Collaborative Homeschooling w/ Matt Beaudreau
Matt Beaudreau is the founder of multiple Acton Academy campuses and author of Collaborative Homeschooling. He’s also the founder of Apogee and host of The Essential 11 Podcast, as well as an international keynote speaker.
In this episode, Matt explains his philosophy of education and how he went from being a public school teacher to trying to find a better way to educate children and then discovering Acton Academy. Matt also talks about how, after becoming an Acton Academy founder, he wrote his book to explain his ideas around education to the parents whose children joined his program.
Matt's Links:
Instagram:
@mattbeaudreau
@apogeeprogram
@actonplacer
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Josh Steimle: Today, my guest is Matt Beaudreau. Matt is the founder of multiple Acton Academy campuses, and we'll talk more about what that means in a minute. And he's the author of collaborative homeschooling. He's the founder of Apogee and host of the essential 11 podcast. And he's an international keynote speaker.
Matt, welcome to the show.
Matt Beaudreau: Pleasure, Josh. I appreciate you having me.
Josh Steimle: So give us a little background on you, Matt, where do you come from and how did you end up in the education space?
Matt Beaudreau: Yeah, I'd say definitely kind of an interesting journey. So I'll give the high level overview and then feel free to dive into any of that, but I've come out of education. So I ended up at Stanford University actually before anything. So I really started learning the game of education there and that wasn't anything that I had targeted. I had done the whole high school to college, you get your degree and you come out and still don't necessarily have anything to offer the world, sort of situation.
And I'd always been a good student, straight A's throughout the entire thing, but I never really learned anything about myself or my gifts or my passions or what I wanted to do. I was just following the path laid out in front of me. I was lucky enough to land at Stanford and really got to see the game of education play out at that high level. And I say game meaning all the way into the admissions department and understanding how the admissions process worked and seeing that it's not as much of a meritocracy as people like to think. But, within working within the university, I was like, you know what, I'm actually liking kind of the speaking in front of people thing.
I'm figuring out this game of education. And I think I could actually be a really good teacher and really help kids understand how to navigate that game. So they didn't do the whole, my experience of getting good grades, but coming out and still feeling like you don't have anything. And I know there's kids that come out and struggle, so how can I help?
So I go into public education, I was a public school teacher. Which I then went into public school administration more and more seeing the game that was playing out and not really liking what I was seeing. And the more I was understanding the game, the more I was understanding that this isn't about young people, like it's supposed to be. Great people involved, phenomenal teachers, phenomenal administrators, wonderful human beings. And so I'm very, very pro teacher and administrator. But the system's not designed for young people.
So I was naively, I was like, “Oh, I'm going to go to private school and that'll be different.” So I was a private school teacher and a private school administrator too, seeing the same games play out there. They’re basically recreating a public school model.
And so it was all of those kinds of things that led me to go, okay, I'm going to one, start speaking out against the system that I'm not a fan of and speaking to what I thought the solutions were. And two, I'm going to build something else. Cause now I have kids and I want them going through an educational process that is what I want for them. So I started doing both of those things, which then dovetailed into the speaking career for Fortune 500s as well. So I got to do that, the speaking part to provide for the family, gaining more and more insight of what the world is asking from our young people while simultaneously starting to build these campuses, which are now an integral part of this global education movement. So it's been a pretty wild ride.
Josh Steimle: So give us a little background on Acton Academy and how you became associated with Acton Academy.
Matt Beaudreau: Yeah. So during the kind of speaking out against what I was seeing in the game of education, I was speaking to a group of professors in South Carolina in 2014. And one of the professors said, “Hey, I'm going to be taking a job at UC Santa Cruz, which I know is not too far from where you live in California. And I would love to have you speak at a TEDx that we're putting on there. And I'd love to have you speak with some of your ideas that you're talking about in terms of schooling and what education should look like in the 21st century.”
I said, “Great, that'd be fun. I'd be interested in checking that out.”
And she said, “Cool. I'd love for you to check out a couple of places that I think are interesting. And maybe along the lines of what you're talking about.” And one of the places she recommended was this place called Acton Academy in Austin, Texas. And at that point, there was a handful of campuses around the globe, by a handful, 10, 12, 15. There weren't many. So she said, “Go visit them.”
