Lisa Illingworth — Batman, CEO, Educator, Mom and did I mention Batman?

But it is yet another edition of What's Involved. Thank you for tuning in and listening, almost depending on when you get to listen to this. Almost at, in South Africa at least, level three of lockdown. Not something I thought I'd ever say in my life. And my special guest, it's joining me on the line, CEO and head Batman at Future Proof SA. It's Lisa Illingwood. Hello, Lisa. David, if we were close enough, I would give you one of those awkward hugs, but just because you know that I'm Batman, like that I have such a grin on my face right now. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Good. Well, that's just, you know, that's just part of my natural stalker tendencies that I have. But Future Proof SA, let's talk a little bit. You were on the show last year. We spoke earlier and you said around about September, we had you on the show. And we're talking about Future Proof SA, what it is, what it does, how you do, why you do. And you played some cards very close to your vest, which we're going to get on to just now. But just a brief synopsis of Lisa, who is Lisa and where does Lisa come from? A land far, far away. No, I was an educator in my earlier former years and then left education in terms of leaving the classroom, but reformatted myself and my purpose and my vision and my business towards entrepreneurial education.

And that's essentially what Future Proof does. Future Proof catalyzes entrepreneurial thinking and action in kids from as young now as the age of five. It was six, but with the cards that you mentioned earlier, we've now started being able to tap into younger markets and getting kids to think and act entrepreneurially from a younger age so that when they hit their midlife, as I want to say, like you and I have, then they're not learning these entrepreneurial lessons then and taking their first entrepreneurial steps at a later age when the school fees are that much higher. So that was the vision and that's the purpose of what Future Proof does. I'm not sure about this midlife thing that you mentioned with you and I. Me certainly, but I mean, you're still a spring chicken, right? I don't know. The way I live my life in terms of risk adversity, I might still be halfway. We've had some very interesting times and I mean, nobody's shortcoming. I'm still battling to get my head around this coronavirus. Everybody's talking about this and that and the next thing and pivoting and doing your business and most of us have had and certainly in terms of our business, two months ago, everything just came to a grinding halt and it was thank you very much.

Thanks for playing. Have a nice day. Stay at home. You are a single mom, two daughters, I believe. Am I correct? You are. There's not another one. These are very high. There's not another one lurking. It's just the two. As an educator, how has it been for you so far? Sure, but context switching, that's become my buzzword is context switching, going from putting on your mom hat to putting on your educator hat to putting on your CEO hat. Sometimes they're all stacked one on top of the other because you're yelling instructions across the house for which exercise to complete whilst your staff look deer eyed at you through their zoom lenses. That's effectively what it's been and I think that's what's been the most tiring or the most consuming of mental bandwidth is the hats and which hat do I wear when and am I actually giving any of those hats any justice because there's no deep work that any one of us can do and entrepreneurs will understand this term deep work where you can get stuck into your flow, you can get somewhere, you create momentum, you build something of significance that is so difficult to achieve right now because you are context switching every moment of the day and that's what's strained this situation for me because we leave the home, we go to our office, in the car we change hats.

Sometimes we have to go and fetch kids in the middle of the day and we change hats back again but you only ever have to wear one hat and maybe two, now you're sitting with three or four and it's really difficult. I agree with you, if I look at my morning this morning and I'm one of those people that are apparently at risk due to underlying health conditions so I've been locked down essentially what over two months now, I think I may have been out two or three times but my day today started off with obviously cleaning the house and washing dishes and hanging up washing and then keep on looking at my watch going okay, I've got to start getting my head ready at around about nine o'clock because I'm doing interviews from 9.30 this morning but I'm still at home in my home office which is okay but for me radio is what I was always, that was my thing and I always used to tell people, you can't do proper radio if you don't have bums in seats and I used to get quite snarky about people coming into the station, suddenly they couldn't anymore and it's really messed with my head and it shouldn't but it has and I think with you as well, I mean have you also experienced, you get days when you think like I know, today I'm not doing today, today I am going to guess, I'm going to have a pity party for myself and I'm going to have balloons and cake and the whole lot at my pity party and everybody must just leave me alone and I'm going to curl up in a fetal position and listen to sad songs, have you had those days?

