We’re excited to introduce you to entrepreneur and dad Jordan Weiner, the founder behind the 2020 NAPPA Award winning How to Be Good Behavioral Learning Kits.
Jordan Weiner with daughter Lauren Alexa.
We would love for our readers to get to know you better. Tell us a little about your daily life.
In addition to investing time daily in children’s educational businesses I also own Internet Consulting, Inc. Working on these businesses aren’t work to me – it’s play. I am a single father, which is my most important job/love. I truly live an American Dream fairytale life, which I am grateful to the core of my being. Everyday I wake up and wonder how did I get to be so lucky in life, and I try and give back as much as possible.
One of my favorite parts of the job is seeing our illustrators bring our characters and products to life. Knowing our work will help kids strengthen and expand life skills and self-worth. The work is chicken noodle soup for my mind, heart, and soul. Seeing and hearing the kids, parents, grandparents, teachers, nannies, babysitters, counselors, and therapists all say how much they love our materials makes getting all the details done fun.
What was your motivation behind launching this company and developing these behavior education kits?
How To Be Good For Santa was my daughter’s, Lauren Alexa Weiner’s, flash of genius when she was only 7 years old. She was playing a SIM’s game and building an online bookstore when I asked her what some of the titles of her books where. She rattled off some amazing titles such as “The Meaning of Life” and I forget most of the others … but when she said “How To Be Good For Santa” I immediately knew that it was a flash of genius because what kid doesn’t want to know the secrets for how to be good for Santa and what parent wouldn’t instantly by that product as long as it was truly top tier award winning materials that would genuinely help their kid(s) build life skills?
A few of my motivation goals for launching this business where to show my daughter that she has million dollar ideas, to help her learn real business in the business world, and to help her get into a top college by brining her idea to fruition. Other core motivational goals are to genuinely help kids have fun learning to build life skills and making it easy for guardians to have access to award winning materials that help their kids live happy and wonderful lives.
I help a lot of businesses and people with Internet Consulting, Inc., which is what is funding How To Be Good For Santa and How To Be Good with Polly the Parrot (The Polly the Parrot product versions are for people that don’t believe in Santa and for the educational market). By the time I die, I want to leave something truly humanitarianly beneficial behind – and what better way to invest time, money and my human resources than helping children build life skills and self-worth? The pay it forward returns are exponential.
Our products are amazing, with hand illustrated water colored animal characters that kids, parents/grand parents, teachers/educators, counselors/therapists, and everyone that sees them love.
Why do you think character development is so important for kids?
Helping children build life skills and self-worth provides a solid foundation for them to do well and feel good about who they are. If we invest a little time, efforts and resources while the children are learning how to act it truly helps all stakeholders. Knowledge is power. Kids minds are sponges, by being a little proactive instead of reactive we can increase our children’s positive to negative ratio, helping them know how to be safe, how to act properly so the ongoing cause and effect is in a positive direction. An evolutionary advantage humans have is the ability to create tools and pass knowledge down through our generations… so our children don’t have to recreate the wheel for experiences we know have already learned. Investing time helping kids with their character development will pay exponentially in their lives as well as the lives they influence.
What do you enjoy doing when not working?
I love raising my daughter, spending quality time with my family and friends. Playing any type of game, watching quality movies, I love to cook and feed the people in my life, I used to love to travel but the pandemic put a stop to that for a while.
Favorite place to be with your family?
Anywhere as long as I am with family and friends. I’ve done everything from parachute to scuba dive and try all types of experiences in my life’s journey. I truly appreciate the nuances of life and living in the moment, the where and what are not as important as the with who.
Best life advice?
One of my characters Georgey the Gerbil who specializes in greeting people nicely sums up my best advice in life “Run through life happy and free while treating others with dignity!” A couple other Jordanisms are everyone goes through ups and downs and you must make it through the lows to get to the highs. Positive actions usually get positive reactions and negativity usually gets negative responses so for your own best interest it is best to be kind to others. I also believe that you can only do so much with your own hands and thoughts and that to truly leverage yourself and ideas in life you need to work well with others by building a strong relationships with quality people. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes and/or admit to being wrong. Live to learn and enjoy the ride, you only go through this life once so try and be kind and help everyone, so you don’t have any regrets.
Best advice for dads?
Say and do positive things for the kids, role model how you want your kids to act, and most important is time on task… spend as much time with your kids as possible and they will turn out knowing they were loved and be good humans.