I went to go visit them, to do research for this talk. And I walked out of there and went, “This is exactly what I've been asking for in all of the systems I've been involved with.” It was a no brainer for me. And so I came back home and it was like, all right, we're either moving to where one of these exists or we're gonna build one.
And so now we're building more than one
Josh Steimle: And how many campuses are you up to right now?
Matt Beaudreau: I have three right now that I personally own. The network in general is up to about 250 ish globally. And when I say campuses, that's 250, some of those being they just launched this past fall and they've got nine or 10 students in a one-room schoolhouse, sorta scenario all the way up to, some of them are like the campus that I'm sitting at right now. That's a full campus of 150 ish students, with a wait list that's just as big. So there's an everywhere in between, but the network is growing hand over fist.
Josh Steimle: And to explain to people further who are listening to this, who owns these campuses, is it you or is it Acton Academy?
Matt Beaudreau: Yeah, that's a great question. They're individually owned. The people who are usually more familiar with something like CrossFit than they are Acton. So you're essentially… it's a similar kind of thing where you are coming in licensing the IP to understand the systems and to get connected to the network, but they are individually owned locations. And it's not a franchise either. You've got some autonomy, you've got a lot of autonomy on how you operate these things. You do pay a small percentage of revenue. We all pay that back to the next. But then I also get the privilege of being on the governance council for the network, which is just a handful of us owners around the world, that really decide what to do with that money. And we take that money, some of it goes back into marketing and recruiting, looking for good new owners, but the rest of it goes back into things like fellowships and scholarships for the heroes that graduate and all of that money goes back to the heroes. So it's really the most altruistic organization that I've ever had a privilege of being a part of.
Josh Steimle: And the students being the heroes.
Matt Beaudreau: And the students are absolutely the heroes.That’s right.
Josh Steimle: So you launched your Acton Academy and then your book Collaborative Homeschooling, did that come before this or after this?
Matt Beaudreau: That came after. Yeah, that came after I was in I think the second year that we were open. And we were just already seeing so many good things happening. And, I at that time, I was still speaking too, so I was still on the road doing 60, 70 keynotes a year for organizations that every listener would know. Some of the biggest organizations on the planet. Based on what they were, these organizations were asking of me and with, the things they were looking for, and wish they saw in these young people. Based on what I was seeing happening on our campuses. Based on what I was hearing about happening on other Acton campuses across the world, it was really obvious to me at that point, that our growth was going to be astronomical. It was obvious because we were solving some problems that people didn't even realize they had yet. And I could just see it becoming more and more of an issue. You could tell that this is the way it was going. And so jumping in to write that book was partially about telling that story early so that it could really help more and more people at the early stages of this mission.
Josh Steimle: Got it. And so how did you go about writing the book? What was your process like?
Matt Beaudreau: Yeah. So I actually reached out to a gentleman I had worked with loosely, had become loosely familiar with first from reading one of his books, which I thought was one of the best books in education that I had read in a long time. And so it was a book called Education of Millionaires and the author was the man named Michael Ellsberg. And Michael Ellsberg is a wildly successful author and a copywriter. His dad, Daniel Ellsberg is, I would say, infamous, I won't even necessarily say famous he's infamous. If you've ever seen the movie, The Post with Tom Hanks, that entire thing is about Daniel Ellsberg and the Vietnam papers and all that.
So Michael comes from that lineage. And so I had reached out to him, and said, “I love what you did here. Do you know anything about Acton Academy?”
He’s like, “No, tell me more. What is that?”
And as I explained to him, he’s like, “We need to start spreading the word on this. So let's collaborate on this.How can I help you?”
And so that really turned it into these kind of weekly sessions where I'd jump on with Michael and just kinda chat with him and go, “Okay, Here's where I'm writing and here's where I'm going with this. And what do you think?”
And he’d say, “Okay, maybe expand on this.”
And so he coached me through that whole thing of telling that story where we currently were. So it was it was a long process, a tedious process. I feel like I'm a decent communicator but I get energized from communicating verbally. Things like this, are just naturally, like this will raise my energy, put me on stage in front of, 5,000, 10,000 people, Goodnight, piece of cake, I love it, it's great, high energy. Sitting down in front of a screen and having to communicate that way, I can do it, but it's a challenge for me. And that was a part of it too, is I needed that challenge for myself and just a different way to tell the story of Acton for people that would hear it that way.
