We recently connected with James and Keziah Finney and have shared our conversation below.
James and Keziah, appreciate you joining us today. Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea
It was my senior year in college, and I needed to do a final project to complete my degree in Studio Production Digital Film-Making. I was thinking of doing a documentary on leadership, with a focus on the similarities and differences between two profound leaders: Martin Luther King Jr. and Hitler. I know, the controversy, right? At the time, my future wife, Keziah Davis, who is now Keziah Finney, thought it best for me to do a math-related video instead. Seeing as how math class was always an archenemy of mine, I had no immediate desire to partake in a production of this magnitude. However, against my better judgment, I said to her, “If I am going to do a math video, it has to be funny.” So that is what we did. My senior project was a 5-minute and 20-second video called “Adding Integers After-School.” In the video, Mrs. Finney played dual roles as the teacher and student. We overexaggerated students’ rebellious behavior inside the classroom with a comedic twist. Whether it was making a PB & J sandwich in their seat or drooling from an intense power nap, we covered the inconvenience that passionate teachers go through while making a great effort to teach a lesson to a “checked out” student. The turning point in the video was the spontaneous math rap the teacher delivered on the spot, after realizing the student was not learning the information through the traditional method of teaching. The teacher asked for a beat from the student, and the rest is history!
The next day, Mrs. Finney asked if she could use the video to show her three classes because they were starting a lesson on Adding Integers the following week. I said yes. She then created a pre-test to assess where her students were before watching the video, and a post-test to gauge comprehension levels after watching the video. She shared the data she gathered with me that evening, and we were both amazed. Her lowest-performing class had a 61.7% increase in comprehension for adding integers simply from a 5-minute and 20-second video. The average increase from all three classes combined came to 16%. After seeing that, I asked her, “How many people do you want to help?” and she said, “As many people as we can,” and that is how Lyrical Math started.
The process of going from idea to execution for me was faith. I didn’t know if Lyrical Math would work or not. I just knew it made sense to me, and I believed in my wife’s abilities to both teach and rap. Plus, it helped to have someone like me on the project because, for one, I never liked math, and for two, I hate being bored. So I thought if a person like me can learn math from what we cook up, I know students like me would as well. I’m honestly still a big kid at heart.
So I had the idea from a senior project in college, and now we have data to support that idea. We felt like we were on to something huge! I was already incorporated in Delaware, so it was go time! I took that momentum and cashed in all my chips, sort of speak, and used all the money that I received from Pell grant refund checks while in school, as well as some money from my part-time job, to finance this initiative. I ordered audio equipment from my favorite A/V store, B&H Photo in New York. I Auralexed the downstairs closet to make it soundproof, and we got busy creating. The funny thing is, we had to record Lyrical Math Part 1 three times because I mismanaged the raw audio files twice. We laugh about it now, but it definitely wasn’t funny recording all 10 tracks multiple times back then. I remember telling my wife, “That’s just God testing us to see how bad we want it.” Once we had the audio recorded, mixed, and mastered, we created the curriculum around the music. We started with a consumable student workbook, then a scripted teacher guidebook to help teachers in the classroom, and ended with a resource assessment book made up of pre- and post-tests for all 10 lessons. The resource assessment book allows the user to gauge student comprehension levels. It’s pretty dope for teachers to have some clean, catchy, and effective songs that teach procedural steps for solving basic math concepts. After all the creating was complete, the next move was to protect everything we created. I hired a prominent law firm to trademark my business name and copyright all of its intellectual property. Looking back, they charged us an arm but let us keep the leg, metaphorically speaking.
The first year was exciting, fun, and adventurous. It was August 2015, and we had just completed The Lyrical Math Part 1 music album. We were full of creative energy, ready for the world to hear our music and ready to begin the next project all at the same time. Without much delay, we got straight to work on creating a hip-hop math intervention curriculum to complement the music album we just finished creating. A lot of opposition was in front of us, along with sacrifices. There just wasn’t much time made for anything other than building and creating. I’m talking missed birthday parties, family gatherings, and when it came to selling our curriculum in the beginning, a whole lot of no’s.
It seemed like the biggest hurdle for us to figure out was how to educate the community on Lyrical Math being a viable option to help children with math. People seemed thrown off when we would put hip-hop and math together in the same sentence.
A big component that helped us move from the idea phase to the actual launch phase was performing. Mrs. Finney loves to perform and has been since she was nine years old. So, we would hold school assemblies as a way to introduce our product to the school’s administration team. It didn’t always work, but it was a great way to get a foot in the door.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
My name is James Finney, and I am the Director of Operations for an EDUtainment Production Company called JFinTV® Studios, LLC. My wife, Keziah Finney, is a certified middle school math and science teacher with over 23 years of classroom teaching experience. Since the tender age of 9, she has been recording and performing her own original hip-hop music. As a teacher, she has fused her musical talents with her love for teaching.
I always knew I had a calling for educating the youth. I am a product of the Boys & Girls Club, so community and giving back are pretty much ingrained in me. It wasn’t until I found my passion for video and storytelling that I made the connection on what vehicle I was going to use to educate the youth.
