Jeremy Qualls on Entrepreneurship in Public Education
Jeremy Qualls is the Executive Director of Entrepreneurship and Innovation for Williamson County Schools, leading naitonally recognized programs that prepare high school students for real-world business and career success.
About Jeremy Qualls
Dr. Jeremy Qualls is the Executive Director of Entrepreneurship and Innovation for Williamson County Schools, leading both the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center (EIC) and the district’s College, Career, and Technical Education (CCTE) programs. Since stepping into this role in 2020, Dr. Qualls has helped shape what’s become one of the most ambitious career-based education programs in the country where high school students don’t just study entrepreneurship, they live it.
Under his leadership, the EIC has grown into a 10,000 sq. ft. innovation hub where students launch real businesses, work with local mentors, and compete in pitch competitions—some going on to win at the national level. With support from the community and a $15M state grant, a new innovation hub is now underway next door to take that vision even further.
Jeremy’s background spans more than a decade in education—as a teacher, coach, principal, and district athletic director. He’s the mind behind programs like the WILCO Awards and “Outside the Lines” work-based learning initiative with the Tennessee Titans.
His leadership has earned statewide recognition, including 2015 TSSAA Administrator of the Year and 2024 Technology Educator of the Year by the Greater Nashville Technology Council.
Did you know?
Williamson County Schools now offers 55 career pathway programs across 16 unique fields—from robotics and hospitality to coding, film, government, and beyond.
Resources
EIC for Williamson County Schools
WILCO Awards
CCTE
-
Spencer: Dr. Jeremy Qualls. Thank you and welcome to Signature Required.
Jeremy: Thank you so much for having me.
Spencer: You have a tie for the longest title I think, that I have introduced on our podcast and we've been doing this for a while now. So you are the [00:01:00] executive director for the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center and the college career and technical education programs at Williamson County Schools in Tennessee.
Jeremy: That is correct.
Carli: Say it 10 times fast. I can't, yeah.
Spencer: How long is your business card? Like, are you card stock, like full?
Jeremy: We get it down to letters, right? So we try to shorten it up to CCTE and EIC. But when you say those things, everybody's like, what does that even mean? So sometimes we have to spell it out.
Spencer: So for those that are not visually watching us, we're in a different spot than our normal studio. So. Tell us where we're sitting right now.
Jeremy: You are sitting in the middle of the Entrepreneurship Innovation Center, which we call the EIC here for Williamson County. We are so fortunate to have this space.
Jeremy: It's roughly 15,000 square feet. It's an incubator space for kids to come that are students of Williamson County schools. They have to apply and interviewed even be in the program, and we have grown the program from 70 kids to a wait list of about 300 to even get in and try to build their business.[00:02:00]
Spencer: I had never heard of this facility. I am born and raised here in Tennessee. I live about 12 minutes away from where we're sitting right now. And it's amazing to me just to sit here and see what is happening in this facility. So for those that have never heard of it, help us just understand the mechanics and the structure.
Spencer: So who owns this place? How do you get to go here? Just walk us through some of the very basics for someone that's never heard of this and wonders if it's even relevant for them to listen to the rest of this.
Jeremy: Yeah, that's a great question. We hear that all the time. People are like, where is this? What is this?
Jeremy: Didn't even know. This actual building here is on the campus of Franklin High School, which in the annex building. And 40 plus years ago, this used to be the vocational training building for the school system. And all the kids that were doing those programs came here. And then Columbia State actually bought it roughly 15 to 20 years ago and operated out of this space until they built their new [00:03:00] facility.
Jeremy: And then our leadership was on a trip in Colorado and saw an incubator classroom in a high school. And Dr. Mike Looney at that time was the superintendent came back and said, we I know what we're gonna do with this space. We're gonna retro this space to make an incubator. And I think it was one of the best ideas in public ed I've ever seen.
Jeremy: And, once the doors opened we had kids applying. Coming in from all 10 high schools and it was roughly like 70 kids, like I said earlier. Now. The word of mouth through the WCS population is here. The external side is what we're still working on, making sure people know about what this building is and what it does.
Jeremy: So technically, Williamson County Schools owns this building and owns this program. We have four teachers that we call facilitators that are on WCS payroll. And the building is the program is o open for Williamson County students presently right now.
Spencer: All 10 high schools. All 10 high schools.
Spencer: Schools. You don't have to go to Franklin High here, all
Jeremy: schools. That's correct. You don't have to go. We provide transportation. You can drive yourself or you can walk if you're willing to do so from Franklin High. And, the [00:04:00] program grew so fast. I don't think we were ready for it, actually, for the growth to happen that quickly.
Jeremy: And then we started thinking about how do we further the footprint? Because the bigger the footprint, the more people know
The
Jeremy: more people know, the more people that come here, the more people that come here, the more opportunities to get mentors and even private funding right now.
