How did he become interested in entrepreneurship or being an entrepreneur?

Braeden was interested in social good. Former First Lady Michelle Obama encouraged Braeden to think about ways to pay it forward. He won a food competition called the "Healthy Lunchtime Challenge" when he was 9 years old, and we had incredible luck being at the same table as Michelle Obama. She talked about eating healthy and living a healthy lifestyle, which was really important. She spoke to kids from every state of the country. It was a kid's State dinner, and Brayden represented Delaware.

She told him this was an excellent opportunity for him to think about how he could pay it forward. He didn't really understand that. Washington, DC, has a very high homeless population, and he asked questions like "why people were asking for money?" and "Why were they sitting at the train station"? He wanted to give his souvenir money away.

I told him, why don't we think about what Michelle Obama asks of you and about how we can pay it forward and find a way to help these people without giving away money because we don't have more money to give them.

What challenges have you and Braeden struggled with?

Healthy food is expensive. When you’re working with soup kitchens and shelters, they prefer non-perishable food, so finding healthy supplies that are affordable is really difficult. Another challenge was school, family, and work balance. He was young when he started, and the teachers and principal were open to working with him. But as he got older, it became a little bit harder because his academic demands increased. There would be instances where he would get invited to talk somewhere and it was an unexcused absence since the school wouldn’t approve it. From then, it was up to me to say “Okay, his grades are good. He can handle missing this one day,” or having to turn down an invite.

When we went through COVID, a lot of our work - which was mainly in public schools - got shut down and we are still struggling to get back into schools. Which, understandably so, since school protocols have changed and Braeden’s in college now, so his classes are during the day.

There’s been a number of challenges one after another, and one that was harder for me to understand was that he didn’t want to be a superstar. He wanted to be Braeden. He wanted to be the kid who played video games and rode on his scooter. It was hard for him to have that limelight sometimes, but he’s been given so many opportunities to attend different events - like meeting Gwen Stefani at the Disney Radio Music Awards in Los Angeles. 

As his mom, I want to protect him and I want him to have a happy life, but I also see that this is important to him and has become important to all of us. This includes the community, which was another challenge since people knew where we lived. People would leave toiletry items and we would come home to see that - which was a good thing, but we needed a storage unit since we lived in a townhome. Fortunately, I lived close to family and my parents, who opened their basement to become our Brae’s Brown Bags storage area. Again, we did not anticipate how this would take off and also had ignorance to the problem. I learned that, just in Braeden’s school district, there were over 700 homeless families. I’ve been privileged to always have food on the table, so that was a challenge too, when places we knew of - like the woods and other areas - people would be out in 18 degrees. There was one time where we drove four people who were sitting outside at an unopened shelter. They asked us to take them home and we drove them to the woods.

I cried the whole way home because when you immerse yourself in that environment, you realize you can only help so little. We put our contact information in these brown bags containing healthy food with bottles of water, and gave them to shelters or soup kitchens where they can get help. But, even then, they ask us to leave them in the woods. Everything was very hard to breathe in, but the concepts that he had to learn at such a young age have really impacted many including myself, so there have been many challenges.

Getting him involved in leadership was also important to me, so I connected him with the Jefferson Awards in their Lead 360 program. This helped us get connected to other like-minded people across the country, including many youth leadership conferences and schools. Once I could connect with them, they would invite Brayden to talk and I made sure to get my background checks and things alike since I was obviously an adult. So, it’s just learning all those intricacies to enjoy putting my best foot forward in order to get Brayden through the doors. It still is hard to filter emails and phone calls - and it was much harder in the beginning - but he can do a lot of that now on his own. 

Are there specific skills or lessons your child has learned through entrepreneurship?