Josh Steimle: And when I hear the title Collaborative Homeschooling, I think homeschooling, I don't think Acton Academy or private schools. So what's the link between Acton Academy, what you're doing there, and the title of this book and the content?
Matt Beaudreau: Yeah, that's a really great question. Understanding, I go back to understanding the game of education, right? I say that very specifically, there is always a game to be played. In California, where I'm located, the game looks a specific way that not every other state mimics necessarily. And so the way we have set up our campuses here, it's more around a collaborative homeschooling from almost a legal sense of the word. And we can very clearly identify how our campuses don't qualify as what California would define as a school, because we are so student driven because the students take on so much responsibility. We're not doing direct instruction. We're not lecturing. We're not even answering questions. All of these things that are playing out here, we can make a very clear case.
Okay. We're not a school, so what are we? And so that's the link is, really all of my students they registered with the state as homeschool. And so we're really having this collaborative homeschool sort of unit. And I knew that was going to be something that became more and more relevant as the years continued to progress. I could see that becoming a relevant path in California. We've since help launch numerous collaborative homeschool environments, some Acton’s, some not. And it's a way to self organize that makes sense to a lot more people than if I just said private school. Cause the people think traditional conventional school. So that's why we shifted to that.
Josh Steimle: I like that because the title kind of forces people to ask, it doesn't allow people to think they already know the answer. They have to ask you, “Well, what is this?” And that's necessary because you do have to explain it to them.
Matt Beaudreau: That's exactly right. If you say school, everybody thinks they know what that is. Everybody thinks they understand because they went through it. So everybody thinks they understand what it is. Everybody thinks they understand how to build one, how to run one. Everybody thinks they get it because they grew up in it. So they feel like, “Hey I’ve got the answers to it.” And nothing could be further from the truth, especially when you start talking about something that's along the lines of an Acton Academy philosophy.
Josh Steimle: Yeah. There are times when you want your book title to tell people exactly what's in it. There's times when you want the book title to create a question, which I like that. That kind of goes along with Acton Academy, because it's all about Socratic method and asking questions.
Matt Beaudreau: That's exactly right. We always say from a network perspective, asking good questions is infinitely better than having answers.
Josh Steimle: Yep. So the book was self-published, is that correct?
Matt Beaudreau: Yes, sir. That is correct.
Josh Steimle: And how long did it take you from beginning to end to write the book? From the time you had the idea and you said I'm going to do this, until you published it.
How long was that?
Matt Beaudreau: Yeah. It was probably about a nine month process. As a product of one, just wanting to do a decent job with it and really tell that story. So that in of itself, obviously there was a lot of going back and revisions and rewriting. One of the things that I struggled with was, “Gosh, I'd rather just talk about this, right?” Nope, you gotta be disciplined and go back in there. And so I would just discipline myself with a specific amount of time every single week.
And then in the midst of also traveling around the world. I think that same year I did 64 keynotes, and only out of the 64, I think five of the 64 were even in California where I live. And none of those even drivable. I was still having to get on a plane. So doing all that, running a campus, so there were time constraints on that as well.
The beauty of what I was writing about too, is that the heroes, every single day on this campus would give me something else. Something else would happen. Some new things would take place. Some epiphanies that they got, or some new successes they had. And that made it even harder because I wanted to share. Which was impossible. So I also had to figure out, okay, what are the stories I am going to share? Where am I going to cut this off so that people can just at least get a little flavor of this?
Josh Steimle: And as you were writing the book, who are you thinking of as the ideal audience to read this? Was it the parents:
Matt Beaudreau: It was absolutely the parents. Yeah, for me, it was the parents that were going to come in and have questions of: What does this collaborative homeschooling thing look like? One of the things we found is school is very much almost a religion in this country with the emotional attachment that people have to how it is currently run and based on their own upbringing. So then they're very attached to school looking exactly the same. And we've also bought into this school needs to look just like this, because that's what's going to get you to college because college is what's going to get you to happy and successful.
