 Welcome to the wide world of eSports, a show devoted to all things eSports. I'm your host, Catherine Norr. Today, our topic is Techie Factory, Building Powerful Minds. With me is Freddie Haustad, the CEO of Techie Factory. Welcome, Freddie. Well, thank you. Glad to be here. That intro made me a little sad to be in Dallas, Texas. It looked beautiful, but yeah, I'm excited to be here. Thanks. All right. Yeah, so Aloha from Hawaii. Anyway, so tell us about Techie Factory. Yeah, Techie Factory is the place where kids go to learn all the exciting eSports and tech that they already love doing. We do a lot of coding, but then we do Roblox experience creation. We do Minecraft. We do DJ. You name it. If it's tech related, we do it. And so we do summer camps and after school, and we are actually a franchise or and hopefully will be in Hawaii soon. Fantastic. So what age groups are you focused on? Majority of our kids are younger. So kind of seven to 12. And that's the majority of our customers. But then we have some older kids, especially for eSports and some of the more robust coding. And so can this be like an after school babysitting program while parents are working? I'll tell you, Catherine, a large percentage of our kids that we see during the summer at camps, they have to work and their kids don't. And so if they can have them learn something cool and the kids have a ball, then they're all for it. So especially during the summer, that's the case. But then after school as well. All right. So is it in person or is some of it like remote? Sure. The vast majority is in person. What we found with this kind of age group of digital natives is that they just assume be at their house on their iPad or their PC. And we want them to be with other kids. We want them to learn some of the social kind of soft skills involved with being around other people. And so we really like to get them in. A lot of what we do is very hands on. And so we very much prefer in person. But then there's some people that that doesn't work, whether it be schedule or proximity. And for those folks, we do offer virtual as well. And so do you also have native technology teachers? I mean, are your teachers younger? Again, that's one of the really fun things about what we do. And what we tell, you know, potential franchisees is that it's kind of easy to have to find instructors. We have a predominance of high school kids and college kids. And between how we present the material and kind of our platform and then our training, most of them are digitally savvy enough to do it and run with it and do an amazing job. And so what led you to start this? So I was a public school teacher here in Dallas for 14 years. My wife and I nearly 10 years ago now opened a math nasium, which is a math learning franchise. She's actually a math teacher. And we opened our first one here in our neighborhood and then eventually opened another and then acquired third. And so we were math nasium franchisees, and we loved it. We started to notice and really look at, you know, trying to figure out where the future is. And for us, trying to, you know, own more centers in other states wouldn't be a great option. And so we found a place called Techie Factory that was started by former CIO at Pizza Hut and a really successful guy and went to partner with him and eventually bought it from him and started working on franchising right before the pandemic. So how many locations do you have and where are they? Right. So we have two here in DFW and we're about to add nine that are predominantly in the state of Texas. And so, yeah, I mean, we're really young, which is weird to say because it's been two and a half years, but we, and we started franchising in earnest two months before the world shut down. So we're ready to grow now. And it sounds like this would be a great opportunity in any place. Is that true? No doubt about it. I mean, everywhere, kids kind of of this age love what we teach and the parents really see the value in, you know, whether it's coding or eSports or all the digital creation that we do. It's great. And, you know, one of the cool things about what we do is the entrepreneurial aspect, whether it's our content creation or our roadblocks. We really get to hone in with these kids on entrepreneurship and talk about money and talk about how to make money and talk about, you know, the fact that they're probably not going to design a game and become millionaires at 10, but there are examples of kids who are making money at 10 and 11. And it's just nuts. And it really opens up the kid's mind to the possibilities and it's a lot of fun. And to your point, yes. I think the eSports is a little head of the curve in some places as opposed to others, but the digital creation, the coding we do, kids love it everywhere. Okay. So a lot of people have this image of kids playing video games is not a healthy thing. However, your your business is basically kids working with gaming and computers after school instead of doing sports. What do you tell parents who may have an issue with what you do? Sure, the dreaded screen time. You know, it's a fairly easy conversation for a growing number of parents. We get calls all the time from parents who say, my kid's not interested in traditional sports. I really want them to find their niche. I want them to find their people. Can you help? Yes, yeah, we definitely can. And then for those kids who aren't necessarily as introverted or who do want to play traditional sports, great. The reality is, and you know this, Catherine, that the vast, vast majority of these kids are playing video games anyway. And they get home and they play for an hour and then they go to baseball practice and they come home and they play for an hour and they eat and they, if their parents let them, they pay for another hour and then go to bed. And why not put that in kind of a traditional sports setting where they're working on teamwork and they're working on how to win and lose properly. Where they're working on, you know, healthy competitiveness. And we talk about the importance of nutrition and exercise and sleep because very few of these professional esports folks or even really successful streamers don't worry about their health at all. I mean, it's the human body. It needs exercise, it needs sleep, it needs good nutrition. And so we have the opportunity to talk to the parents about that. Sure. And one of my guests from an esports team two weeks ago, he mentioned, they mentioned that he got like five hours or less of sleep, sleep even in a week. I mean, he was streaming all the time. So it sounds like a good thing that you combine those kind of life lessons with what you do. Yeah, because and streaming to a lesser extent, but professional gamers, their career is