is plenty of work to go around, plenty of work to go around.

And if I can help this next generation. Embrace the challenge of self-employment and help ’em do it where the cost of living is low and the internet is fast. Well then, I’m all in. I wanna do that. And so the timing’s really good. So working with startup Hutch and the city on this proposal for bringing this, we like, kind of like this WordPress agency startup apprenticeship program, like trying to get that launched here in town.

Then I went and talked to the high schoolers about what it is I do for a living, how I got started, and what that was like. And here are some interesting takeaways. I spoke three times today, so three times the classroom’s full, and I’m speaking three times to three different groups. The first talk, I’m gonna admit, first talk, it wasn’t like gangbusters.

There was some interest. A couple of kids asked if they could contact me afterwards for more information, and I was like, absolutely. Here’s, you know, my website. So, so that part I think was okay. But it wa it wasn’t, it wasn’t that Kurt v Onan signature stamp on a live talk, let’s just put it that way.

Like there was just felt like there was something lacking. So then the next sec session I did, I tried to speed things up a bit to leave more time for q and a afterwards. And there was a couple of questions, but it wasn’t. I don’t feel that there was the quality of the talk boom that elevated the questions, if that makes sense.

I’m trying to, I’m trying to give the kids a, a little bit of grace here. That class was rough, that that class was like I got the impression kids almost didn’t wanna be there, and then the third session rocked. But here’s how it rocked. I changed the order of the talk. So the first two times I was like, my name’s Kurt.

This is what I do, this is what I’ve done. This is how I’ve worked with other things in the past. This could be you. What, what are your plans? Hey, do you have plans? You know, like, let’s get interactive and do you have plans? Do you have plans? How about you? Are you gonna go to school? Are you gonna start a job?

Are you gonna do with it? You know? And then, and then finish with, Hey, WordPress does 43% of the internet. It’s open source and you can get started for less than a thousand dollars and start making revenue. Okay? So. That was kind of like how I, how I closed the talk. So for the third time, what I did was I said, Hey, my name’s Kurt.

We’re just gonna have a conversation. I encourage this to be back and forth. I want it to be kind of casual, but we only got 20 minutes, so lemme just hit you with, lemme hit with you chord with the message. If I told you today that for less than a thousand dollars, you could launch your own business and you could make $6,000 before the summer.

Would you wanna know how to do that? And all the hands went up, you know? And then I said, okay, let’s dig in. Let’s dig in real quick and let’s see if anything I say to you in the next 18 minutes makes any sense. And then we went through it, and I think it went, I think it went really good. A couple of takeaways.

First off, three classes. Outta three classes, four students knew what WordPress was. That’s important that, that’s really important because if WordPress runs 43% of the internet and young people don’t know what it is, what’s its future, so that sounds bleak. It sounds more bleak than, I mean at the sound.

How can I say this in a better way? I, I’m a person who likes to see opportunities within the obstacles. So here’s what I will say. When I explained what WordPress was, more than four people seemed interested in it. How about that? That’s better, right? A couple of the kids, I knew that these kids had like a, a, like some of them have an automotive background, a farming background, you know, being around machinery things like that.

So I said, “Hey,, how many people like racing, how many people are into racing?” And you know, a lot of kids put their hands up. And I said, okay. So what kind of racing are you into? Nascar, F1, who’s familiar with the Mazda Cup series? A couple of hands went up, so I put up the picture on the slide of the Hendricks Motorsports race team.

You know, their cars are up on the screen, and I said, “Are you familiar with the name Hendricks?” And they, yeah, yeah, yeah. I said, those are clients of ours. That’s who we get to work with. I’ve worked for Ducati, I’ve worked for Suzuki, I’ve worked with Polaris, BRP, you know, I’ve communicated and, and interwoven my life into these segments.

And people were like, oh, that’s so cool. And I was like, and I didn’t go to college or leverage my financial future to do it. I. You can get started right away. And so for some people, college in your future, that’s great. If college is for you, that’s great. If that’s the choice, if that’s the plan you made, you wanna do a four year degree, that’s wonderful.

Go and chase that. You gotta plan, pursue the plan. If you don’t have a plan, you need a plan. Like you can’t, if you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward. So take a step, do something, get, get some gumption going. So do you want to get a job? Do you want to go to school or do you want to create your own job?

And wouldn’t it be cool if you could do like an apprenticeship program and someone gave you exposure to what it’s like to run your own agency, where you’re involved in the client meetings and the quoting, and the negotiations and the proposal process and the project management and all those things.

