We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Mitch Weathers. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Mitch below.

Hi Mitch, thanks for joining us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

I became a gifted teacher because he was a mediocre student.

Growing up I rarely felt comfortable in the classroom. In fact, it took me 7 years to finish my undergraduate courses and graduate from college.

Choosing to become a teacher, I was fortunate enough to experience my K12 schooling and my undergrad work as if it was happening all around me. I distinctly recall feeling unsure of how to jump into my learning with confidence. There is a loneliness to experiencing your education as a passive object as opposed to an active subject.

From the moment I entered the classroom I relied on my personal experiences as a learner. I recognized that what we teach, the content or curriculum, is secondary. We must first lay the foundation for learning before we can get to teaching, or assessments, or even technology.

Fortunately, in my first years of teaching my students were just like me. They came to school each day but they were not successful. In fact, most of them were plagued by historic of academic struggle and by the time they reached me in high school they were more or less switched off to school.

My goal was to switch them back on to their learning. But how?

Then I came to me. My students lacked agency, just as I had experienced. They wanted to be successful, who doesn’t, but I remember thinking that they did not know how to “do” school – or what some schools we work with call “studentness”. They lacked the executive functioning skills that research has overwhelming shown to lay the foundation for learning and life.

Over the course of the following two years I designed a program called Organized Binder. Simply put, the program empowers teachers with a simple but research-backed lesson structure and routine. Students, by virtue of engaging in this daily learning routine get practice with the executive functioning skills that set them up for success. However, because the teacher does not have to “teach” executive functions in a traditional sense the program simultaneously protects the time needed for content instruction.

The secret is found in establishing a predictable learning routine that serves to foster safer learning spaces. When all students get practice with executive functions by virtue of this daily learning routine we can set them up for success.

Mitch, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I don’t teach teachers how to teach. I teach teachers how to set students up for success.

I can teach teachers how to deliver content – I am good at it, but that’s not where I add value to schools, districts, and colleges.

As you know, unless students develop a solid foundation for learning it does not matter how great teachers deliver content, or how emergent the technology, or even how engaging a lesson might be.

When students hone executive functioning skills, teachers’ efforts to deliver content find fertile ground and then, everyone succeeds.

I have a black belt in creating fertile ground for learning.

I show teachers how to equip students with executive functioning skills. It is possible for teachers to engage the most disengaged or disinterested students and set them up for success in school and life.

That is my superpower.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

My story of resilience was born out of the pandemic.

Derek Sivers, in his book “Anything You Want – 40 Lessons for A New Kind of Entrepreneur” urges business owners to, “Care about your customers more than about yourself, and you’ll do well.” He also suggests that we “Just stay focused on helping people today.”

My company works in education – public and private. Specifically we work with K-12 schools, districts, and colleges. In the spring of 2020 our landscape shifted as the world shut down in response to COVID. We typically renegotiate our contracts each spring with returning and new clients. When schools officially closed in March of 2020, we were mid-negotiations.

In March and April of that year 90% of our customers told me that wold not renew their contract for the 2020-2021 school year.

YIKES!

Many of them told me that they had every intention of renewing, but they since no one knew what the fall of 2020 would hold they were forced to wait (most schools poured funds into devices and hotspots in an effort to stay connect to and engage students and families – sadly, for the most part, it did not work).

Certain we were going out of business, you can probably imagine how many sleepless nights I experienced in March and April of 2020.

Then, in late April I was on a group video call and someone (I don[‘t recall who) said something that struck me. They said,

“How we show up during COVID will be remembered.”

I know this was late April because I wrote this quote down in my journal and dated it 04/29/2020. I put a star next to that quote and then in the very back of my journal, inside the cover, I wrote a reminder to always go back and read the quote on page 38 with a start next to it. And I do!

That one line changed everything for me as a business owner.

Instead of being fearful about going out of business (scarcity mindset), which I could not control, I decided to simply show up for my customers (abundance mindset). The next day I began calling every customer from the previous school year to tell them that regardless of whether or not we had a contract in place I was going to show up and support teachers as if we did, for the entire school year.

And I did.