Jeremy: Everything that, that, the seed funding and angel investments are all privately donated from businesses, indoor individuals. And the kids actually get an opportunity in the year. We have a Shark Tank event where they get to pitch for funding and then we have a prototype fund as well that kids tap into to build their prototypes.
Jeremy: But we started looking at how do we further our footprint? So we started asking the middle school principals, Hey, we're looking at potentially growing this program to an eighth grade program that we call mx. And before I could get off that stage, I had three principals say, I wanna do it. We now have, starting next year, eight programs at the middle school level.
Jeremy: That will be starting, including a program at Franklin Special, which is not a part of the Williamson County District, [00:05:00] but they feed into the Williamson County District. So we have eight eighth grade MX programs with one fifth grade program coming online next year as well. So you think about it, we have adults from the private sector feed feeding in mentoring these students at the high school, our high school kids pay it forward to the middle school kids and so forth, so that we have this farm system of entrepreneurs and design thinkers coming through these programs, eager and willing to come to this place and make their dreams a reality.
Carli: So what are you teaching in your MX classes? What are you teaching here? We had the privilege of getting a tour and our daughter is with us and her, she was like, oh, what are we going to do? You know, it, we drag her all kinds of things.
Carli: And I saw the light bulb go off in her eyes when she saw all of the access to tools and different. Capabilities that you have here, and she's like, wow, this is really cool. But how are you preparing students to even begin to use the resources that you have available? That's
Jeremy: a great question. We start with end of mind, and the end of [00:06:00] mind is this, we know that 0.001 chance might have a viable product.
Jeremy: I think that number's actually grown in the last two years, believe it or not. But we, that's not the end goal. The end goal in this place is to have soft skills. The ability to think creatively, to be able to network. That's the main goal, right? The main goal is to have a student that, that, may have not a lot of confidence to be able to talk to people to come in and before they leave this program, look at you straight in the eye, shake your hand and say, I'm gonna give you a 32nd pitch, which is huge. Moving forward, going out. But here in this facility, we have a podcasting studio.
Jeremy: We have a prototyping studio upstairs in the fabrication lab. And we go through, actually Barbara joins, one of our main facilitators here. Had a great idea this year, and we went to we do team building in the first month when they first get here, because you could imagine sitting in a cohort of 75.
Jeremy: To a hundred kids from 10 different buildings. It's the most diverse population in Williamson County. They're coming here to [00:07:00] one location and not always are you gonna be in a situation where you're with people that are from a different school, different thought processes, different backgrounds, right? So then we send them over to Goodwill.
Jeremy: They have $7 and 30 minutes and they have to go and bring stuff back. And the upscale project's the first thing they do, and they have to utilize the tools up there. They have to do. And we do module training of, have you ever held a screwdriver before you ever done a screw gun before? You ever done a heat press before?
Jeremy: So they go through those things in the first couple of months and then they actually create an upscale project where they take things from goodwill and we do a showcase and people come in and vote on who the winners are. And some of our kids have actually. Changed and pivoted to a business that they formulated off of that as an example, we had a kid that took old records, took the heat gun upstairs and folded 'em into bowls, and then all of a sudden he has sold 50 to a hundred of those in the first two months of being here.
Jeremy: It's just small things like that. It gets those creative juices flowing.
Spencer: Dr. Quas, one of the other mechanical pieces that I just am curious about.
Spencer: 'cause [00:08:00] we have a lot of educators across the country that listen to our program, that see this and are still just wondering like, how do the kids have time to come here during the school day? If we have Williamson County parents listening in, how do I get my kids into this program and what's that process like?
Jeremy: That’s a great question.
Jeremy: We have annual open houses twice a year, and it's like standing room only. It's pretty interesting to see and people coming in and ask some questions. Then we have actually the interview and. The application process. But before that happens it's one of those things where the word of mouth has picked up for us tremendously to get here.
Jeremy: But you have to be willing to sacrifice something to get here because there's a travel time involved. Then there's the actual class time involved. So what we do is you have a choice of giving up your cafeteria time for that travel time to come here. That's the middle of the day. Those kids usually use our transportation methods and ride the bus and get over here.
Jeremy: We have a policy where [00:09:00] you know, if you want to do DoorDash or you wanna get something to eat, we treat this just like adults. That's the thing that we hear the most is you treat us like adults. That's what we love this. So good. You know what, hey, if you wanna get something to eat, you wanna get a cup of coffee, whatever, do your thing, right?
Jeremy: We're not gonna stifle that process. And, but the majority of our kids give up a study hall. Okay. They give up a study hall for travel time. They actually take their class period here, and then that travel time that study hall split into two, getting here and getting back.
So
Jeremy: you have to give up something.
Jeremy: But then we have another option, which is a seven o'clock cohort in the first of the morning. That's before school even starts
Spencer: start at 7:00 AM That's correct. All right. That really tests your commitment.