Mrs. Finney grew up in a musical family that exposed her to various genres of music. As a child, she performed gospel music in her family church, which gave her her first experience singing solo before a crowd. During the same window of time, she gravitated towards hip-hop and was the youngest and only girl member of a hip-hop group. She recorded and performed music in several talent shows in various states. She enjoyed learned and always had a love for math and science. She enjoyed working with children and knew at an early age that she wanted to be a teacher.
We primarily focus on edutainment. So, the products and services we provide are educational, focusing on entertainment. My wife and I don’t like being bored, but we understand the value of education. For example, we have an early childhood education product and service that allows parents the opportunity to teach their own child(ren) letter sounds, shapes, colors, and numbers. It’s called Look Who’s Teaching Me (LWTM). We know LWTM is solving a major inconvenience for most parents with children aged 2 to 5 years old. Simply because most parents have to work, which means the school or daycare sees their child throughout the week more than they do, ultimately meaning their child is learning from them more than you! With the help of YouTube at such a tender age, with Look Who’s Teaching Me, the parent can now teach four major concepts needed in every child’s development using music, fun, and engagement.
Our flagship product and service, Lyrical Math, is a data-proven and research-based hip-hop math intervention program. Lyrical Math builds student confidence by teaching basic math skills through instructional hip-hop music. What is great about Lyrical Math is that it directly gives school districts that are facing teacher shortages a way to still deliver high-quality math curricula, with their substitute teachers and paraprofessionals who are required to teach math but are not certified math teachers. With the national teaching shortages our country is facing, Lyrical Math is a great tool for any school district to have.
We auditioned for Shark Tank back in 2016 and made it through the initial audition. During this experience, I learned a lot about us as a brand and our market share in this industry. Back then, we had no sales, so we had no market share. Pretty much tadpoles in a very large pond. However, I was forced, thanks to the next round of Shark Tank auditioning, to find who the frogs or frog is in this industry. I did and discovered what sets us apart from the rest. Mrs. Finney. This award-winning certified math teacher with over 23 years of experience in the classroom is the reason our products and services are set apart. Mrs. Finney can turn any environment into her classroom and build any student’s confidence with Lyrical Math. Whereas the frog I referenced earlier has a team of teachers and artists that work together to create, our team is more simplified and strategic, which streamlines the process of going from creativity straight to market. “One band, one sound” is a favorite quote from the movie Drumline.
I would rather not use the word proud because I don’t intend on being boastful, but I am most pleased at how we have endured all the “no’s” early on and persevered. I admire the creative spirit my wife and I have to produce educational content and materials that reach students in ways that are both unique and entertaining. The moment I will never forget is how we pivoted during a major time in human history. The country was shut down, and the entire education system was on its head. Nobody was learning anywhere.
It was summertime at the height of the pandemic when my wife came to me and said, “We should pop up at local parks to give free hip-hop math classes.” I said, “Draw it out, let me see what that looks like.” She did, and I knew we had to control electricity for the microphone and music, so I went to Harbor Freight and bought the quietest generator I could find. I used Jotform for parents to register their students online for class. We marketed the form on Delaware’s New Castle County website, and we were set. Our first class was at Glasgow Park, and we had about 15 registered, but only one showed. A dad who brought his 10-year-old daughter.
Mrs. Finney taught that class like we were at max capacity. Twenty students per class was max capacity since students had to be spaced six feet apart. After that first class, the floodgates opened. We had so many families registering that we had to create back-to-back classes. I’m talking families from Maryland and Pennsylvania driving to a Delaware Park for a 30-minute hip-hop math class. We even caught the attention of a reporter from Action News in Philadelphia who came out to cover what we were calling “Pop-Up Math Class.” Since then, we have received partnerships with New Castle County, the State of Delaware, the YMCA, the Boys and Girls Club, and various charter and public schools. So I say all this to say our perseverance and commitment to providing quality edutainment to the students we serve is what I admire the most.
Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?
What has been the most effective strategy for growing our clientele is a solid reputation. Proverbs 22:1 talks about how your name and reputation are better than riches and gold. I would go so far as to say a good reputation is the real currency.
How’d you meet your business partner?
How I met my cofounder/business partner was on the road, Route 13 in New Castle, DE, to be exact. The year was 2012, and it was my senior year in college. This particular semester, I would always treat myself to Chick-fil-A on Thursday because I had class all day long. Well, on this particular Thursday, I was headed back from grabbing a bit to eat, and I was in deep thought and without an answer as to what my next move was going to be after graduation. I had no career path lined up at the moment, which made me nervous. I’m guessing my inner thoughts transferred over to my facial expressions because while stopped at a red light, this woman in a little white car next to me caught my attention. She rolled down her window and asked if I was ok. I said “yes” and asked her why she was asking. She basically told me that my face suggested otherwise. We sparked a conversation, and without hesitation, I invited her to my school’s parking lot to finish the conversation. After speaking with her, we both realized how our gifts and talents complemented each other. The last thing she said to me that day was, “We have a lot of work to do, Mr. Finney. Vision, Sketch, Apply. I was so impressed by this woman’s candor that I had to know more about her. Long story short, I married her.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://lyricalmath.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lyricalmath
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JFINTV/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-finney-m-ed-5ab97046
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/jfintv
- Other: www.lyricalmath.info | www.lyricalmathonline.com
Image Credits
Delaware Online, Joel Del Tufo