Totally and I think also what I've done in that process of having those very, very sad days is I've allowed myself the sad days and there was a differentiator because I would not allow myself the sad days, I needed them desperately, eventually it got to tipping point and didn't want to get out of bed, stayed in bed, beat myself up the entire day for staying in bed because I wasn't being productive and I wasn't on my Udemy course or I wasn't learning how to bake banana bread or whatever it was and that just added to that burden. So eventually giving yourself permission to go you know what, today I'm not doing, thanks for playing, I actually let my team know, I was like hey guys I'm taking a mental health day and a good friend calls it a duvet day, just take a duvet day and in the UK they give people five mental health days a year where you can actually check in and leave and you can do that, we don't have that sort of system available to us, I literally took mental health days, wrote it off, I'm not being productive and I'm going to give myself permission not to be productive and just that little mental framing switch to say you can, it's okay and in fact I was talking to people the other day about it's okay to suck, like just suck, suck at being the CEO, suck at being the mom, suck at being the home schooling educator, just suck at it because quite frankly we're not always going to be on our best particularly now where there's so much being thrown at us, there's so much change, there's so much assimilation of information that we have to do that we're just tired and burnt out.

So yes, permission to suck, permission to stay in bed, have a mental health day and write it off and then pick it up the next day. My thing was when I was going through some of my bad times which I wanted to make sourdough bread, I happen to like sourdough bread and guess what, we couldn't buy flour, there was no flour, so like my therapy was just, I was done, it was me. Well I mean you saw what my therapy was with your stalker tendencies is if I'm sketching and I'm not usually in the space and time where I've got that mental ability to sit down and sketch and so I found just finding things around me that were detailed and because what happens is that when you're one side of your brain, when your left side of your brain is on all the time because we are in this where we're not actually able to get away from work in air quotes, your left brain is on all of the time. The first thing that goes is sleep always and then you're constantly thinking about problems over and over again. If you then have to find a creative outlet, you engage your right brain. The hemispheres of the brain cannot be active at the same time. So if you are actively doing sourdough bread or you're actively sketching or you're actively doing pottery or whatever it is, you're giving that left side of your brain a break.

Then you can do your mental filing, your mental processing, you can get all of that stuff in order, you know, like your squirrels at a rave. You can get them into an order and in that respect, you're giving your brain the ability to regenerate, to engage again at full capacity. But so many of us are not giving ourselves the permission to go and sketch, to go and make sourdough bread and what happens, we end up engaging our left brain all of the time. Indeed. We are chatting to Lisa Illingworth. She is the CEO and the head Batman, the bat person of Future Proof SA. When we come back, we'll continue to talk about the strange life that we're living and where Lisa is and where she sees herself. Maybe she's got some advice as well. We'll talk about that and more when we come back. Right, we're back and my special guest with me, Lisa Illingworth. I've got to say, just before the break, we were telling about you sketching. You have a talent there, I must tell you. I was very impressed, you know. When we say stalker, I didn't have to do too much of a deep dive. It was on my timeline, I'll be honest with you. I did favour it. You don't want to go too far down. Yeah, I'll just get a bit creepy then but you've got a talent for that and the thing is what I appreciated seeing what you were doing during this time and you and other people were like you kind of, did you make a conscious decision to expose yourself and go, not expose yourself like that but go listen, this is the real Lisa, okay.