And it doesn't matter if you break that down and prove that all of that is completely false. People still have that religious view. I didn't want necessarily to talk to them. The people that had it all figured out, I wanted to talk to those parents that were like, “I feel like there's something different. I feel like there's something better here, but I'm curious enough to know that I don't know exactly what that is. I'm floating in that middle where I'm going there's probably something and I'm open enough to go ahead and explore and not think that I've already got the answer.”
So I was looking for kind of that niche of parents.
Josh Steimle: Got it. So once the book was done, how did you go about promoting it? How did you go about getting it into the hands of that audience, into the hands of the right people?
Matt Beaudreau: Yeah. The beauty of the Acton networks, it was really a two-fold. One, just going to even parents that we were currently serving on campus. They were some of the biggest advocates because they're a part of that story and they've seen the outcomes, right? They've seen the outcomes of their young heroes and the transformations that have taken place. So they were really some of the biggest advocates early on and getting out and sharing that message.
But, the network is so much bigger than also just, our individual campuses too. So even sharing that with the network in general and just going, “Hey guys, if this helps any of your parents understand conceptually.” It's the same thing we do with Laura's book Courage to Grow, just going, “Hey, let me give you a little sneak peek into what we're doing and how some of this plays out.”
And it was really the network at large that shared the most and got the most traction, which was cool.
Josh Steimle” And that Laura being Laura Sandefur who co-founded Acton Academy with Jeff.
Matt Beaudreau: That is correct. Yep. Absolutely. So we still use those books to this day to help just explain to people that are both new owners, new families, and people are exploring and going what the heck is this Acton Academy thing?
Josh Steimle: Yeah. We'll link to Lauren and Jeff's books in the show notes as well for people to get those. So, what impact did you see from the book then as people read the book, as you see parents reading it, do you see the lights go on? Do you see them say, “Oh, okay. I get it now what you're doing.” What benefits have you seen personally from having the book out there?
Matt Beaudreau: What was interesting as we were looking at it is part of it is I wanted to tell the story. I wanted to discipline myself of putting that out there and I wanted to share all the amazing victories of these kids. If I'm looking at the next kind of level of goal, I'm going Okay, cool, this would be cool if this kind of helps as maybe a top of the funnel sort of thing, to alert more people, more parents about what we're doing and it inspires them to come check us out as a potential partner in the hero's journey for their young hero.
What I didn’t realize would happened as much is that definitely created some more interest and I know is a big part of the reason that we've expanded to now three campuses here in a very short amount of time and are going to have four or five, come next year. That definitely helped.
Even more so, it helped connect me to parents who were also entrepreneurs, who are going, “Gosh, I've really wanted to figure out a way to help my kids. Because I want to create something better for them.” It connected it more to my journey as a dad who wants to do this for my hero and build it out.
And so that's been interesting to see is that it actually increased our networks interests about almost 10 fold, in terms of the amount of entrepreneurs that we had reaching out saying, “Hey, we're interested in opening something for our kids like this. Which is pretty cool.”
Josh Steimle: Yeah. That is great.
So, I want to turn the tables on you a little bit. Like I said before we started recording. I'm interested in starting an Acton Academy. I got introduced to Acton Academy a few years ago through Slope School in Utah. One of my friends was sending his kid there and he told me about this. He like, “You gotta look into this thing.”
Matt Beaudreau: That's awesome. Maddie Clayton is the the owner of Slope School. He's a brilliant human being.
Josh Steimle: Yup. And even before that, I had toyed with the idea of starting a school. Cause my mother was an elementary school teacher for 15 years in Southern California. I saw the system firsthand. I saw things that I didn't agree with through her. And of course I went through the public school system and I didn't really enjoy school that much. For me, it was always, why am I here? What am I doing? And then while I was in high school, I started my first semi-real business and I thought, “What do I need school for? I can just go do stuff. I can do a business. Like I don't need school for this.”
When I went to college, I loved college. And so it wasn't that I didn't like education. I just didn't like that system. And I read a ton and I educated myself essentially. But for years, I thought, “There's gotta be a better way to do this.”