Jeremy: And it's one of our first to fill up.
Carli: I was gonna say too, if you have athletes that wanna come here, that would be tricky. And you don't want it to be either or. 'cause this is leadership training, but so is athletic.
Jeremy: Absolutely. We don't have we do not have afterschool programming currently, or a cohort rather after school.
Jeremy: That's gonna change in 26 when we open up our, a new innovation hub and we're looking at those things. But right [00:10:00] now, those athletes or those AP students that, you know, we love to tout. We have the perfect ACT score, kids that come through here. And we have the kids that quite honestly could be struggling financially and emotionally.
Jeremy: We have all, everything in between. And we love that about that because this gives them the opportunity to be around students that are not like themselves and the empathy that we have to train here and the empathetic situations, which I'm looking at these shoes, which is a great story off the backside of that, B but kids getting the opportunity to be around people that are not like themselves.
Jeremy: There's a skill involved in that. How do you get those people to work on your teams together when you might not have like-minded ideas or situation. So it's really interesting. There's an educational component to every. Aspect leadership. I love how you said that there is a leadership culture here, that you are building future leaders in every opportunity in here, whether it's a conversation with another kid or I'm trying to find out who can run the sewing machine.
Jeremy: There's an educational component to all of it.
Spencer: Carli and I are so passionate about entrepreneurship there's [00:11:00] something distinct about entrepreneurship that. Casts a net that brings in people that haven't always succeeded at other things. There's a reason why disproportionately the number of dyslexic individuals are successful entrepreneurs.
Spencer: They have been trained to think differently and it's been out of necessity. They've had to survive in school. And they may not be valedictorian, but they're smart and they can pivot. And those are skills that work well in entrepreneurship. And it's why we wanted to highlight this facility so much because this is across the board what Tennesseans and what our country see as adding value and education.
Spencer: Like you learn skills here that you're gonna use in real life, whether you become an entrepreneur or whether you work for an [00:12:00] entrepreneur. And I just love to. Have that come to life in the school system and model it for other organizations that are saying, how can we do more of what's being done here?
We have five public school systems and three private school systems that are coming on board as a proof of concept to show that when the tide rises, so do the boats.
Jeremy: And we are riding this tsunami wave. Either you surf it or you're gonna be swept up under it. Yeah. And right now, Nashville is the place to do entrepreneurship, innovation, all of the things in FinTech biotech, as you well know. So why not show on the K 12 level of education that it's a great foundation to be a landing spot for potential entrepreneurs and companies here in the mid-state area.
Spencer: Because you've got a couple hundred kids here, but your wait list is literally a couple thousand.
Jeremy: Well, it could be right now at the high school? Yes. At the high school level, it's it's three to 500. But we're [00:13:00] not taking into account to these middle school programs are roughly 300 to location.
Jeremy: You've got seven. So, I mean, it's, the touch is massive, but then when you start talking about the mid-state area, like you're talking about, it will definitely be in the thousand floors. All said and done.
Carli: I wonder if you could share with us some of the stories, because we like talk and shop, right?
Carli: We wanna talk business, we wanna talk about school systems, how we can continue to grow and make this better. It's, I feel like we could sit here and chat all day, but I think what people really connect with are, can you tell us about a couple of your kids? I see some shoes here. Yeah, we got some cool looking shoes here.
Carli: I would really like to know where I get a pair of these. What are they? So let's
Jeremy: start with the shoes. So the shoes, there was a moment in time when in year one when we took a took the place or started the place here. We were thinking, how do we do more leadership training holistically versus the individual projects, right?
Jeremy: They get in their teams, they get in their projects, and they kind of put their head down. and They start going. I was like, okay, using the Google 80/20 model, 80% of Google [00:14:00] employees, 80% of the day, they're working on what they're getting paid to do, right? 20% of the day, Google encourages them to do whatever, take a nap, go for a run.
Jeremy: And what's, what they started, what happening, what they started seeing was side hustles. So let's think. You may go to Centennial High School, I may go to Franklin, you may go to Ravenwood. It's the only time of the day that we're together
Jeremy: we started thinking, how do we take how do we give them opportunities and time built in to have those side hustles happen? Right? So we started year one. I was like, let's just take one day a week and where they're gonna do side hustles. Let them go to somebody else and let them start establishing those side hustles.
Jeremy: Well, it didn't have any guardrails. And that's what we do. s So we backed up, we pivoted, say, alright, how can we do a holistic project that is meaningful?
Jeremy: So enter the Tennessee Titans Burke Nile, CEO of Tennessee. Titans lives right down the road, dropping his daughter off of Franklin. One day a mutual friend of mine Darren joins said, Hey, I know him. Let's go meet with him. So we got a chance to go meet and I pitched to him, I said, Hey, I've got this idea.