I am Batman but I'm not Batman all the time and I want people to be able to see what's and all that even though I have all these hats I wear, I'm human and I do have crappy days. You know, authentic leadership is the space I like to operate from, authentic, raw, transparent. Those are all kind of key values in my value set and it's a place that I lead from and trying for me to lead from a place of where I have it all together all of the time, I'm going to slip up because that's not me. So I made a conscious decision, I think it was sort of just sort of midway through when Cyril played his +4 card, you know, his proverbial +4 card. When he played that I was like you know what, actually I'm not coping and I wanted to lead to say in this position as Batman sometimes I'm also human and sometimes the cape is in the wash. So this is who I am, I think I did a post on Facebook which was no makeup in my hoodie because hoodies make me feel comfortable and warm and secure and I've probably stolen it from someone. So those, this is who I am and leading from that place gave my team permission to do the same thing, to do scrap calls in their pyjamas as long as you know they were not holy or anything like that and they didn't kind of confuse their superhero characters, they could do that.

And then it was saying to the rest of the friends and fans around us is guys, you know, no one's really coping right now, no one knows what to do. There is no way of knowing this even I mean I went to my 93 year old grandfather and said what do I do here and he said you know what even I haven't seen this so I can't even help you here and leading from that authentic space gave everyone else around me, my team and everybody to just be themselves, to own their stuff and that is one of our values in our business, own your stuff and by me owning my stuff publicly to everybody gave everybody else the sense of safety to say you know what yeah if she feels this way then it's okay for me to feel this way too. It's amazing when you say that you went to, you said to your grandfather about this time I was chatting to Solly Crock, it was his 91st birthday yesterday and also when we were chatting I said to him you know what is this he says you know he was born in the Great Depression went through World War II, went through all of this and he can't get his head around this he said it's just it's totally unprecedented. In terms of you guys though I mean you know you've got your two daughters and you've been you know luckily you've been an educator you've been obviously trying to keep them up to date.

Schools going back Monday, we have a matric who's going back on Monday, I have mixed feelings I don't know I'm scared what do you think? I would be lying to you if I said I wasn't scared either and I was on a call with Craig Caroline who's an educational psychologist and previously Salsa principal and we were chatting to school leaders and helping support school leaders and school management on how to create positive education environments with the burden of stresses of COVID lockdown coming into the classroom, kids are bringing this stuff with them, teachers are bringing this stuff with them, how do we create positive educational experiences coming out of such a time of crisis and I'm not going to lie to you I'm scared this is and I don't want to be a fear monger and I don't want to to blow this out of proportion but as an educator I look at a classroom and I've been into some hairy classrooms you know Deep Sloot, Kai Leecher, Hanover Park where these places are overcrowded, you've got kids there who social distancing is not normal, it's not natural, it's not, we are as humans we have a fundamental need for belonging and connectedness and kids they the first thing that you do with a child when it's born what do you do?