My wife and I, we started homeschooling when our kids got to that age. I guess we were homeschooling them from the day they were born, but when they reached school age, we just kept on schooling them at home. And now we’ve gotten into a hybrid space where we have kids that are going to public schools and halftime public schools and full-time homeschooling. So we've run the gamut. But all through these years, I've thought, what kind of school would I start if I were starting a school? Well, I grew up skateboarding, so that's all I ever wanted to do. I wanted to skateboard. I wanted to draw, I wanted to make videos, I wanted to start businesses. That's the kind of stuff I was into. And I thought, “If I were going to start a school, it'd be skate school.” It'd be a school for skateboarders where they could go and learn how to start a skate shop, how to start a skate magazine, how to edit videos, how to do social media, how to do all this stuff around skateboarding.
And the reason I gravitated towards that kind of learning model, where it was something I was interested in, is because of an experience I had in high school and college, where in high school, I failed every math class from seventh grade onward. So as soon as we started algebra, I was the dumb kid. I was the smart kid before that, like sixth grade. I was the smart kid. I was the advanced kid in math. I hit algebra. Nope, didn’t work because I never learned how to study. I never learned how to do homework. And with algebra, you have to study. I couldn't just go in and ace tests. So I failed every math class all the way through algebra two. Got a D minus in algebra two and said, “Yay, I'm done. I passed. I'm done with math for the rest of my life.”
Then, when I was in college, I had this experience where I said, “You know what? I don't want to be an artist anymore.” That was my life plan before. Didn’t need math for that I thought. But then I switched into business and entrepreneurship and all of a sudden I had to take math classes and I thought, “Oh no, I'm dumb at math. I'm terrible at math. And now I need math. What am I going to do?”
So I went back and I started with seventh grade math, Beginning Algebra and took remedial classes. And here I am. I'm 22 and I'm taking seventh grade math classes because I knew I had to catch up and I knew I had to go back and get that foundation.
I ended up taking something like 12 credits of math classes in one semester, everything from Beginning Algebra, all the way through to Calculus in one semester, got A's on everything, piece of cake. And I loved it. And I looked at that and I thought, “Wait a second, what happened? Did I just get super smart in the last five years somehow? What made the difference?” And the difference was I cared. I didn't care about math before, but once it was, “Hey, I need this to do something I want to do.” Suddenly I cared about it.
Matt Beaudreau: That's right. That's absolutely right.
Josh Steimle: And so I thought, what about all these kids out there who are skaters? And they think, “Oh, I'm going to be a pro skater and that's going to be the rest of my life.” And then that doesn't work out for that many people. I thought, I know a lot of skaters who really struggled with school and had a hard time with it. But if I could put them in an environment where I said, “Look, you want to design a skateboard deck? There's geometry here. Like we got to get the CAD software out and design the concave on this deck and how these curves are. And you need to know some Geometry for this.” They might be interested in Geometry. They might be interested in Calculus, if we're designing a huge ramp, that's different than any ramp that's been done before.
They might like writing, if they're doing a skateboard magazine. They might enjoy video editing. There's so many other things around this. And so this idea of context based education or centering education within a context that the student is interested in, became my thing that I wanted to push. And so now the only question is: When am I going to do this? When am I going to launch the first skate school? And I found out Acton Academy while I was thinking about this. And I thought, this is the system. This is the system I want to use to launch skate school. Now, for me, I'm looking at this and saying: How do I get this off the ground? I need a building. I need funding. I need a lot of things. And I also want to write a book about it that helps me explain to the parents that I'm marketing this to, “Hey, this is how my school is going to work. This is what it's all about. This is the way that we teach or quote, unquote, teach.”
But what were some of the challenges that you faced as an entrepreneur, getting your Acton Academies off the ground? What were some of the first steps and how did you overcome those challenges?
Matt Beaudreau: That's a great question.
Josh Steimle: Sorry, That's a long introduction to the question.
Matt Beaudreau: Don't be sorry. It was fantastic. I'm literally writing things down. You're talking about, you're learning: Why am I here? But some of the things I wrote down, why am I here? And you have so many students that are asking themselves that, right? There is no context. They're seeing the game. All students, I feel like, figure out the game of school very early on.