What if you could go somewhere and get knowledge about all the things it takes to run a business that school didn’t give you? Here’s, here’s another thing that is, I, I don’t wanna say bleak ’cause that’s, that’s too negative. Out of those three classrooms that I spoke to today, how many, how many of them, and you could put a comment in if you’re watching this live, how many of them knew what open source was?

Or have he heard the term open source? Go ahead. I’ll wait. I know I’m waiting for no one, no one’s gonna put a comment in. None, none, none of them. Out of three classrooms of students, none of them. None of them knew what open source was. So four people heard the word WordPress before. And out of those four people, none of them knew what open source was.

So I explained kind of what open source was, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t like. Like, like for us that are in the WordPress space, that are, that are doing things with WordPress, you know, we think of this like open source. Oh, but it’s open source and it’s wonderful and we all get a, we all get ahold of it and, and we can build what we want with it.

And these young people, they didn’t even, they didn’t even know what the term was. So how do you get to your senior year in high school? And take classes in computers and IT, and coding and all of these things and never hear the word WordPress and never hear the phrase or term open source. That to me was a little bit alarming.

And so then I, I, I said, okay, so if it’s open source, meaning you don’t have to pay for the software, what does it take to get started? And I was like a laptop and an internet connection. So if you already have a laptop. Access to the internet. You could start making money this weekend. I mean, you’d have to find a customer, right?

But your point was that you can make something happen. You can make something happen. People say to me all the time, “Oh, wouldn’t you rather have a job that’s more secure?” I’m seeing people with layoff announcements in my LinkedIn feed nonstop. The reason that Mana No Mas is, has grown again and is doing what it does is because when I was gainfully employed as a corporate employee at Suzuki, I.

I got laid off and then I got laid off right at the beginning of Covid. Nobody was hiring people in the middle of Covid, so thank goodness I knew how to fire up my own thing again and go out and generate revenue. You, you gotta, like, life throws curve balls and you gotta be tenacious, you know, you gotta find opportunities within the obstacles.

I’ve said that before. And so. I, instead of being negative, I want to come at this with a piece of hope. My son goes to that school, my son goes to the high school. And so I asked him how his talks went, that he went to, and I said, well, how did they assign you to the talks? This is important. ’cause I, I was there today and I, I wasn’t aware of this myself.

I said, “How did they assign you to the talks? How did they know what you’d be interested in?” Here’s something cool. A lot of businesses were at the school today. It wasn’t like 10 home, like, it wasn’t like 10 freelancers showed up at the school. No. They had people from all walks of the community come to the school today and pour love and value on top of these students.

Like I, I can’t tell you how cool it was to show up and see. There had to be 50 other businesses there. I. And they gave us donuts and coffee in the morning. We had like a little open networking floor time to meet some other people. And then we did our talks, and then they gave us a lunch afterwards, and you got to meet more people, and like People’s Bank was there, like that, people’s bank was there, there, there were people everywhere.

And it was so cool. It was so cool. And I said to my son, out of all those talks, how did they choose which talks to send you to? And my son said, “We picked”. I didn’t know that. He said we picked. So what does that mean? That means that I, Kurt Von Ahnen, owner of Manana, No Mas, that’s how I’m listed in this talk, right?

I own my own WordPress agency. I own my own internet agency. These kids chose my talk. I didn’t know that. So I told you earlier in this presentation I said. I get to a slide where I show them I work with WordPress. I kind of save it to the end, right? So I go through, like, I’ve worked with this race team, Ducati Suzuki.

I throw these big names out. This is what I’ve done. This is what I could do. These are the books that I’ve published. This is this, this is that. But at the end of the day. I have a job to do every day, and this is what I do. I run this agency, and my agency is based on working with WordPress. And WordPress runs 43% of the internet.

It’s open source. And you two could get started for less than a thousand dollars.

None of them. Four of them, okay. Four of them had heard the word WordPress before. None of them. None of them knew what open source was. A lot of them didn’t have a clue about money. I mean, no clue at all about money. No clue at all. I said earlier in the talk, I asked kids, do you have a plan? Do you have a plan?

What’s your plan? One girl said she’s gonna go to school for automotive. I said, “What about automotive?” She goes, “Well, for automotive.” “Okay, great. What are you gonna study about automotive?” She didn’t really have an answer. I said, “So you’re gonna go to automotive? Like, like, like automotive Technician training,” and her eyes lit up. And I said, “Okay, great. So no matter how much schooling you go to, when you get out and into the real world and you get a job at a dealership, you’re gonna be an entry-level tech. So you’re gonna be in, you’re gonna be a lube tech, so you know you’re gonna change oil, tire rotations, maybe a couple brake inspections, things like that.”