You hold it, you touch it, you connect oxytocin is released all of those things are necessary for human health, now you're turning around and you're saying do not act in the way that you were designed and you're telling this to children you know how are we just going to be policemen standing in a classroom now you know shouting at kids left, right and center step away from your friend don't touch that put your mask on on top of that trying to then impart some kind of learning to them and playing policeman at the same time it's not natural for kids not to want to sit next to their friend hug them be close to them for the teacher to walk around and place a hand on a shoulder it's not natural for us to unlearn that behavior it's there for a reason and I worry that sending children back into an environment against their own DNA is going to result in a whole lot of other emotional and mental stresses that we have not prepared ourselves for well if you think about it I mean you make a very good point and specifically with the little ones the littlies I mean you know if I still have memories of my days in nursery school and in primary school when you went somewhere everybody held hands and you know you went to people and had a hug and you know you and now you're going to these and I think more specifically the little ones is that's what concerns me is that you know you're saying to them wear a mask all the time now it's uncomfortable and they can't really breathe properly but they're being shouted at to wear a mask then they're being told to concentrate and you know if you're older maybe you can you can get to that I mean but I've seen so many people and I've spoken to so many people that go listen I kind of you know when they now let us out and we're able to go back to whatever normal is you can't hug you can't shake hands I mean I met somebody the other day and that my instinct every bit of my body was saying reach out shake hands say hello nice to meet you and and I kind of had to stop halfway in this awkward kind of moment and then go oh and that's just me and I'm not the most sociable of people at the best of times but this is it because why because our wiring is such that physical touch releases oxytocin makes us feel connected and oxytocin is one of those good hormones you know the dopamine serotonin all of those things it's what's needed and necessary to keep our mental health in check a mental health is strained you sending kids back into an environment where they can't even get the oxytocin kick I saw a suggestion on on one of the social media channels and it had the playground with chalk demarcations of blocks of one and a half meters where kids at break can go and stand in their block and play in their block and they have to stay inside that that chalk block on the plate on the courts or on the playing field that is not normal like I mean are we setting ourselves up for for depression are we setting ourselves up for mental health issues for you know anything that's in return about talk about underlying conditions what about the mental underlying conditions that are there that are going to be exacerbated by putting them in environments that are not safe that are not stress-free where the teacher's trying to pay policemen the whole time and then not able to get that kick of oxytocin what about those underlying health issues yeah absolutely there's a bit of a bit of a bit of sort of a more on a lighter note the one thing that that I used to really love about being in a radio studio and being on air in a radio studio was that you could control your environment and and you know you could be around your environment as I'm sitting talking to you know I don't know if you heard but one of the cats decided that he would like to come and jump on the desk in front of me and rub himself up against the microphone so that wasn't that wasn't me doing curvy deep breathing actually the cat who is now in front of me on his back demanding attention while I'm supposed to be having a very serious conversation with you but that is it is a reality I might even I might even you know what let me do this I'm gonna I'm gonna take a photo of this right now of where I am and what I'm doing and of said cat and I will post it on Facebook and you can have a look at it just now because it's weird anyway so when we come back I will find out what Lisa Ellingworth has been doing she is the CEO and Batman of future proof SA and we're back talking to Lisa still have the you've heard of the cat in the mat I've now got the cat on the desk so what have you been up to Lisa because during this entire corona virus thing which nobody nobody actually saw coming certainly you launched something in the middle of all of it I know how crazy to me about that um that was okay so as an entrepreneur starting a business I you entrepreneurs when they design businesses are designing businesses out of what they want for themselves and for those around them so if some people will design lifestyle businesses that support a certain lifestyle others will design businesses that are you know businesses that are going to make a massive transformative impact and that's what future proof has always been for me is how do I create a massive transformative impact in education in South Africa and then scaling it out into the world and I think that keyword is scale and to scale a business you cannot do it off the back of a single individual and that single individual was me Batman I realized quite early on through some great mentors and some accelerator programs that if everything resided inside of me and my head the systems the process is the intellectual property I was never going to achieve what I wanted to in scale and massive transformative impact and so a year ago we started the process of decentralizing or disseminating the intellectual property that I had developed around entrepreneurship education and on top of that digitizing it so that we could maybe just get more scale and more impact but also influence the seasonality of the business which is certainly around schools so school seasonality comes in where it's term time there's exams you know teachers are are under a time famine which is the typical case and so how