Whether they do it consciously or subconsciously, some will go, why am I here? And they will not like the game and they'll not necessarily figure out how to play the game or figure out certain aspects of it, like the algebra or whatever. And we worry about those students. Like they'll never figure it out.
And then we don't worry about the students who do figure it out and just figure out how to play the game and just become apathetic. I was definitely that. I could figure out the algebra stuff and got my A’s. I went back and took an algebra two, It's funny you said that, cause I took an algebra two test a few months ago. I got a 19%. Almost all guesses. I got an A. But when I grew up, I still don't actually know it because there's no context. I can run seven figure businesses, but it doesn't mean I know how to do algebra, those things don't correlate. So what you said there, talking about self-education, which is really the only education. Talking about skateboarding, and I look at a guy that I grew up with and graduated with that you might know of named Stefan Genachowski.
Josh Steimle: Oh, Yeah Stefan’s great.
Matt Beaudreau: So Stefan and I graduated together, we grew up together, graduated same high school, same year together. And I remember his journey through school and we weren’t like best of friends, but we were friends. And remembering his journey and just kinda being one of those guys that called out the game early on and was like, “I'm going to go figure stuff out.” Signs this $20 million deal with Nike around skateboarding.
So much of what you just said was phenomenal. So I just, I really liked hearing that story. The challenges, and I get the pleasure of helping a lot of new owners, this is where I try to give back to the network as much as possible. And I'm actually taking on, coming up here in 2022, actively being the one who is recruiting good new owners. So it's kinda cool. They ask, “I kinda know how to start a school. So there's probably, you know, some things around just getting the kids. And there's probably some different ways to market on social media, but it shouldn't be too crazy. I've run a business before. I've run this business before.”
I always tell them it's not the same thing as any other business you've run. It is in a lot of ways it is more difficult, but it is also far more rewarding than so many other businesses. And definitely learn that through experience. My first year building out the tribe, meaning the parents and the heroes that we were going to launch with. I was still traveling, doing a lot of speaking. And then when I'd come home, anytime I was home, I was having breakfast with a stranger. I was having lunch with a stranger. I was having dinner with a stranger. I was having coffee dates with strangers. And then once a week, or once every couple of weeks, we're having meetings in these coffee shops. And I did that every week, every day, as much as I could.
Jeff and Laura had this thing about, if you're going to get your tribe, you're going to go to a hundred coffee dates to figure out your first people. I went to 200, for sure. And because I think I spent so much time building that out. We had to this date, it's still the largest launch in Acton Academy history with over 50 heroes starting. And we grew to a full campus faster than any other location partially because of my maniacism around building that out. Finding the right people is always the most difficult part. It continues to be the most difficult part. Finding the right families who get it, who understand the mission, and who are willing to let a hero's journey actually play out.
One of the things I always tell the parents, is everybody loves the story of a hero's journey. You love that archetype in any stories, any movies, you love that journey. Joseph Campbell did a great job of mapping that out and it still uses this archetype in so many stories. Everybody loves it. Until it's their kid, who's in the throws of the hardest parts of that journey. And then it's like, “Ah, okay. But now I need to step in.” Or it’s, “But my kid's different and our situation is different.” And it’s not. But it's getting them to understand that and to step back and to let their hero fight and battle and slay that dragon and come out the other side.
So that's always the hardest part. So getting parents that were on board and understanding that was difficult. One of the sneaky, most difficult parts of starting an Acton is finding a building. Because there's a lot of there are a lot of kind of ideals that you want for something that is an educational environment, including play space. And then there's a lot of zoning regulations that go in, depending on what state you are, if you file as a private school, there is extra zoning regulations that go into that, that's one of the sneakier parts too. So those are the two biggest challenges.
Starting and then finding the right guides. It's a weird thing to hire an adult. The adult has to be on board with the mission. And part of that mission is they're really good at their job when they're not needed anymore. And that's a weird thing. It's like, “Hey, work yourself out of a job.”
Josh Steimle: Yeah, that's hard. It's hard to not feel needed.