Jeremy: I've got this entrepreneurial center. I wanna do some things. So he said, you know what? I [00:15:00] dropped my kid off there, really didn't know what was in the building. I said, well, come on. He said, I'll come in a couple weeks. I thought, there's no chance this guy's coming.
No chance.
Jeremy: Not only did he come, he brought his entire VP Suite.
Jeremy: Wow. Oh cool. And we sat in that room right behind us, the podcasting studio, which was not a podcasting studio at the time for three hours. And he's like, what do you wanna do? I said, anything, let us work. But you have to understand, these kids are so high end. It can't feel like babysitting. It can't feel like a shadowing.
Jeremy: It's none of that. I want a real life project that they can create and they pitch to y'all and y'all be the sharks. So what is a problem that you have? He said, easy. We don't have a generational fan base. I said, okay. What do you mean? He said, kids aren't coming. I said, well, I hope y'all have thick skin, because at that time we had a hundred kids out here in class.
Jeremy: I said, come on. So we walked out, we got on stage. I grabbed a microphone. I said how many of y'all been to Tennessee Titans games this year? Two hands go up. Whoa. And I go, what? What? What's going [00:16:00] on here? Why aren't we going to games? Hands shoot up. I said, go. It's not Friday night in Wilco. So if you've never been to a football game in Wilco, it is, it's a sight to behold.
Spencer: Yeah, it's incredible. It's,
Jeremy: it's themed. Everybody shows up. Social event. Awesome. Right? Hands keep going up. It's boring. Too long, too expensive. Then my guy. He held his hand up in the back and he uttered the three most powerful words I've ever heard in public education. He said, your TikTok sucks.
And I
Jeremy: went, I, if there was something I could crawl under on the stage, at that point in time, I would've crawled under.
Jeremy: I was like, this is embarrassing. I can't believe you said that. His name is Will cor. My low wheel. To this day, he was my project. Right? He was the one that came in. We all have draft picks when we're picking who comes. He was mine and I'm sitting there looking at him. I know daggers are coming. I was like, I can't believe you said that.
Jeremy: Standing next to me is a gentleman named Surf Melendez. He is the vice president of what I'm gonna let you guess creative. His number one job for the
Carli: Titans.
Jeremy: His number one job for the Titans is to push the button on TikTok. [00:17:00] And I'm going, oh, I can't believe he said it. Surf is one of my most favorite people I believe I've ever met.
Jeremy: One of the most humble human beings ever touches me on the shoulder and says, can I see the microphone? I was like, sure. This is really about to go off the rail. And he looked at that young man, he said, I wanna hear more. And I thought for a second, hang on, do we have lightning in a bottle here? And Will said, let me show you what I'm talking about and Will goes into this mode.
Jeremy: This is what I saw firsthand, but he had not shown it since he'd been in the program. He goes through and he said, you see this is a football player. We care nothing about. You see this. This is Steven. We don't care about that. He got to the third one and it was an alligator with a football in his mouth at spring training.
Jeremy: He said, this is the content we're looking for. Yeah. And at that point in time, surf looks at Burke, the CEO and says, how come we've never asked this before? I'm getting chill bumps while I'm telling this story. Because at that moment, something changed in all of us. We realized, number one, unbelievable talent that we had not tapped into yet.
Jeremy: Number two, they had [00:18:00] realized, okay, let's hear more about this. So we come back in the room, he says, I'll tell you what we're gonna do. We're gonna come back in three weeks. I'm gonna let every one of these cohorts pitch we're gonna take and see what comes out of it. Great. So we come back, we called it Titans Thursday.
Jeremy: So every Thursday we got the kids in there. The teamwork that came off of this is indescribable. I mean, they were excited. They had all this thing. They worked up their pitches. They argued at first who's gonna do the actual pitch. You know, they all couldn't be on stage.
Jeremy: Two weeks later, they came back. Every cohort pitched. It was remarkable the things of what they wanted to do. The titans liked it so much. They said, not only are we going to deploy some of these things, you're gonna do it for us and we're going to give you the December Jacksonville, Jaguar game. It is your game.
Jeremy: So what they did, they gave us a thousand tickets to sell. They sold the tickets in 48 hours. The kids were responsible for all the jumbotron content.
Jeremy: Pre-game, halftime, post-game entertainment, all of it. They had to shoot the [00:19:00] information. They had to get it all up. The most important thing off this was five days prior. They were responsible for content creation of reaching which audience? Their audience. You see that flag above us right here?
Jeremy: Spirit Week was born, that was five years ago, and ever since they've been doing it, they had to all, they had to ask the NFL permission for a manifest increase, and they built it. The very first NFL student section. We sold a thousand tickets, wristbands, all kids. Halftime Entertainment was a high school band.
Jeremy: All of our flag runners led the players out. They had a a kickoff tailgate.. It was incredible. That was year one.