do we influence that seasonality with a digital channel but it was interesting because I didn't want to compromise the value base of what future proof is there to do and it's there to the catalyze entrepreneurial thinking and action and it's not a content delivery system that's what I didn't want to digitize the content and say great here is the content learn entrepreneurship by being you know being able to do a lean model canvas or a risk register that's just knowledge for the sake of knowledge and that for me serves no purpose entrepreneurs are fundamentally based in characteristics they build character traits and that's what we were trying to do was we were trying to build characteristics and character traits and the system the digital system and channel that we chose had to be able to do that too so a year ago we started that process of building a learning management system digitizing the content but at the same time being able to build in the behavioral metrics the behavioral development of traits into that system and the journey took a year and it just so happened that it was three weeks ago we pushed the go live button for future proof online and I can tell you now that I've had to drag my kids my fleas away from the screens kicking and screaming because mommy I just want to do one more quest I just want to do one more level I just want to earn a few more orbs which is the currency in the system I just want to build my superhero character a little bit more and they're learning but they're they're not even they don't even know they're learning because they're having so much fun and that feeds into what we believe entrepreneurship education is about you should be doing it you should be having so much fun that you don't even know that you're gaining the characteristics the skills and then the content of entrepreneurship so take me through I mean it sounds fascinating and it's one of the first things that I wanted to do and I saw that you guys had launched this was go I want to play with it too but take me take me through how does the how does the model work so if I'm if I'm a parent what for what age groups is this is this appropriate for so we started pitching it at the age of five and we realized that learning online is a self-paced learning journey and that's so it's it's kid-specific we've had four-year-olds come onto the system and be able to use it we've had 18 19 20 year olds go onto the system and enjoy it so we've realized that pitching it at a specific age group was almost a counterintuitive because entrepreneurship as a learning journey is cyclical it's you know it's not a linear journey and we you it you know at the tender age of 35 and me at the tender age of 23 might be learning the same things and so we gave kids the opportunity to design their own learning journeys so they can start off from about the age of three four five and that takes them through things like money orientation you know just learning about money currency credit cash value how's value ascribed and it's all in storyboard format it's all in gamified format for the little ones there's no text that they have to read because they can't read yet so it's all voiceover stuff and they can introduce two characters the other thing that we learned in entrepreneurship education is you can't be what you can't see so modeling and setting examples for kids to look up to we had to do that in a digital channel as well so in the first level there's more to the mouse and more to the mouse takes everybody through that and I used to egg the hell out of that system because I don't know if you know but more to the mouse was Mickey's original name Mickey Mouse was originally more to yeah so I used to egg the hell out of the system and I put more to me in as the first character and that's that's how it's developed is is there's characters that these kids can identify with and they take them through different lessons different quests so there's levels kids go through levels and there's quests they get allocated reward in the form of orbs the orbs get allocated at the end of each of the quests that they complete and then as they go up into the higher levels there's assignments that they have to do and we don't say assignments we just say challenges and they have to go often they have to interview a customer or they have to go and find a problem and solve it or they have to go and identify a risk and put a plan together everything in action everything demonstrated because if you're an entrepreneur you do it's not that you sit behind a textbook and you learn you actually are actively developing and doing and so that that's how it all works and it takes them from level one through to level ten so there's ten levels there's three to four quests in each of the levels and there's challenges within each of those as well and there's also behavioral metrics that we're measuring right the way through and it starts off with money currency and value and it takes them through finding a problem solving a problem getting a customer understanding marketing going to markets the lean business method financial processes up to level ten where they are they're you know doing simulation of of a board meeting sounds absolutely fantastic anybody able to to to get onto this so is it is it is it a monthly subscription one of how does it how does it work yeah it's a monthly subscription we designed it that way so that kids could don't feel pressured they can take it as fast or slow as they want to it's eighty nine random month we've definitely went and priced it competitively so that during lockdown anyone can access it at eighty nine random month I mean you can have three or four kids on that for for the same process as school fees more you know school fees are more than that so we just wanted to give kids the opportunity to access it and parents to access it as well and and it's literally it's available to anybody in fact we had a call with the UK Chamber of Commerce the other day who are very very interested in in what we were doing so it was futureproofonline.co.za and it's literally available to absolutely everybody you can go on as well and have a free trial I think it's 48 hour free trial test it out see but because