Braeden has taught me how to be a public speaker. It;’s not something I was ever comfortable with before since I was a web developer and liked working behind the scenes. If anything, I think the roles are reversed since he taught me. But, one of the things that I had to help him with was being more concise - like an elevator pitch. Another would be empathy because a lot of times you can see people strung out or going through withdrawal. When we would work in colder temperatures, hypothermia sets in really quickly. There would also be people who looked drunk but weren’t, and in fact couldn’t walk. He needed to learn to “poker face it”. You never want to be fake to people, but you also don’t want to be judgemental since it’s very easy to judge with things you may not understand. You need to be compassionate and genuine, and realize that everybody is on a different journey that you may not see. So I think emotional intelligence is a skill he got to learn at a young age and he has carried that forward. He is one of the calmest, young people I know that can handle mental health and high tense issues and be able to hone it in.

Have you seen any positive changes in your child’s confidence or leadership skills since starting their business?

It’s easy for me to see the changes now that he's 20 years old. He’s a completely different person than when he was a little kid, but as a child, his leadership skills were incredible. He would be in charge of a room of 400 kids - grabbing the microphone, jumping down the stage, and be in the middle of them and talk. He was talking to his peers, he knew they would listen to him and knew that they would be excited about what he was talking about. But, the leadership aspect of it, he wanted to create more leaders. It was never about “Let’s see how many people I can get to follow me,” and I feel like there’s a lot of young people these days that are all about followers. Social media has kind of forced that upon everybody, but Braeden was never about that. He was all about the ripple effect of sharing a story and watching people run with it - whether they wanted to help with food insecurity, shelter animals, or help recycle. He loves seeing them become leaders, and he has so many friends now around the country because they just lifted each other up.

How do you address setbacks or failures with Braeden in the context of their business?

When he was little, I think it was harder. He wanted to make sure he was getting everything right, and we still didn’t really know what we were doing and what would be right. I think in many cases, he taught me to let it go. That might be more now since he is older, but when he was little it was more about reflection. When something’s happening and you’re not sure - like technical difficulties or forgetting something you needed - at that point it’s out of your control and it’s just realizing that “I’m going to do my best. I can always do better next time.” There’s never really a failure because even when something doesn’t go right, it’s a learning experience. I think we both taught each other that not everything’s going to be perfect, but at the end of the day, if you’re sharing your mission and more people want to hear more from the ripple effect, it won’t be a permanent setback. It gave you something to learn from and to improve next time. I feel like it’s always been about what’s working and not working, then improving it.

Braeden: I think it’s good to address it as what you can learn from whatever setback or failure was made and the recovery. “How can I quickly reflect with what I realized was a mistake? And how can I cover it and make it seem not so bad anymore. I think recovery is very important when it comes to failure. Like when I messed up with something public speaking-wise, I was able to bring it back in and just focus.

How do you involve Braeden in the decision-making processes related to his business?

For some parts, he did that on his own - like once he could drive, I wasn’t transporting him everywhere. For example, a code purple - which, in Delaware, it means that the temperatures have dropped below freezing and we’re opening emergency locations for people to go stay if they don’t have a place. I used to do the transporting and he would pack the bags, but he does that now on his own. I would give him the location, sometimes he would take his girlfriend, and they would both go deliver. He has seen me doing things and now he’s like “Oh, well I can do that.” When it comes to responding to things, he normally will check with me like “Mom, did you see that email? Is it okay?,” and I would say, again with my number one question, if he was comfortable with this. When he was younger, it was more like “Do you want me to write an outline for this speech and you fill in the rest? Do you want to practice this?,” and then it would get to the point of “No I got it, I can write it. I’ll read it through with you.” It just naturally happened. I think him seeing me struggle as a single mom, made him always want to fill in.

What resources or organizations have been helpful in supporting your child’s entrepreneurial journey?

Braeden: Dosomething.org helped us out at the very start. From multiple grants and word of mouth I believe. They helped us with more exposure and the start of my non-profit. After that, we got a lot of support from the YMCA and the Boys & Girls club - where we hold our annual and now biannual celebration of how long 3B has been around. They gave us a place to hold that celebration. The Food Bank has also helped us a lot for the same reason.

