- What has it meant for you
to step into this journey of entrepreneurship?
- You work for yourself and you're proud about what
you've built, you take care of it a little differently
then something that this is kinda like
something you have to do.
- [Scott] America has always been associated with making it,
but is this opportunity accessible to all?
- [Rodney] 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 wanna break that stereotype.
- I'm wanna see this through for the sake of my family.
- [Scott] They're defying the odds, and their stories
show us what it means to be Made in America.
(soft music)
- [Amber] Our children had the vision first.
- All right team, ready to deliver?
Y'all ready? - [Kids] Yes!
- [Amber] It 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 wanna sell?
They said "Well can we sell the opsicles
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.
- Thank you.
- High five. - High five.
- Pull the stick from the bottom before it falls off.
(laughs)
- All right thank you. - Thank you guys so much.
- We're just dancing 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 Khan-Robinson.
- I am Kibwe Robinson.
MOKIPOPS, 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 MOKIPOPS?
- Nur-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 MOKIPOPS.
- The film crew is back there, they're filming us.
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.
- [Producer] So they have no idea that they're talking
to a 12 year-old.
- No, it's a secret.
- Qadar, 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 what they are?
Which is pretty exciting.
- My sister here is a big spender.
And I just save a lot. I don't like getting a lot of things.
- And then Ayah, she is our special gem
because she was the one that really
initiated the flavors.
She would basically throw ideas out and we'd 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.
- [Scott] 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 at both ends
to make things work.
We have to get up early in the morning before the children
to do some prepping.
And then we gotta have free time with them
so they can enjoy themselves as children.
It can become challenging because we, you know,
we don't wanna 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 started 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 will 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.
- [Amber] 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 into my mom and like,
why didn'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 feeling 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 wanna access
becomes more expensive.
- There was over $130 billion dollars in 2019
invested in the form of angel and venture capital.
And 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 pot.
We had to get a new van for the family
that took away from what we had saved
for packaging to go into a larger retailer.
If that gets frustrating, like very frustrating.
When does that financial break gonna come,
you know, for us.
Like that, I have moments where like,
I get overwhelmed.
I feel like I'm gonna start to cry.
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 wanna know that there's some,
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 after it 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.
- [Amber] I come from an entrepreneurial family
and there have been traits of entrepreneurship
in my children that initially I wasn't aware of.
- Who 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, we stayed at their house
when the house got destroyed in Hurricane Irma.
(soft music)
- [Amber] The power goes off and we all
congregate as a family in my children's room.
And we all huddle and say this prayer together,
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.
We get a phone call from the next door neighbor,
and says, the storm got y'all.
Three trees like fell on our house.
- [Kibwe] It was very scary,
to leave your house and come back
and see it in shambles.
- [Amber] 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.
- [Kibwe] When Hurricane Irma hit it let us know
we gotta seize the moment.
A moment can come and go quickly.
We lost a lot of things. Our house was destroyed.
The only thing you can go,
really when that situation happens is up.
- [Amber] You know, sometimes things that appear tragic,
aren't tragic, you know.
There's 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 in 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, such a diverse and inclusive city.
One thing that I've 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, a hundred percent of our events
were just canceled.
Like everything was just wiped off the board.
We thought that we were gonna 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?
- [Kibwe] If our product is primarily
a person to person product,
how can this product now become an online product?
- Hey Amber and Kibwe,
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 yeah.
- Subscribe below. (laughs)
- Welcome to MOKIPOPS production world for now?
So, you know, you heard me say for now,
no Willy Wonka here.
- No, uh huh, it's not,
it's the Robinson's.
(upbeat music)
[Scott] So you've been traditionally selling MOKIPOPS
at events all around Atlanta,
and now you're got your eyes set on, you know,
getting up on shelves in different retail shops.
Why are you moving in that direction?
- My son challenged us a couple of 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's when he says, hey we go 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 guys the questions, you have
that kinda insight at eight?
I'm just like, wow. 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 to what we can do.
We're about to do an event with Food Well Alliance,
where they bought the popsicles back in January,
and when COVID hit, it was like, well,
we have popsicles sitting on the table
we will still want to honor, you know, the order.
So there's gonna be a day, and an event where
they're gonna have like, you know, social distancing,
and different COVID measures in effect,
so 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 wanna 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, they were good.
We just pass them to someone else.
No, we were still able to honor that.
And that's really special for us because the only way our
business is really gonna grow and be the place
it's gonna 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 owned 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,
to have that legacy and to transfer 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 becoming successful
and us being able to share our tools and how we did it
so we can share it on for generations to come.
- [Scott] In a lot of ways I'm getting chills,
'cause I'm thinking about breaking the cycle
and like bringing in education and,
and also the systems that hold us back when really
second chances are so necessary, right?
- [Producer] If I want to start my own business,
what would you say that I should do?
- You shouldn't like start a lemonade 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 gonna be a complete business.
- You just have to learn to imagine 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 wanna 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 am 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.
Like that is what a true entrepreneur looks like.
That's the Robinson family.
Y'all are showing what it means
to be Made in America.
Like that's what it's about.
[Scott] So we're gonna learn more about the Robinsons
and they're ambitious push towards new ways
to sell their pops in episode four.
But next step up is Yolanda who owns iwi fresh.
It's a farm-to-skin spa.
And she's gonna talk about how she's pivoting,
and how she's gonna possibly even expand during this time.
I hope you join us.