going to be really short if they're getting the five hours of sleep a week. It just is. And so, yeah, we really want to focus on that. Sure. And, you know, I think there are some things like you talk about roblox, you mentioned roblox. And that's kind of like people talk about that being like the metaverse. How do you, you know, if we're looking at the future of essentially the metaverse and of gaming, how does the metaverse factor into what you're doing? Yeah, so initially in kind of the current state of the metaverse, a lot of what we do is it relates to roblox is teaching the kids how to make experiences, teaching them how to be safe on the platform. And the cool thing about roblox is there's something called Roblox Studio and you can go in there and create your own experiences. You can use a coding language called Lua to build just about anything on the platform you want. And so instead of trying to go to a 10 year old kid who maybe just doesn't gravitate towards this and say, hey, let's learn Java or let's learn C++ or Python, we can go to them and say, hey, let's go into Roblox and build this cool stuff. Well, then they hit a wall as far as what they want to create. And so then we got to learn Lua. And so that's how we kind of introduce them to Roblox and get involved. And then, you know, the metaverse, Catherine and this and kind of youth esports in general are a big really important to me. And I think us as entrepreneurs, us as adults, it's really important for us to help guide some of these companies or create them to make safe places online. The reality is that the FTC is going to continue to change and update these laws to protect kids. And why not be on the front foot of that really and create safe places now and cool places and fun places, because that's the key with kids. If they'll sniff it out, if it's not cool, and they won't be interested, whether it's great or not. And so, yeah, for us creating those safe places is really important. You know, it seems to me that if a kid is eight years old, 10 years old, 12 years old now, that when they're an adult, when they're a young adult, that will be when the metaverse becomes more part of our lives. And I would think that it would be very important for a potential career in a world where the metaverse is super big, that they would have this kind of skill and experience at these young ages. What do you think about that? You know, it's really, it's really funny you mentioned that. And I think a lot of the listeners of Think Tech Hawaii will appreciate this. Someone will. The reality is that these six, seven, eight year olds, whose parents want them to learn the code, I think it's great because I think there's an abundance of soft skills that are really important that can be learned through coding. But the reality is when they're old enough to have a job, AI is going to be doing a lot of it. But to your point, they're still going to be all these new jobs created. And all of them are great for these digital natives, where they're going to be doing things as a related metaverse. And so I think teaching them now, again, to your very smart point is really, really important. And so yeah, so giving them the opportunity to do that, whether it's Minecraft or Roblox, Lego is about to come out with a metaverse. I mean, I think a lot of these children focused companies are creating stuff that will be able to utilize. Sure. And so you kind of alluded to the pandemic a little bit. How did that impact Techie Factory? So by all rights, we should be dead. I mean, Techie Factory shouldn't exist in reality. A lot of our peers didn't make it. A lot of the folks doing similar things, their franchisees in particular didn't make it. We were very fortunate to be in Dallas, where we had less parents that were significantly worried about COVID and they were satisfied with the precautions that we took. And so we were able to still run camps and still run after school. They were much, much smaller and with social distancing and everything else. It wasn't easy, but we were able to keep some kind of revenue stream to get us through. So it was, yeah, it was really tough on our business. But kind of since last spring, we started trending back to normal. And this summer, we've had the best summer we've ever had, whether I owned it or someone else. And so it's been great. And we're kind of fully back on track. I would think that there would be pent up demand for getting together in person. There definitely was. And we look for that to really fuel the youth esports component of our business. And so yeah, I mean, that's going to be an exciting part of, I think of this fall in particular. And what is your website? techiefactory.com. And from there, you can go to either of the locations. You can see the different different things we teach. You can learn more about franchising and kind of what we do in general. And here pretty soon again to esports, you'll find a lot more information. We're going to have tournaments all over the country. We're partnering with a company that does competitions all over the country. And so we're going to have stuff all over our app, which is called E-Turney. Is that safe place for kids to go on and compete and create content and keep the creeps away? And so we'll be utilizing that. But yeah. So this is something that could go outside of the US into other countries as well. Is that right? It could. In fact, we recently spoke with a company that is based overseas about possibly partnering and working together. So no, this is definitely something that could go overseas in the app in and of itself. Definitely. I mean, we anticipate having kids from all over the world again competing and uploading their streams so that we can make sure they're okay and uses VODs and they can be in that safe space. And what kind of, you know, clearly what you're doing is providing education for children at young ages in technology. What kind of jobs would this translate to them having in the future? I mean, I realize that the job situation may be quite different when they grow up. But I'm wondering what you foresee right now. Sure. The neat thing about us, and I think one of the big differentiators between some of the folks that are doing something similar to us in this space is that we do have that digital creation aspect. And I think anything from coding to entertainment to music. I mean, we touch all of those. And so I think kids, we don't feel like the eight-year-old that's in our place needs to leave and be able to be ready to be a professional coder, DJ, Roblox designer. We want them to be able to understand kind of what these jobs are or what these skills are and be able to choose for themselves. And we have a lot of kids who will come and do Roblox for, you know, two