 What is it meant for you to step into this journey of entrepreneurship? When you work for yourself and you're proud about what you build, you take care of it a little differently than something that is just kind of like something you have to do. America has always been associated with making it, but is this opportunity accessible to all? Atlanta was built to include everyone, but so many people are still being left behind. I'm Scott Shigeoka, GoDaddy's entrepreneur in residence, and I'm on a journey across the country meeting the people who are building it. I want to break that stereotype. I want to see this through for the sake of my family. They're defying the odds, and their stories show us what it means to be made in America. Our children had the vision first. Alright team, ready to deliver, y'all ready? Started out challenging our children to come up with something creative for the summer. They said, can we start a business? I said, well, what do you want to sell? I said, well, can we sell the popsicles we're already making for the family? And they sold 85 popsicles in 45 minutes at their first event. Thursdays is our delivery day. We deliver in a city of Atlanta in Decatur. Pull the stick from the bottom before it falls off. Alright, thank you. We just dance and over zoom, you know, we're just doing our thing, you know? Hey Scott, how are you? I'm good. It's been a minute, right? But I'm glad we can connect even in this COVID-19 reality. My name is Amber Han Robinson. I am Keyway Lubna Robinson. Mokey Pops. That is my children's all-natural vegan popsicle business. And tell me about your kids. What are they like? And when did they get started with Mokey Pops? Lord Jehan, she's our media ninja. She's the one that takes charge of putting out e-blasts and saying, this person has 1.2 million followers and getting people attracted to Mokey Pops. I post, I update our pop-ups. I answer people's questions and I just reach out to our followers. They're like, oh, that was you that I was talking to or something like the whole time. So they have no idea that they're talking to a 12-year-old? No. Secret. Hidar, since he was young, he was always good with numbers. He is our financial genius. He's the one that looks at the books and thinks about like, you know, are we spending too much on some products to make our popsicles the price point they are, which is pretty exciting. My sister here is a big spinger and I just say a lot. I don't like getting a lot of things. And then Aya, she is our special gem because she was the one that really initiate the flavors. She would basically throw ideas out and we would say, let's try to create what she's doing. We have 34 different flavors in all, basil lemonade and strawberry lemonade and yeah, mango cream. What is it like to run a business with your kids? Because I think that's something that not a lot of folks have experience doing. What's the experience like and also what's hard about it? You know, let's keep it real. Oh, keeping it real? When you're in the building process, which we are in, we're doing, we're touching everything and we're doing everything. So sometimes we end up burning the candle with both ends to make things work. We have to get up early in the morning before the children to do some prepping. Then we got to have free time with them so they can enjoy themselves as children. It can become challenging because we know we don't want to burn them out. We want them to be excited about the business and feel that they're not missing out. The thing is that all my children start to really appreciate the sacrifice and the benefit that comes from that sacrifice. They feel good when they walk into a room and people already know them for good things. Not just for being children in the room, but like, hey, you guys are business owners. We're looking forward to work with you. Their eyes light up and that does something for Amber and I both. It really does. When it comes to equity, especially racial equity in this country, being able to teach young children of color about money really early on, we'll start to heal some of the generational wealth gaps that we have. Being able to understand why wealth doesn't transfer between generations in certain communities. Historically, a lot of African-American families don't know much about financing and credit and so forth. When I graduated college, I realized that my credit was messed up. I remember turning to my mom and like, why don't y'all tell me about credit and blah blah blah. She's like, well, what do you mean we didn't know about that? And then when we go and attempt to get financing and billing like maybe a scarlet letter on our head, you know, of this history that keeps coming forward and haunting us. Credit represents the passport to the American financial system. If one does not have a credit score, every single service we want to access becomes more expensive. There was over $130 billion in 2019 invested in the form of Angel and Venture Capital in about 11,000 U.S. firms. Less than 1% of those were Black founders. We have not gotten any outside support whatsoever. And we haven't been able to adequately pay ourselves just by turning the money over and putting into the business over and over. With it being full-time for my husband and full-time for me, you know, we have things that come up that pull from the financial part. We had to get a new van for the family. That took away from what we had saved for packaging to go into our larger retailer. That gets frustrating, like very frustrating. When is that financial break going to come, you know, for us? Like that, I have moments where, like, I get overwhelmed. I feel like that, right? So, yeah. What's coming up for you right now? There's some, like, emotion coming up for you, like some energy coming up for you, what's behind that? Like, all of this is an enjoyable process. You know, but we've been working, like, tirelessly for the past five years. I want to know that there's some relief that's in the near future. And I've been coaching myself silently by looking at great entrepreneurial women. And I'm like, well, what is it that they have that allows them to be where they are? And a lot of it means that they have help, you know, addition to their spouses. Thank you for calling out that the successful people in life that we see have so much help and so much support around them. I think there's this interesting narrative that says, like, you have to be everything. You have to be the really great mom. You have to be the really great business person. And you have to do it all and not take time for yourself ever, you know. But it shouldn't be that way. The radical act of self-care is actually really valuable and important for your relationships and for your work. I come from an entrepreneurial family, and there have been traits of entrepreneurship in my children. That initially I wasn't aware of. What is that? This is my this is my grandmother and grandfather. My grandfather was the first African American civil rights lawyer in Cleveland, Ohio. Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall and all of them. Those were my grandfather's comrades. When I look at these pictures, I just feel like we have a lot of support, you know. That's the friends who stayed at their house when we the house got destroyed in Hurricane Irma. The power goes off and we all congregate as a family in my children's room. And we all huddle and like say this prayer together. We're like, oh God, please keep us safe in the process. We get all of our popsicles and we start driving through the neighborhood and giving them out to neighbors. You get a phone call from the next door neighbor and he says the storm got job. Three trees fell on our house. It was very scary to leave your house and come back and see it in shambles. Essentially, we were instantaneously homeless right where we prayed as a family. The tree came literally down on her bed like 20 minutes after we said a prayer. The pops saved our life. When Hurricane Irma hit, it let us know that you gotta seize the moment. The moment can come and go quickly. We lost a lot of things. Our house was destroyed. The only thing you could go really when that situation happened was up. You know, sometimes things that appear tragic aren't tragic, you know. This sometimes you have to be put in an uncomfortable position in order to have a paradigm shift in your life. We were living in the suburbs of Atlanta and Stone Mountain. We then relocated to Atlanta. Us moving to the city of Atlanta really gave us the opportunity to be more engaged in events in the city. We started developing reputation very quickly. Atlanta is such a diverse and inclusive city. One thing that I appreciated about being here in Atlanta is that if you can navigate networks and build personal relationships, you can create opportunities. I tell them all the time like, what if the storm didn't happen? We wouldn't be where we are right now. When COVID hit, 100% of our events were just canceled. Like everything was just wiped off the board. We thought that we were going to get certain funding so that we can upgrade our equipment and get new supplies. And then with the COVID happening, it all literally disappeared in thin air. How do we shift? How do we pivot? If our product is primarily a person-to-person product, how can this product now become an online product? Hey, Amber and Kiwi. It's been so long since we last saw each other. So how has business been post COVID? We decided to offer porch deliveries. And so our customers order online. So I think it'd be a great idea if we got your Instagram account linked to your website so those static pictures turn into the live feed. It's just letting your customers know what you guys are up to, which is so important, especially during COVID. Thank you, Courtney. You can go to any social media platform, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube at MokiPops. That's it. M-O-K-I-P-O-P-S. And, you know, subscribe below. Welcome to MokiPops production world for now. So, you know, you heard me say for now. No Willy Wonka here. No, it's not. It's the Robinson's. So you've been traditionally selling MokiPops at events all around Atlanta, and now you've got your eyes set on, you know, getting up on shelves and different retail shops. Why are you moving in that direction? My son challenged us a couple years ago saying, hey, it's great that we're going to events and people are starting to know us, but how can we make money while we're asleep? So that says, hey, that's retail. That's a retail question. That's wild. That is just, you know, that I have so much hope and optimism and faith in the next generation. I'm just like, are you asking those kinds of questions to you? That kind of insight I ate? I'm just like, wow, that's, that's, wow, that's beautiful. One of the key things that we have to do to get our products on the shelves is to, first of all, have something that looks presentable. Right now, our packaging is we have the wrappers and we have stickers to go on the wrappers. We're trying to blend the two, so we're trying to have branded wrappers. We're still like in a shared kitchen space, which we're kind of busting at the seams. So we can't produce much more than we can right now. We're limited into what we can do. We're about to do an event with Foodwell Alliance where they bought the popsicles back in January. When COVID hit, it was like, well, we have popsicles sitting on the table. We still want to honor, you know, the order. So there's going to be a day and an event where we're going to have like, you know, social distancing and different COVID measures in effect, but we can still honor our business. I had a conversation with my son the other day and I was letting him know that when you're doing business with people, you want to always have integrity. You know, it's not like, oh, well, you know, we took your money at the beginning of the year and the popsicles, oh, these were good. We just passed them to someone else. No, we're still able to honor that. And that's really special for us because the only way our business is really going to grow and be the places going to be if people respect us, people know that we're trustworthy and that we have a lot of integrity. What's your hopes for your kids to get out of this journey? For us, it's like legacy building, especially us being an African American on business. It's very important to be able to have a business that could be started by our children and with the help of us that one day they can take it and just keep passing it on down the track to have that story and have that legacy and to transfer it down, you know, generations to come. That would just be awesome, you know, really. Generational wealth is the wealth passed down through families. You know, it's a big reason for the racial wealth gap today in black and brown communities because there's not a whole lot of that. A black family that owns a business is 12 times wealthier than a black family that does not. We need to accelerate everything we do to support equity and inclusion so that folks that have the determination and the resolve to get ahead can get the resources. Hopefully, when they're my age one day, they're reaping a whole different type of benefit from the job and they're being able to just help people. We want to open up the gate to people become successful and us being able to share our tools and how we did it so we can share it all for generations to come. In a lot of ways, I'm getting chills because I'm thinking about breaking the cycle and bringing in education and also the systems that hold us back when really second chances are so necessary, right? I want to start my own business. What would you say that I should do? You shouldn't start a limited business because that's a typical business that everybody wants to start when they first start it. So like something different and you need help. You can't just do it on your own then it's not going to be a complete business. You just have to learn to map yourself and push yourself beyond your limits and you can't be complacent. You know, we represent, you know, a dream that the family has, you know, and that's something that's always in my head. It's like, look, like I want to see this through for the sake of my family. Like my mother said to me, I'm just really proud of you for sticking to this, you know, and you're seeing the fruits of your labor, you know. So that meant a lot to me to hear her say that. I'm just so proud and excited for them. I think they are really doing the work behind the scenes. They're making some really big and challenging shifts in their business towards retail and new ways to sell their product. That is what a true entrepreneur looks like. That's a Robinson family. Y'all are showing what it means to be made in America. Like that's what it's about. So we're going to learn more about the Robinsons and their ambitious push towards new ways to sell their pops in episode four. But next up is Yolanda who owns Iwi Fresh. It's a farm to skim spot and she's going to talk about how she's pivoting and how she's going to possibly even expand during this time. I hope you join us.