Matt Beaudreau: Exactly. And the best way I can, I've tried it and there's a million different ways we can go with this, but one of the things I try to make it parallel to is if you're a parent, you don't want your child living with you at 30 years old, you want them out and functional, not needing you, but still wanting that relationship, still wanting you as a guide and a mentor. And that's the role of a guide, as far as we've had it here, is you become irrelevant in terms of, they can handle things on their own and they can make things happen, live, grow, they can do all those things on their own. They don't need you anymore because you've set everything up so well that they can do it, but they still want you around. They still want to go back to guidance. They still want to check in with you. They still draw energy from you, from the love that you have for them. It's that. Those are, I would say the most uniquely, big three challenges of opening a campus. And so we've learned the hard way.
And so part of what I'm getting to do is, in 2022, is help new owners that come in, navigate those things more smoothly, more effectively so that they can focus on the mission at hand.
Josh Steimle: So I applied for an Acton Academy school a couple of years ago. I was not ready for it, but I wanted to go through the process and see what it was like. And just know what I was getting into.
Matt Beaudreau: Yes, sir.
Josh Steimle: So I went through the whole process. I read all the books and that's one of the things I really liked about the Acton Academy process, bringing this all back to books, is that they make you read a bunch of books before you can even submit your application. I was like, I love this because books are my love language. And I love that you wrote a book. I'm curious. Do you make your parents read your book before they can apply to your Acton Academies?
Matt Beaudreau: I make them read Jeff and Laura's book. I recommend that they read mine. And that's just more of a personal thing, whether that's a mental hurdle I need to get over or whatever that is, but I make them read Jeff and Laura's, I recommend mine.
Josh Steimle: That seems like a good way of screening people out. If they're not willing to read the book that explains how your system works, are they really the right fit?
Matt Beaudreau: That's a hundred percent correct. So at this point again, lucky enough to where our campuses are running really well, I mean the ones that I personally own. And so we'll do informational sessions for parents and we were getting 100, 150 families coming in every month. Some of whom didn't know anything about what we were doing. So we had to start putting in extra filtering systems. So now people go to get info and they've got a whole video series of me they've gotta watch. And one of those things in that video series tells them, “Hey, now here's some books you're going to have to read.” And they've got to do all of those things before they even get to come to the info session. And the info session only gets it to where they can then have the students shadow and they can interview and then hopefully get on the wait list or come in, and so it's that filtering and us as a network are doing the same thing for exactly the reasons you were stating. Not that we want to be some sort of elitist, hoity toity, whatever. It's no, man, this is so different than what you think school is. We just want to make sure you're running to this and not from something else.
Josh Steimle: Yeah, because you get somebody who doesn't understand it into the system, they're going to muck up the system.
Matt Beaudreau: Yep. That's absolutely it. And almost all owners learn that the hard way. You bend here and there at some point because you think, “Oh, okay. Maybe.” And almost always end up going, “Okay, that was a big tuition paid for me and time, energy, whatever.”
Josh Steimle: I think we run into this a lot as entrepreneurs generally, that there's always that stage of your entrepreneurial journey, where you need the money. And so you bend the rules because you need the money, you need the customer, and then you end up regretting it and you say, “Oh, I never should've taken that person on.” And one of the things that I think is great about having a book is that often the book is the way people find you. And so they've already pre-screened themselves before you ever talk to them. And so they come to you and you already know this is probably somebody I can work with because they're coming into me and they're saying, “Hey, I read your book. I love your book. I want to work with you.”
It’s like okay, now we don't have to go through all that stuff and figuring out if we're really the right fit or not.
Matt Beaudreau: Bingo, that's exactly it. And so you're describing really the top of the funnel, both for, owning campuses as well as finding new owners to create those. But the barriers to just illuminate the path and make it a very clear: “Yes, this is where I want to go.” And those books are an integral part of it.
Josh Steimle: Yeah. Well, Matt, thank you so much for being a guest here on the show today. If people want to learn more about you, they want to learn more about the Acton Academy campuses that you're running. Where's the best place for them to go?
Matt Beaudreau: Ours specifically are actonplacer.com. And we're relatively active on Instagram under the same thing. And then I'm just at my name, Matt Beaudreau and most active on Instagram. Probably more than anything else too, but glad to help any way that I can.
Josh Steimle: Great. Thank you so much, Matt, for being on the show.
Matt Beaudreau: Pleasure, my friend.