semesters and then switch over to something else. But that's what we want. We want to give them a taste. We want to get them excited about it. And then if that leads to them really finding a passion for it and going on to do something in the space, great. But really, yeah, anything from coding to entertainment, we do chess, eSports. So I mean, the potential careers down the road for these kids is limitless. You know what's interesting? We're both members of eSports Trade Association. And I noticed that other members are not necessarily in the eSports industry, but they're insurance, the insurance industry. They're lawyers or accountants. They're all, you know, in all sorts of different industries. So I think that, you know, it definitely touches, eSports and gaming touches so much, right? Definitely. And I think all you need to do is look at, so our business in the fall, the youth eSports tournaments, by the time that gets fully going, we're going to have marketing people, PR people, attorneys, all the people involved, the eSports, the live entertainment, the convention folks in whatever city. The list of businesses that will be, yeah, the list of businesses that will have financial gain from these events is certainly more than 20 or 30 for each event, and possibly way, way higher. So yeah, it's amazing the amount of different folks that have kind of nothing to do with eSports, but they'll be making some money from it, certainly down the road. You know, I always think with Hawaii that we should do eSports tourism because, you know, we have a robust tourism industry here, but, you know, certainly when you're talking about a tropical location, eSports tourism would be an option. And we even have, like at University of Hawaii, we have like tourism programs, you know, so that that people can major in tourism. So I could even see that being something like eSports tourism someday. And, you know, so it kind of even goes broader. It goes very broad. Yeah. And I think that's one of the great things about eSports as kind of a revenue generating device. So you could have a fairly large few hundred kid youth tournament or series that culminates with an event in Hawaii. Well, then that gets the local kids more interested. That gets adults more interested who really see the value. And then suddenly you have teams and clubs there in Hawaii. And then someone contender belong whoever comes in opens an arena and another and then yeah, then you're having multiple tournaments. You're having folks coming off, you know, ships just to do these tournaments, you have folks from the Pacific and the states involved. But yeah, all it takes is getting someone to kind of start it and do a great job. Sure. And, you know, when do you have sponsors within your company? Like are there any, are there any companies that are sponsoring like you techie factory and providing you with gear and stuff? There aren't yet. We were not big enough to be completely honest. One of the really exciting things we're doing, Catherine, is we've created a nonprofit. So our franchisees, once they're all over the country, can run these camps for underprivileged kids and run these after school labs for underprivileged kids that wouldn't otherwise be able to necessarily afford what we do. And we will raise the money here in Dallas and to be able to send it to them. So these new entrepreneurs don't have to flip the bill, but they can really get out in their community and help a lot of kids. And we have some great donors. There's a company called a lot here in Dallas, a great software company that has really been helpful in that regard. But I think once we grow that business, once we grow the youth esports, then I do think we'll be able to go to sponsors. And if nothing else, have the opportunity to offer our franchisees a chance to get discounted stuff and things like that. So we don't now, but I definitely think we will. Now, what are you looking for in franchisees? What attributes would someone have to have in order to open a franchise? Yeah, I think the love for kids is paramount. Again, my wife and I, school teachers, a lot of the people that work for us have been in education or kid-related franchises. And so love for kids, I think an entrepreneurial spirit is really important. And then it kind of depends from there. I mean, I think we'll have successful franchisees who are teachers and have someone who helps them run the joint. And then during the summer, they go full bore into it. I think we'll have obviously business people, folks that own other franchises. But you know, some of the people in the pipeline were CPAs a week ago and decided they wanted to do something different. Some of them will be esports folks who realize that, you know, like everything in our culture, it starts with adults and then kind of goes downhill and eventually gets to kids and they want to be able to take advantage of that and kind of shepherd those kids. So it's a variety of folks. Sure. And could you foresee partnering with something like the YMCA or some other kind of program like that? Yeah, I think the nonprofit really gives us the opportunity to do things like that. There are for-profit businesses out there that are currently partnering with YMCA and to a lesser extent big brothers and big sisters. And so I think we want to do a lot of stuff like that. And a lot of the YMCA options are for older kids, kind of high school and middle and we want to give the opportunity for, you know, elementary school kids. Again, pushing the fact that we want them to be out there getting exercise and getting sleep and not flipping out when mom or dad says turn your game off. But they're playing anyway. So let's get it in a really healthy positive setting. All right. So, Freddie, I'll let you tell people how they can reach you and connect with you if they're interested in either having their child be part of your program or if they're interested in becoming a franchisee. Yeah. Well, I'm excited to hear from all the potential franchisees there in Hawaii and I will be happy to come visit. But yeah, takingfactory.com and then our app is called E-Turney. It's in the app store now. You can download it. It's completely free. Our nonprofit is TF Promise and all of those have a presence on LinkedIn. And then it's kind of a hodgepodge to be honest with you on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and everywhere else. But yeah, if you type in Freddie Halstead, you'll find me and all the cool stuff we're working on. Fantastic. Well, Freddie, thank you so much for being my guest today. Thank you, Catherine. It was a pleasure. All right. So thank you to our viewers for joining us today next week. Actually, in two weeks, my guest will be Leilani Ferenes of True Esports. See you then.