Mainly, we would hold events wherever we could hold them sometimes. When it comes to classes, the only class I took while in middle school would be BPA (Business Professionals of America). It helped my organization - what I was doing at the time and my class went hand in hand with public speaking.

Christy: I work at the University of Delaware and I used to work for the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. They have Delaware Cooperative Extension, which has a while unit that focuses on food insecurity. They were speakers at some events, so having that connection was really great. They also have an annual day event where we could have a table and people could pack brown bags and take them home in the car. So, if you see someone on the street when you’re driving, you have a bag and can hand them out the window. The Jefferson Awards were also a big thing year after year. They would help both of us with our leadership skills because they had events where Braeden could work with the young while I worked with the older people. Kohl’s, the shopping department, had an award called “Kohl’s Cares” which helped too. There was Mazda and NBC Universal as well in doing a lot for helping nonprofits where Braeden received the “Mazda Drive for Good” Award one year. They had him go on “The Today Show” and, at the Christmas tree lighting, he was able to be featured on TV at the Rockefeller Center.

So, having those local connections, working with the Food Bank of Delaware, and the Jefferson Awards, they would then share with us “Look at Kohl’s Cares, look at this “Mazda Drive for Good”. Dosomething.org was the same - where they help people and kids all over the country to do something good.

How does your child balance the financial aspects of their business, such as budgeting and reinvesting profits?

Christy: Well, as you know, our first donation from Start-a-Snowball that was $100 was gone immediately just because, again, non-perishable healthy foods are so expensive. The brown bags we use aren’t plastic bags they’re just brown bags, which is something that Mazda helped us with a lot. It’s been hard because, as Braeden is getting older, he doesn’t qualify anymore for the youth grants. But, we do have a following now - I hate saying “following”, since I think we’re all leaders - and we have people who regularly donate once a month. So, really, it’s basically what the demand is. When we were working with the schools, they had a summer program where kids who didn’t have food at home could go get food, and we would help with that. We look for sponsorships when we hold events. That would just be us going to a local mom and pop shop and saying “We’re getting ready to do a hunger conference, and we need some money to get this off the floor. Would you like to be a sponsor? Your logo will be on the website and your logo will be on the banner.” So, learning how we can amplify local places to make them more visible and to also help us in our initiatives. Working with already existing organizations was also very helpful because they had connections too and we would learn from them like the Food Bank of Delaware.

Humans, in general, want to do good and be told “Your donation 100% goes to this mission.” Braeden doesn’t get paid, I don’t get paid, and we don’t do mileage reimbursement - it all comes out of us and our money. When people realize there’s no overhead and basically know “we’re not using your money for anything, but helping other people,” they give, and we’re really lucky. When former President Trump was in office, some changes he made like itemized deductions or alike, we hurt from that. We have less donations now that that change is made. So, it’s important to know what the policies are and what we can do to incentivize bigger donations like “we’ll make sure we tag you on Facebook” or “your logo is gonna be on the email we send out,” so things like that. But again, it’s never really been about profits, it’s just been about being careful with the money and being honest about where it’s going.

Brayden: Along with what my mom said, it was a lot of grants and donations that we depended on along with making promises to those who gave us the donations that it would be for good use. If they were a brand or company, they would be included and there’s no money-making out of it. Anytime I was on TV, there wouldn't be profits coming to me from that, but I consider the exposure that we got as profitable. We got more good donations and had more people be aware that we are here and helping people.

What advice would you give to a teen or kid entrepreneur who wants to start a business?

Braeden: Something that I always said was to always dream big and that anything you want to do can happen. Not everyone may feel like they have the support they need, especially when they are young, but I’m sure there is at least someone you could talk to about all the things you may or may not want to do. Something to look out for is anyone that you can take your ideas to as long as you know that they will listen and will take your words in account. I think it’s always very important to pitch your ideas, or plans for the future, to someone to get other opinions.

Any mistakes that you may think are unforgiving, you can bounce back from almost anything. Always keep at the back of your mind that no matter how hard you fall, you can always get up just as strong as you fell.