Spencer: A theme that I hear all throughout that story of success is mentorship and the importance of the students being able to come in and bring something raw, bring real feedback, bring a real experience that then someone that has had a couple laps around the track can take that, refine [00:20:00] it, and then have something produced like what we're sitting here, a legacy for the Titans.
Spencer: Talk a little bit about mentorship here at the center. So if there's a successful entrepreneur that is listening that says, I'm passionate about this, I'm looking for a way to get plugged in, can they get plugged in a facility like
Jeremy: this? Absolutely. That that, this is the game changer for us here when you have a hundred plus mentors that these kids can tap into.
Jeremy: We have one day a month set aside for programming for mentors. They come in whether you have 30 minutes or you have all day, and everybody's like, you know, I got 30 minutes. I'll come in and sit at a table, listen to an elevator pitch and say, that's a terrible idea, or that's a great idea. And that's what we talk like here.
Jeremy: This is no lie. Yeah. We tell our mentors do not sugarcoat it. Kids here do not wanna spend six months on a project for you to come back in the end and say, yeah, that probably wasn't a good idea. Yeah. Tell us the project. Yeah. There's no
Spencer: participation ribbon. Yeah,
Jeremy: exactly. And they know that. So, our mentors come in and they'll say, yeah, I got 30 minutes and you look up and they've been here all day.
Carli: I prep [00:21:00] for this, I read that you think you're about to have your first million dollar kid. I do. What does that mean? I do. We don't wanna
Jeremy: jinx it. I'm putting pressure on her. But
Carli: you're hoping to have your first million dollar kid. What does that mean?
Jeremy: Yeah. So Abigail Goddard is a junior, so we have her for another year.
Jeremy: She came through the most interesting point, I think it shows the power of the program. She'll be our first five-year kid. She came through the MX program, so she got year one under her belt as an eighth grader. she'll be one of our first five year kids that come through the program.
Jeremy: She has created a a spiked drink detection key chain, So, the product in herself is pretty simple. It's a key chain. Version one was a plastic and a silicone key chain that has a test strip. And this goes to tell you her level of thinking.
Jeremy: She had come up with a group out of the UK that has the actual test strip, and she has been working back and forth with them and ordering through them. Their third party third party tested and vetted. So it's actually, it's just a key chain with those test strips. You drop a drop of your drink on the test strip, and 15 seconds later it tells you [00:22:00] whether it's not been spiked by pretty much any drug known to man.
Jeremy: Wow. And it is the most interesting concept. and today and it's, it, you know, she's looking at how do you conceal that? You don't want to openly say, Hey, I'm testing your drink. Obviously there is a a an interesting dynamic socially that I had not thought about. That if I'm testing my drink and me and you happen to meet the first time, that could be slightly offensive.
Jeremy: So it, yeah, it's concealed either in your pocket or however you can take it. And you can do it at any given time to test those. And and as you know, that has had an uptick in society specific to Nashville's not immune to it, and the college scene. So she thought, here's the problem, and I've got the solution.
Jeremy: and through this, she has got every box checked of what you want in an entrepreneur.
Spencer: So tell us about the new facility, some of the technical components that are coming online, because I think that the accomplishments that you have here in this 10 or 15,000 square feet is really [00:23:00] something, but you're about to put that on a whole new level.
Spencer: So tell us what's on its way.
Jeremy: We are super excited about this. Three years ago, governor Lee announced the innovative school models grant. So the formula of the grant was a million dollars per high school and 500,000 for every middle school. Two things in there that piqued my interest. The moment that they announced this grant was that you, if you're a system like us, it has multiple school, you can pull the money, and secondly, you could do construction.
Jeremy: Now, when I immediately heard that, I was like, that's exactly that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna leave a legacy. Most people, when you take this money and you apply for the money, it was completely reimagining what school looks like, your partnerships, all of those things.
Jeremy: So I'm thinking, okay, what is 2.0 for us in the ESC? So being over college, career and technical education, we have roughly 140 teachers. We're responsible for across all 10 high schools. We have 33, 33 programs of study, from cybersecurity to culinary arts, to [00:24:00] drone technologies, all of that. So I thought, what are some programs that we don't currently have that we can do here and use the EIC Foundation blueprint to get kids from all 10 high schools to do that.
Jeremy: But furthermore, it's not just about learning. Those skill sets, it's about the entrepreneurial mindset. So we're gonna couple the two. So in August of 26, we applied, got 15 and a half million dollars and we had to petition the state to use a hundred percent of those funds because they u originally had a 10% gap on the build process.
Jeremy: And I was like, we wanna use all of it. So I got commissioner Reynolds on the on the Zoom, and we talked through it. She's like, that's exactly what the spirit of this is. So we're gonna take that and we're building a 25,000 square foot facility next door. It's gonna have aviation. So a kid can literally get their private pilot license if they've done appropriately by 16.
