14-Year-Old's Inspiring Business Backed by Multibillionaire
Will your child follow in your footsteps? That’s a question entrepreneur Marcy McKenna doesn’t have to ask. Her son Jack already has his own business — backed by a multibillionaire — and he’s not even old enough to drive yet.
“I never dreamed that I would have a 14-year-old who was a CEO of his own company,” marvels the Newport Beach, Calif., mother about her eldest, founder of the candy company Jack’s Rockin’ Toffee, who is bracing for big business this month when his confections are scheduled to debut at Sam’s Club.
Marcy and Jack McKenna (Photo: Yahoo Parenting)
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“I did always think that my kids would be creative, because we have that kind of a wacky household where we’re always coming up with inventions and ideas and pass them around the dinner table,” explains the inventor of the Style & Go hair care valet in an inspiring interview about the joys and worries of raising a mini business mogul as part of Yahoo Parenting’s “What It’s Like” original video series. “I thought when he graduates from college he’ll probably do something entrepreneurial. I [didn’t imagine] it would happen when he was in the eighth grade.”
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But Jack’s toffee business has been a surprisingly swift success. Since he started it officially at age 9, he’s raked in $12,000, partnered with a toffee manufacturer, and earned a wait list of customers. The candy — a pretzel covered with toffee, chocolate, caramel, and sea salt — is unique in that the toffee doesn’t contain any dyes or preservatives. Jack created it that way because he wanted his younger brother with Williams syndrome (whose diet prohibits artificial additives) to be able to eat it.
Jack and Colin McKenna (Photo: Yahoo Parenting)
Mom Marcy — wed to American History X and Blow screenwriter David McKenna, with whom she has three kids, Jack, Colin, 12, and Courtney, 9 — remembers the day Jack came up with the literally sweet idea for his toffee as if it were yesterday. “[We] were out to dinner one night and Jack said me…’Mom, what am I going do if I don’t make it in the NBA?’ He’s all of 8 years old at the time and he was so certain he was going to be a Laker some day, but with a mom that’s 5 foot 1, it was not likely. So I said, ‘Well, you do what you love and success will follow. Think really hard about that. What do you love?’ And he immediately said, ‘I love candy.’”
Marcy and Jack McKenna (Photo: Yahoo Parenting)
Instead of dismissing his idea, Marcy recalls, “I said, ‘Well, there you go. Then you need to come up with the very best candy recipe you can come up with, and you’ll be hugely successful.’” The mom, a past winner of TLC’s Homemade Millionaire reality competition, says her son’s mind “went to work,” and the next day she discovered that he’d been up all night online looking for recipes.
Marcy McKenna’s great-grandfather. (Photo: Yahoo Parenting)
Entrepreneurial drive “sort of seems to be in our genes,” adds Marcy, revealing that her great-grandfather was an inventor too, noted for developing the delay mechanism on a bomb for the U.S. military. So when Jack presented her with the recipes he wanted to make, she took him to the store and helped him try a bunch out in their kitchen. “We did lots of trial and error,” she remembers. “He was just determined to make the best toffee in the world.”
Jack’s toffee. (Photo: Yahoo Parenting)
Jack’s decision to make a preservative-free toffee that his brother, and others on restrictive diets, could eat was a treat for his mom too. “At family holidays, or birthday parties, it really made Jack sad that Colin couldn’t eat sweets like the rest of us,” she said. Seeing his compassion is “when you know you’re doing something right as a parent.”
The McKennas packing toffee boxes. (Photos: Yahoo Parenting)
It took about 50 batches before the boy got a taste he liked, but that didn’t deter him. “Jack has always been the kind of kid that when he puts his mind to something, he keeps going until he does it,” says the mom. “So it wasn’t a huge surprise to see him want to do this and then to actually do it.”
His first outside input came from his grandmother’s poker pals. “She came home [and said they were] blown away by the taste,” recalls Marcy, who further supported Jack by suggesting that he call the fans, ask how much they want, “and see what they’d be willing to pay for it.” The boy’s business was born, and he’s never looked back.
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“He felt really good making a little bit of money,” says Marcy. “So then he put flyers around the neighborhood and he set up stands on the [street] corners. And it wasn’t like they were just buying it because it’s a cute kid. They loved it. … Before he knew it, he couldn’t even begin to keep up with the demand.” When an opportunity came up to be on one of his favorite shows on the Food Network, Rachel vs. Guy: Kids Cook Off, Marcy says he jumped. Jack was the No. 10 finalist and the producers chose eight, she says.