Every week I would reach out to specific schools and teachers and simply encourage them and let them know I was available for any kind of support the might need. Most of the time these educators where just thankful that someone was willing to help. We spent more time talking about how crazy things were in the world than we did solving immediate problems.

This was not as easy as it sounds but I just kept telling myself, “If we are going out of business then this is the way I want to go, “Focused on helping people today.” That’s it.”

Thank goodness for the initial rounds of state and federal relief for businesses, if not, we would have certainly gone under.

Here is what is most interesting, and humbling to me, about this journey. Throughout the summer and fall semester or 2020, I showed up each day to serve educators while being certain my company was slowly going to go bankrupt.

Then startlingly, in January of 2021, school and district leaders started reaching out and asking if they could bring our program back ASAP – in any capacity! They shared that all the technology they had purchased was not keeping schools connected with students and families as they had hoped. Their teachers were overwhelmed, students were struggling, and they wanted to invest what they know works!

Fast forward to 2022 and all of our former customers have come back and our company has grown more this year than ever – we can hardly keep up. I believe we are experiencing is growth for a two reasons:

1. We show up to take care of our customers in good and tough times.
2. We are focused on setting teachers and students up for success by laying the foundation for learning.

Echoing Sivers, find the courage to show up for your customers, even in the dark times, and they will thank you for it.

Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.

I founded my company as a consultancy. Myself, or one of my teacher-trainers, would visit schools and/or districts and offer professional learning for teachers. Specifically we trained teacher on how to implement a system I had designed to give students practice with executive functioning skills. At that time, and still to this day, there are 3 tenets to our trainings:

1. Being explicit (don’t make assumptions about what students know, understand, or can do)
2. Implement a predictable daily learning routine (this creates safer learning environments)
3. Model the use of executive functioning skills (for us. this is a physical 3-ring binder)

Following our training we would then give schools the master documents to make copies of the templates we used in our trainings. This way every teacher could have a Class Sample Binder (aka modeling) and every student could have their binder.

After about 5 years I met the owner of a textbook company. He loved the program I designed and that I was sharing with educators around the country. But when I told him about our business model, without hesitation, he quickly replied, “You are literally killing your customers! You have put up every possible roadblock imaginable to keep them coming back, but they renew ever year!”

I was perplexed.

He congratulated me on the repeated revenue and said that it proved the efficacy of the program. my company was built around. Then he asked me how likely would it be for his textbook company to sell their books if once they got the contract they asked schools to copy/manufacture the product. That is nonsense – but it was what I was doing.

Then he said, “You have to solve this pain point for your schools and sell it back to them. An DON’T WORRY about the money. It will work!”

I left this meeting and immediate called my designer to share that we were going into the print business. I had absolutely no clue where to even being so I just started asking people I trusted – starting with my textbook CEO friend – what I should do. He suggested that I reach out to 4 printers to get quotes and get a baseline for what our first product run would cost.

So I reached out to 8 printers. My thinking was that I was ignorant that more data points the better.

I did the same with companies would could manufacture our binders and folders.

I did not want to take on any debt – I was going to bootstrap this first project. Where was I going to find the funds? But here is what made it possible. That spring, when we were negotiating new contracts for the upcoming school year I simply stated that purchasing materials from us was part of the contract. Basically making it sound like this what our company had already provided.

Surprisingly, that summer our first order was placed. 3,000 units and we promised to have them delivered by fall in time for the school year. Since I did not have any money as a down payment I took the contract with this client to my new printer to prove to them that we could pay for the order.

Seeing the contract, they took my word and gave me 30 days to pay them once they delivered the product. I invoiced our customer. They paid. We deposited our first check over $20k ever as a company. Then we paid the printer and had funds in the bank for our next order.

It was risky, I guess, but I did not want to assume that we would sell more than was ordered, at first. So I played is safe and it worked out.

Contact Info:

• Website: organizedbinder.com
• Instagram: @organizedbinder
• Facebook: @organizedbinder
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mitch-weathers
• Twitter: @organizedbinder
• Youtube: https://vimeo.com/showcase/8775721
• Other: https://vimeo.com/showcase/8775721