Jeremy: Wow. Or go to college and do a commercial pilot. So everything that we did in this building next door was strategic. Number one, [00:25:00] we're gonna have a for-profit company in there called Hawkins Flight Academy.
Secondly is cybersecurity and artificial intelligence.
Jeremy: We've had, I can't tell you, the companies that have, are circling around it from Oracle to Cisco to some local companies. Trace three is another one that have been involved in the process in Tennessee Tech, Columbia State, and Vanderbilt. All three are helping drive that program.
Jeremy: Our third program is with Thompson, caterpillar. Thompson, caterpillar headquarters are in Nashville. We do not have a lot of traditional vocational programming in Williamson County schools. That was one thing that Isaac, we're gonna have one in this building. We wanna reach every kid.
Spencer: Yep. And tell 'em Thompson Caterpillar. What do they do?
Jeremy: Heavy machinery. So we're gonna have that program.
Jeremy: And it's also gonna house, the first ever tcat, Tennessee Colleges of Applied Technology. So in other words, if a kid wanted to go through tcat, they could use the Hope Scholarship to pay for it, and they could get a degree in those applied technologies and go directly to work. So that's gonna be in that building.
Jeremy: And then last is our hospitality and tourism [00:26:00] program. It is a two style program. We're gonna have a facility with a scratch kitchen in it where kids are developing recipe items
Jeremy: those kids can develop. Scratch items, sell it. And then there's the hospitality side of things. We have a mock hotel lobby, a MoCo mock hotel room. Their job is to handle all events in that space in real time, and then do those micro internships with our partners.
Jeremy: Last is our fire management, where we have a partnership with the City of Franklin. They're gonna be training, their entire process is on boots on the ground with fire. The fire department of City of Franklin. So that's a whole lot of information I threw at you. The last part of that is those kids will come over here and take at least one entrepreneurial class.
Jeremy: I stole that idea from Purdue University. They do the same thing for their engineers. These kids will go over there and explore and they'll be a perfect marriage of both.
Carli: At our foundation, Dr. Qualls, we have done a little bit of research and we found that 95% of Tennesseans think it's important to teach financial literacy [00:27:00] to children and educational institutions.
Carli: And when I was watching some of the video materials you put together for your program in prep for this, the number one thing I heard kids talk about was they learn the financial side of what it means to run a p and l. Know their economics, know what their profit margin is. Can you talk a little bit about how you bake financial literacy into what you're teaching these kids?
Jeremy: Yeah, sure. Year one there's some heavy financial literacy components in the curriculum itself. When I tell you it's one thing to teach it, learn it, but it's one thing that it's another thing that you have to actually act it out. Is. The cool part about being here. So when you talk about those financial literacy models of just building customer personas and talking about LLCs and talking about nonprofit status and what it takes to run those and NDAs and all of those things, that those things actually happen here, which is the most interesting.
Jeremy: When they go to get their prototype funds to build a prototype for the final pitch, they have to [00:28:00] fill out purchase orders, they have to fill out requisitions. They actually work with our staff and our bookkeepers to pull those funds and then to reconcile that all on the back end and understand that, hey, we can't, you know, there's a lot of stipulations in that and they have to find work around.
Jeremy: So those stipulations, I don't know of a better way to learn those things other than actually doing them. You can role play all day and you can talk about good things and bad things and actually crashes in the financial world. But. To actually have to pull that out. And then obviously talk about your windows and your margins.
Jeremy: Those are baked into their final pitch. Whether they make our final pitch or not, their final grade every year is to get up and do a final pitch. And all of that is baked in to say, this is where I started here is cost of goods, total attainable markets. All of that stuff is discussed within those slides on those decks.
Jeremy: Every single time.
Spencer: Yeah. It's all fun and games when it's academic textbook, but it's a whole other thing when it's your bank account.
Spencer: Exactly. And it's moving up and down.
Spencer: Dr. Quas, can [00:29:00] you talk a little more on the finance side?
Spencer: So Carli and I, entrepreneurially, we have to manage the books and I just look from the outside here and I see a lot going on here and I wonder how much of this. Is a product of a prosperous Williamson County school system that funds this place and keeps it going. And how much is that separate to where you're dependent upon private fundraising, private sponsors?
Spencer: So help us to the extent that you can, how much of this is a product of the wounds and county side, and how much of this is a product of Dr. Qualls going out there and hustling and finding people to make hustle this thing go hustle every Thursday? Side
Jeremy: hustle? I've been told no so many times that they didn't register anymore.
Jeremy: I tell my wife that all the time now. That is a, I Thank you for asking that question. That's a great question because most people that we bring in, and they come here to look at it, educational chambers of commerce. They'll bring a bus of a hundred people and [00:30:00] say, Hey, we wanna come see this.