not every kid's an entrepreneur right not every kid is going to be the one that wants to be enterprising so we wanted to give kids the ability to test it out or can you hear my sentence eagles I can indeed they do they do very well under lockdown conditions they're thriving but that was that it was that you know go check it out test it out for 48 hours if if it does work or doesn't work for you then the sign up is eighty nine round awesome stuff when we come back we're going to wrap up with Lisa and find out what her next is and hopefully this time she went play her cards that close to her chest it is what's involved my special guest with me is Lisa Ellingworth right and we are back Lisa it's been it's been stunning as always every time I chat to to any of my guests it's it's kind of like wow the time just just flies and turning to you I always find it very inspiring and motivating because you you are incredibly passionate about what you're doing you you you're authentic and I think the bit I like the most about you is that you're not you're not afraid to to make mistakes and and you know you you kind of you you make them in a in a in a fairly you know public way when you make the mistakes people know about it so so I think that's good I mean that's good and just just to recap okay so it's futureproof online all one word futureproofonline.co.za aimed at children of all ages eighty nine round a month which is I'm very impressed with that that's that's a dead give that's that's dead dead cheap because just looking at what you guys have done your development costs must have been way in excess of that and I think I think yeah I think I think that was very much a labor of love just just having a brief look at it it it I don't I don't think Lisa started out and went this is going to make me millions immediately I think this was a labor of love and I think it landed at exactly the right time how many users have you got do you do you track those metrics yeah so I think we're sitting on a 200 odd users at the moment yeah it's quite exciting to see the kids take this up and then the parents kind of jump on the back of it as well it's quite fun to see that so 200 odd users in three weeks we're very happy with with the numbers and it'll grow exponentially as people start talking about it as that word of mouth thing happens but what you said you were right labor of love massive transformative impact you know social entrepreneurs have to have that delicate tension between passion purpose and profit and and that's where it's sad for us wonderful now now there's gonna be two burning questions the first one the first one I'm going to ask you is where to next what's what's your next Lisa survive lockdown which I have renamed breakdown so yes survive lockdown that's my next is is get out of this and reassess the world the market and I've I've pinned as my rallying cry for myself and the team is survive that's that's our rallying cry survive because education is a very risk-averse market it is a very slow to move markets and we are kind of third in the line of cogs that are going to turn schools go back parents teachers and then we're the kind of the extra curricular stuff so it's going to take longer for us to gear back up so it's just survive for now that's what I want to do and I think that's that's a base for for most small businesses that they may not actually reach right now is survive so I think it's a win for us if the business survives out of lockdown and then the gearing up process back into education and we actually started the process when we had the the best quarter in the first quarter of this year the best the best quarter we've ever had to hit lockdown so I mean it was really carpet from underneath us so I want to get back up to that stage where the business is is that profitable and we'd actually started conversations with opening up future proof Academy you know bricks mortar school love yeah I know so we'd actually started that conversation we'd found ourselves potentially a property and we'd actually started putting sort of greasing those wheels so that we could gear up to opening a school and and that obviously has now been shelved until until we find some stability in the market understanding what education and how it's going to be puzzled together because I think it's going to look very different how it's going to be puzzled together and if they still is a need for a school for entrepreneurs I think there'll always be a need for that I think I think even more so now entrepreneurs are going to be what we need for our country and our economy you mentioned that instead of lockdown you called it breakdown I have my own word for it as well yeah it starts with F and ends with up fire truck yes yes yes but I wish you all the best Lisa and then you and the team I think you're doing some fantastic stuff as I mentioned before you know just for me to live vicariously and be play some small role in it even by just chatting to you about your stuff it's a great privilege before I let you go though I want you to tell me one thing about Lisa that nobody else knows oh gosh okay I had my first tattoo because you know I've got lots of tattoos you know this you see me I had my first tattoo which most people don't know at the age of 17 because I finished school when I was 17 and my mom said to me okay you can do it when you can pay for it with your own money and I'd started working from 15 so I had my own money and at 17 I went and got my first tattoo and it was one of those awful choices I had red hot chili peppers was a thing I went and got one of the like little chili pepper tattooed on my hip bone or just next to it very very bad decision and you know that I'm very public about my bad decisions so very bad decision because two years two years later rather two kids later and about 20 odd years it very much does not look like the chili that it once started off as the red hot string beans red hot pumpkin it's always a pleasure to chat to you thank you so much we wish you all the best once again check it out it's futureproofonline.co.za we sincerely wish you all the best Lisa made go from strength to strength thank you so much for having me the privilege was mine thank you David