Mentoring Minds Lends Lessons on How to Empower Smart Growth

Posted by Barney Beal, Content Editor
Proving that it’s not only tech startups who turn garages into business incubators, Michael and Lisa Lujan took an idea to make teaching easier from their living room to a conference to garage to multi-million dollar educational publishing powerhouse.
As an assistant principal, Michael Lujan saw how much of a chore it had become for teachers to ensure that lessons incorporated the latest standards. Aiming to help ensure that requirements were met, the couple had catalogued their collective knowledge on five inches of paper housed in a binder.
To ease this process, Michael Lujan condensed the material onto easy to use flipcharts, packed with standards, strategies and research-based best practices. The flipcharts soon proved wildly popular with teachers at his school, who urged him that his idea would benefit other Texas educators and ultimately of course, their students. Backed with that encouragement, he, Lisa and his mother took up shop in the garage, made a couple hundred flipcharts, brought them to an educator’s conference, and completely sold out in minutes.