A year later, though, the show execs who’d met Jack during his audition called, inquiring whether he still had his toffee company, because they were looking for contestants for the business show Hatched. “I thought in my mind, no matter how good [this product] is doesn’t change the fact he’s 13 years old,” she said. “What billionaire is going to invest in a 13-year-old? Well, I was wrong, and he ended up getting a deal.”
Jack on Hatched. (Photo: Yahoo Parenting)
Today Jack’s company is backed by a multibillionaire, Marcy reveals without sharing specifics about the investor’s identity. “He and Jack are getting ready to take this out to some of the biggest retailers in America. Sam’s Club has already approved Jack to do a test run in their stores, and QVC is basically waiting for an offer from him. … Right now it feels like that moment where, ‘Wow, the sky is the limit.’"
The teen has made his $12,000 so far working when school isn’t in session, and he donates a percentage of everything he makes to the Williams Syndrome Association in honor of his brother, Colin. “The other portion,” says Marcy, “goes into a bank account for his future.”
Jack meets with his backer. (Photo: Yahoo Parenting)
And it’s clear that whatever his future may be, it’ll be business-related for the young CNBC “junkie” and Shark Tank watcher. “I first noticed Jack’s entrepreneurial spirit when he was about 4 years old,” Marcy reminisces, describing a family-staffed “restaurant called Flap Jack’s Café” that the boy cooked up in his neighborhood, hiring his dad to make pancakes and his mom to hostess. “It’s really interesting to think that at that young age, they have that seed. … [He] had a whole vision for how it was going to be.”
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Even the name of his company changed, post-launch, due to Jack’s big dreams. “It originally started as Jack’s Rockin’ Chocolate Factory, because he loved Willie Wonka & the Chocolate Factory,” says Marcy. “But as he’s learned a lot about business, he’s realized that what he really wants to do is do one thing, and do it really, really well, and then multiple products can come off of that.” So he dropped the “chocolate” to make way for future products such as “Jack’s Rockin’ Popcorn, Jack’s Rockin’ Ice Cream Bars,” with toffee in all of them.
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With so much ambition, Marcy says she sometimes worries about the teen being able to chill. She describes him as a “very balanced kid,” who is the president of the school and on a club basketball team, and “also loves to play.” Yet she admits, “I think at this age they’re not old enough to manage that balance on their own,” so she and her husband insisted that Jack work on the business only during school breaks. “I want him to live life as a kid,” Marcy explains. “For me, it’s a little bit scary at this age to have him doing so well on so many levels. I mean, he does press interviews, and they did a big assembly at school where they showed his episode and had him onstage answering questions. There’s a lot being thrown at him right now, and I worry about the pressure on him to see this thing through and to be successful. So as a mom, I’m constantly kind of pulling it back.” She says she reminds him, “‘You know, the great thing about Jack’s Rockin’ Toffee is that it will always be there.’ You can go to college, and go do the fraternity thing, and have fun, and when you graduate, you’ll be that much further ahead. … Then you can pick up where you left off.”
Still, Jack’s excitement for his business hasn’t waned. “Right now, this is what he wants to do,” swears Marcy. “He’s always on me whenever things aren’t happening: ‘Mom, what do we need to do to move this forward? We haven’t heard from QVC. What should we be doing?’ So as long as I see that fire in him, and as long as he maintains a [life] balance … I’m going to be there supporting him and backing him.”
Working together has created “a really special relationship” between them, says the proud mother. “It’s been a really neat process for me to be able to kind of mentor him through this … and I feel like it’s just the beginning of the adventure.”
Jack at his company’s manufacturing factory. (Photo: Yahoo Parenting)
She insists “he has a very good shot of taking this company very far.” Until then, she adds, “I want him to always just be humble with it and kinda keep it within our family.” It’s a “tough situation” handling success so young, she notes. “Because it’s not happening to everybody … and there’s no one for him to learn from in terms of what’s the right way to handle it. It’s him just figuring it out and us trying to guide him.”
The business hasn’t made his daily life too different from that of other kids his age, she says, admitting that “he’s sure learning things that the typical 14-year-old — the typical 24-year-old — hasn’t learned.” But when she takes a look at her boy and his business from a distance, Marcy says she can see that he’s on to something important. “He was interviewed the other day and it made me realize how I kind of thought Jack’s Rockin’ Toffee was going to be it for him, like his job for his life,” she admits. “And he said, ‘Oh, no, no. This is just the beginning. I’m gonna sell this company someday and then start another one.’ So he thinks like an entrepreneur. … He knows that there’s a lot of time in life and there’s a lot more ideas like Jack’s Rockin’ Toffee in his little brain.” And that is pretty sweet indeed.
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