Or six months or a year go in, maybe you’re gonna start to do some alignments and some front-end work, maybe some struts and shocks. You are gonna do some brake replacement, turning the rotors, replacing the rotors, things like that. And you’re gonna grow. Soon you’ll be doing drivability and diagnostics and, transmission work as that.

Sounds good. She goes, yeah. I go, okay, great. “Here’s what I want every everyone else in the room to hear. Anything that you learn, anything that you have exposure to, you save that, you save that experience so that it becomes part of your expertise. And as you get older, that expertise adds up and you put yourself in a position to add value to other people.”

And you know, I talked to him about the book I wrote Action Leadership from the Edge. And then, so we were talking about this, and I said “So what happens if you hurt your back? What happens if you get injured on the job? What happens if you can’t turn wrenches anymore?” You’ve gained this expertise, and you can still communicate well; now you can become a service writer.

Who in here knows how much a service writer makes? Nobody knew how much a service writer made. I said, and if that, if you don’t like that, you could be a warranty clerk. How much, and this is what a warranty clerk does. What do you think a warranty clerk does? And then we talk about what a warranty clerk does.

And I said, how much money do you think a warranty clerk makes? And nobody knew how much a warranty clerk made. Then a young man in the room said, I am going to own a car dealership. I said, dude, that is a huge aspiration. Congratulations for you. That is a big plan. That’s your plan. That’s a big plan. I said, how much money do you think it takes to build and operate an automobile dealership?

He told me a hundred thousand dollars.

It’s like that scene in Rainman. Where Raymond thinks a Snickers bar is $200,000 or something like that, of course, in the other direction. So I was like, well. A hundred thousand dollars probably wouldn’t really work as the down payment. I said, if you want to build a dealership, you’re looking like between five and $8 million in capitalization to get the building done, and you gotta put some equipment in that building and then you’ve gotta.

Floor plan, which means financing the inventory to sell. So if you’re selling for Ford or Chevy or Dodge or Mercedes or Porsche or whatever, you know, you sign a deal with like Wells Fargo or somebody that you’re gonna floor plan that inventory, which means you need to show at least on paper that you’re liquid for about $10 million.

I was like, do you have $10 million? And he, no, I don’t have $10 million. And I was like, okay, do you have friends and family that could amass $10 million for you? And he was like, well, no. And I said, well then maybe you wanna start. I. In the in the quick Lube bay and work your way up. And I wasn’t trying to be mean, I’m, it wasn’t about being mean.

I didn’t make it funny either. I was just like, let’s talk about money. Let’s talk about finances. How much do you think this job pays? They don’t know how much these jobs pay. Do you think that’s good money? Some people said yes, some people said no. I told ’em a story about someone I know who got a job here in Wichita.

They’re making $60,000 a year. I said, is $60,000 a year good money? And they went like this.

$60,000 a year in Wichita, where the cost of living is not high. Right. And the average salary in America is something like 45,000 a year. So is $60,000 for a 20-year-old in Wichita. Good money. Good money. Yes. Yes. It’s great money. And so those were some of the things that came out of the talk today. I feel, I feel cautiously optimistic because they were hungry for the knowledge they were.

Some kids didn’t care. Some kids looked at their phones. But for the most part, the kids who came to my classes today were hungry for what the real world has to offer. They wanted to hear from boots on the ground, what it’s like to be outta school and making things happen. You know, it’s one thing to be in school and hear your teachers ramble on at you all day.

It’s another thing when someone shows up at your school and says, Hey, this is what I do for a living and how I make a living for my family. And so that part went really, really, really well on the WordPress front with all the politics going on in WordPress over the last year. And, with just some of the weirdness that’s been going on with different things.

I am hesitant to be like, oh, oh, you know, this is it’s, it’s Shangrila. No, there, there’s, there, there’s some challenges. But here’s the other, here’s the other side of the reality. The other side of the reality is that when we say there are challenges, when I say there are challenges, I’m looking at it through a lens of somebody who’s maybe.

Maybe out of the 50 or 70 or a hundred people that I know that are active and vocal inside the WordPress community, like where something happens in WordPress, and this group cares about it. Like that’s, that’s kinda like where my head’s at. But then you have to realize there’s a whole community of people, thousands and thousands of people that don’t care a lick about any of that stuff.

And so it is, it’s too, I think it’s too big to fail 43% of the internet. Lots of established plugins, lots of established tools hosting, affordable. I think that we are in a good space. That’s that. Have a good day.