Jeremy: And then go back and they're like, well, you're in a fluent community. Lemme remind you something, number one. Yes, we are sitting in an in fluid community. We're lucky and fortunate enough to have a great sandbox to play in and go, but nothing is on the taxpayer books in this place other than the fact that we have our teacher salaries.
Jeremy: That's it. Wow. There is no taxpayer money going to seed funds. There's no taxpayer going to prototyping funds if we have to have a new piece of equipment. We do have some funding at the local level that we look at doing those, but we usually fundraise or talk to people about donations and in kind on those things.
Jeremy: So everything that we do here operationally is literally beating the bushes, bringing people in and people saying, this is an and because the minute they come in and they spend 30 minutes with our kids, they're like, how can I help? Well, the only way you can really help is we need you to come and give your expertise.
Jeremy: Well, no. I wanna go deeper than that. Well, if I give you money, what does it do? It goes straight into one [00:31:00] fund bucket. It's nothing for kids, that's it. And people usually pretty quick get their checkbooks out after that. But we always need more just like anything else, right?
Spencer: That's a great answer. I love that. And it's really close to. Carli and i's own heart posture and entrepreneurs, we say this often, don't forget their roots and all that it takes to change. The trajectory of a community is one entrepreneur being successful, and then they come back and they create jobs and they donate their time, they donate their money, and it alters the course.
Spencer: And I'm so excited to see what you produce outta here. I have a feeling that while it may be your first millionaire student, it will not be your last in the trajectory you're going. So, one way that we like to wrap up each of our podcasts is I have three short fill in the blank sentences to read to you, and you can just fill in the blank with a word or a short phrase that finishes the thought.
Spencer: [00:32:00] Okay. So you ready? All right. Here we go. If I could tell every high school student one thing about entrepreneurship, it would be blank.
Jeremy: If I could tell every high school student about entrepreneurship, that's the most important, is how to fail forward.
Spencer: Ooh, I like that. Okay. I need more than a short phrase then let's fail forward.
Jeremy: Fail often, and fail forward. It's the only way you know how to learn. We embrace failure in this place.
Jeremy: Yeah. We don't chastise it.
Spencer: Yeah. And I like too that the students have to reapply each year to be here. Yes,
Jeremy: that's right.
Spencer: And that's really an incredible thing because it's hard enough to get in here, but true to form and true to entrepreneurship, you're here and you gotta keep your place here.
Spencer: You gotta earn it every year.
Jeremy: Yeah. It's not for everybody.
Spencer: Yeah. I mean, it's not for everybody. In five years, I hope students look back on the EIC. And say blank
Jeremy: in five [00:33:00] years when students look back on the EIA, they always say is the most impactful educational component in their life.
Carli: Yeah.
Carli: You're well on your way, I think.
Spencer: Yeah. Yeah. And here's the last one. The biggest misconception about career and technical education is blank.
Jeremy: The biggest misconception, and let me stop and say I'm thankful for that. You asked that the biggest misconception about career and technical education is for students that are not going to college.
Jeremy: It could not be further from the truth.
Spencer: Give us another sentence on that.
Jeremy: Learn a skill on our time and our dime and make millions off of it.
Spencer: Yeah. AI is not gonna be able to replace being able to turn a wrench on a piece of machinery that's broken down.
Jeremy: It's not. A lot of kids get put in a box too.
Jeremy: Hey, he's gonna be a doctor. He's gonna, she's gonna be X, Y, Z. Well, they think that until they actually get to it. Now think about being able to do it on our time prior to going to college and wasting money and time.
Think
Jeremy: about that and going through a program and say, you know, I thought it was one thing and it's [00:34:00] not.
Jeremy: I'm gonna shift. There's nothing wrong with pivoting. This is what we embrace in here. Fail forward. Why not do it in our time? So the biggest misconception about that is it's for those students not going to college, and it couldn't be further from the truth.
Spencer: Dr. Quas, your leadership here is evident.
Spencer: It is similar to walking into a restaurant or a shop where you can just tell the owner is present. There's just a different feel that's obvious when we walk in here that. Your fingerprints are all over this place. The culture from the kids, the culture of the staff. We love entrepreneurship. And to see this in our own community, just up the road that we had no idea about, peels back the onion on something that we wanna show a lot of other people.
Spencer: And so it's truly our privilege to get to give a little bit of a megaphone to what you're doing here, and you can count [00:35:00] on our new and enhanced involvement in the trajectory of this place going forward. 'cause this matters what you're doing here.
Jeremy: Well, I greatly appreciate that. It means a lot.
Spencer: Dr. Jeremy Qualls runs the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center next to Franklin High for Williamson County Schools. It was a really great podcast and a great guest that is doing things that matter.
Spencer: Entrepreneurship. As we have traveled, the state makes an impact upon communities. And there's nothing else like it.
