BeeBox: Observation 45. Using games to teach the Business of the Bees. 2024

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My name is Mark Rubin, and I'm a dream weaver. I hope these widgets help you weave your dreams into reality. This story is about using games to teach people things. And the thing i'll be teaching people is the business of the bees, which is how to be a profitable beekeeper. And this is one of the ways I'm demonstrating a regenerative business model, which is a business model that creates money, teaches skills, creates a community and restores habitat, which in this case will be pollinator habitat. The reason I came up with this game is because I my Eagle project, I have a series of steps, attention funnel. And it starts with these observations, this series, this video series of observations that I've made in my life. And then it goes into the lessons from nature podcast, and then it goes into the book, honey is money, which is the kid's version of these ideas. And the objective of this thing was to create 10,000 beekeepers by the year 2030. And Alice was thinking through all the steps in between having a kids book, and having 10,000 beekeepers. And I've been in business for a long time. So I have a pretty good understanding of all the components of a business system. And the amount of work it takes to teach people things. Also considering that most people are worker bees. And that means they have special skills in a particular area, and don't have a holistic view of all of the processes necessary to build a comprehensive business system. So people specialize in things like marketing, or someone might be good at project management, or somebody might be good at a specific thing, but not have the vision of the entire thing. And they're just a cog in a machine. And that's very common, that's a common way to go about life. So when designing a business system that covers all aspects of business, even though it's a simple business can be eliminated, every business has these functions, in this order marketing, to generate awareness of the concept, sales, which is explaining to another person how this concept can help them. operations, which is the doing of the work that's being traded, or the shipping of the product that's being traded HR, which is hiring people to do specific job functions. And even if there's one person doing every job function, there's still HR, knowing what the job functions are. Knowing if you're doing a good job at the job functions, ranking the job functions in terms of priority and important. And effectiveness, efficiency, all the things you would need to do. Even if you're a one person business, there's still HR. And then there's finance, finance is about the money, capitalization, banking transactions, cashflow pro formas, balance sheets, then there's admin, which is often overlooked, but super critical in terms of reporting, keeping track of things, checking boxes, making sure things happen at certain days at certain times. Then there's special projects, which are things that happen occasionally, but are super important. And organizing projects using like a project plan of like, when does this special project start? Who is responsible for it? Where are the milestones within that project? How much money is each step going to cost? Who's going to do it when? How will you know it worked? These kinds of things? Like how do you put stuff together in the real world? And that's business that doesn't matter what that's every business is that I was thinking how would I teach kids that read honey as money your read on the as money as kids from age, you know, three or four and up? How can I convert them into beekeepers, when they're physically strong enough to lift be equipment may be at age 10 or 12? Guessing because these are the boxes can be heavy, you know, 4050 pounds, and they're a certain height, so you have to be certain size to be able to have them. And so there's a gap in time between like three or four year olds, and maybe like a 12 year old or 10 year old rhamnose But it's going to be that could be I could run this business. And I was thinking the what's the best way to teach somebody the skills and I thought about it for Second ends like a game because it's just the game to me anyway, business is a game is this monopoly in real life. So the only difference between the board game of Monopoly and having a part like buying buildings and renting them out, is the color of the money. US it'd be green money if it was real money. And if it's pretend money, it's whatever the colors are monopoly. So to me like the the idea that businesses a game makes a lot of sense, because we're playing it just with different color paper. So I was thinking about this game and and since a book, honey is money is all the lessons and secrets of the bees as it relates to gathering energy from a habitat. And including things like teamwork, cooperation, marketing, and all everything, I thought it'd be fun to convert those assets into a board game. It's now it's November 2023. And we've done a second iteration of the gameplay design of the board game, we have the basics now, in December, we'll finalize the gameplay. And in 2024, we'll be selling the board game box, the business of the beasts. The board game covers all those functions, marketing, sales, operations, HR, finance, admin, and special projects. And teaches people about the decision making of the kinds of situations that occur in business as it relates to those areas. And the kinds of decisions that can be made to increase the chances of success. And I'll add a practical component of this about the beekeeping business. If these kids buy this bee kit, and play this board game, and they play it well. And all they ever did every summer for 50 summers, was take the honey that comes off this beehive and put it into a bank account that has matched the overall US stock market for the past 50 years. If they just took all their honey money and did this game, all the profit and shoved it in a bank account, then they'll have over $2 million because time is honey. And if nothing else, if that lesson comes through, then that would create a situation where these 10,000 kids could essentially spend all the rest of the money they ever make in their life on whatever they want. And as long as they committed to selling this honey in this way, we multimillionaires later and it's not that the objective is to have a million dollars or be worth a million dollars or whatever the game is. It's to feel safe with money. When people feel safe, they make better decisions. That's the be backs the business of the bees board game