Spencer: Not only in Tennessee, but almost nationwide. He's leading a program there that I think is a beacon of light for other school systems to travel to Franklin and say, how is this happening? And what are you doing differently? Because it's showing results and people are noticing.
Carli: Yeah. [00:36:00] I really appreciated the part of our conversation that he gets a little bit of pushback, right?
Carli: Of saying, well, you're in an affluent county. Not everyone has these resources. And we were even talking afterwards and he is like, gosh, if you have a couple of whiteboards, you can stick to any wall, literally any wall. You can have an innovation center. And I really appreciated how approachable he was about the concept.
Carli: Yes, they are blessed to have the space that they have, but it's not unapproachable. You can really get the same results with any type of space,
Spencer: any community that you're in. Has successful entrepreneurs inside of it. They may not be Fortune 500 entrepreneurs, but a successful entrepreneur, many of them can be found in every community.
Spencer: And so to be able to reach out to those locally in the community to say, be a part of our school system. bring your mentorship, maybe bring a couple dollars, but in any case, bring the lessons that you've learned so [00:37:00] that way the kids that are trying to decide what is next for them after high school, get exposed to one of the most powerful forces for change that exists in our economy, which is entrepreneurship.
Spencer: I've
Carli: said it before and I'll say it again. Everyone thinks and talks the most about these big leaders, right? Fortune 500 companies. As you said, we, everyone spends more time talking about their president than they do talking about their local elected officials. But the business owners in your community, the entrepreneurs in your town are the people making changes and making differences for real people, period.
Carli: And I think activating local leadership and helping people understand it is every bit as important. Maybe you don't get the name recognition, but to the people you're impacting, you are everything. And that's what I think that this center is doing. It's empowering these kids to go back and be local leaders.
Carli: And I don't care if they start Fortune 500 [00:38:00] companies or small businesses or run a household really effectively, these skills are transferrable and will change all of their communities, period.
Spencer: Something else that was neat as we toured the facility where there were a lot of staff that were present there that didn't have any entrepreneurial background.
Spencer: And your first instinct would say, well, if you haven't been an entrepreneur, how can you be part of the entrepreneurship and innovation center? Yeah. How do you teach
Carli: it? Right. Yeah.
Spencer: And what was so neat is that a lot of the staff possess a deep knowledge about a certain skill. So it may be about injection molding, or it may be about 3D printing or it may be about architecture.
Spencer: Never have they used it entrepreneurially, but it is equipping the kids with a skill that they can then use entrepreneurially. And I think that's a really interesting component to making an [00:39:00] entrepreneurship and innovation center feel more possible in that you don't have to have a deep bench of people that have.
Spencer: Understood and taken the scars of entrepreneurship. You need people that can teach skills, some of them trade skills so that way the kids can learn that skill and then go apply it in the pursuit of whatever their own interest or business is.
Carli: You know, my favorite thing about the team there was they weren't afraid to fail.
Carli: And they weren't afraid to let the kids fail. They, our daughter, Zoe, actually went and toured the center with us, which was really fun and I saw some of those light bulb moments for her, and we were looking at their candle making apparatus. I don't really even know what it's called, but it was the melting machine to make this, and apparently a kid wanted to make a coffee scented candle as you do.
Carli: And while it was on with hot wax. Poured hot coffee into said apparatus and the teacher showed us it exploded. Like they had to [00:40:00] repaint, they had to rebuild around it. But she was showing me where some of the like tarnish was still in the cracks and she was so proud that they learned, Hey, you can't pour hot liquid in the wax melter.
Carli: But that level of joy at failing forward, which was something we talked about was really cool.
Spencer: That's really good. I like that one.
Spencer: One other thing that Dr. Qualls talked about that stuck with me was that a number of students in the program are ones that have not found homes in any other place. They're not the most athletic, perhaps they're not the smartest. Perhaps they haven't fit in socially. Perhaps something has.
Spencer: Led them to search more than their fellow students that are going through high school. And I wouldn't go back to high school for all the money in the world.
Carli: I know. It's like why you work every day so you never have to go back to school.
Spencer: That's exactly right. And seeing the [00:41:00] recognition that there's something about successful entrepreneurship that caters to the person that never quite fit in anywhere else.
Spencer: And I really relate to that because I was nowhere near the smartest person at my school. I was nowhere near the most athletic person in my school. We see, although I'm not dyslexic, 90% of people with severe dyslexia turn out to be entrepreneurs. And I just have to imagine that people that are dyslexic have had to always do things the hard way.
Spencer: They haven't excelled quite as quickly. They've had to build a resiliency and a work ethic that doesn't cater well to getting straight A's in school or being valedictorian. But gosh, does it ever No shade,
Carli: no shade on those people.
Spencer: But gosh, does it ever translate well into being a [00:42:00] successful entrepreneur?
