What if the real problem with education isn’t that students aren’t learning enough — but that they’re learning the wrong things for today’s workplace? Too many graduates are prepared for exams, but not for collaboration, uncertainty, or real-world decision-making — including money.
In this episode of The Agent of Wealth, co-host John Williams is joined by Simon Holzapfel, co-founder and CFO of L-EAF Lab, an innovation incubator designed to give students real-world, hands-on experience before they ever enter the workforce.
Simon brings decades of experience from independent schools, leadership roles, and advisory work with families and institutions. At L-EAF Lab, he applies agile and evolutionary principles to education — helping students build practical skills, confidence, and adaptability in an economy that’s changing faster than ever.
In this episode, you will learn:
- Why traditional education often prepares students for tests — but not for teamwork, ambiguity, or modern workplace realities.
- How L-EAF Lab helps students break the “no experience, no job” paradox by working on real business problems and building verifiable skills.
- Why soft skills — collaboration, feedback, adaptability, and resilience — are becoming more valuable than technical skills in an AI-driven economy.
- How experiential learning, agile practices, and even financial literacy can better prepare young people for careers, leadership, and long-term success.
- And more!
Tune in for a thoughtful conversation about reimagining education, expanding access to opportunity, and giving young people the tools they actually need to succeed in the real world — not just the classroom.
Whether you’re a parent, educator, or professional thinking about the future of work, this episode offers practical insights into how learning can evolve to meet today’s challenges.
Resources:
LinkedIn | www.l-eaflab.org/ | www.l-eaf.org/ | https://simonholzapfel.substack.com/ | https://www.crowboxpartners.com | Bautis Financial: 8 Hillside Ave, Suite LL1 Montclair, New Jersey 07042 (862) 205-5000 | Schedule an Introductory Call
Disclosure: The transcript below has been edited for clarity and content. It is not a direct transcription of the full episode, which can be listened to above.
What if the biggest problem with our schools isn’t that they’re teaching too little – it’s that they’re teaching the wrong things for today’s workplace?
Too often graduates arrive ready for tests, but not ready for teams, uncertainty, or the simple realities of adult life – including money.
Welcome back to The Agent of Wealth Podcast, this is your co-host John Williams. Today’s episode looks at how we prepare young people for the real world – not just for college, but for careers, for leadership, and for life. Joining me is Simon Holzapfel, co-founder and CFO of L-EAF Lab, an innovation incubator that puts students into agile, real-world projects instead of only textbooks.
Simon came to this work after a long career in independent schools. At L-EAF Lab, he brings evolutionary principles – the kind that help teams adapt and learn quickly – into classrooms and communities so students graduate with experience, not just credentials.
Simon, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much, John. It’s really a pleasure to be here and I really love the Agent of Wealth Podcast mission, so thank you.
It’s going to be a great conversation. Really looking forward to it. Thanks for being here. Let’s start at the beginning. And can you tell our listeners how you went from … You had mentioned in our conversations, you did work in some schools, but maybe there’s other economic piece of another career that I wasn’t aware of, but maybe just give us a little bit of a pathway from where you were to L-EAF Lab.
Sure. Yeah. I would say that for your audience, the through line is since I left college, I’ve just been obsessed with young people making their way in the world. So I taught US history. I taught economics for a decade at the high school level in independent schools. I loved it, but I got bored. And then I got into leadership, senior leadership positions. Also super fun. I didn’t get bored. What I ended up with was after 15 years of that, so 25 years total in education just burnt out. And I’d been invited by some folks at Boston University’s Agile Innovation Lab to keep building programming, syllabus, all that sort of stuff along the lines of what you guys are trying to do at Agent of Wealth. And I had a former family of mine, of a very prosperous family, ask me to help them privately with some transition and wealth planning stuff that their family was going through.
So that’s all just a long way of saying, I’ve had this interest in helping young people and the families that support young people figure out these crazy, crazy, crazy times that we’re in and stuff is just going so, so fast that I realized I really needed to be in two different places at once. So the L-EAF Lab exists as a place for anyone with an internet connection to get these sorts of real world experiential learning pathways. I also work with a very small number of families with different challenges that are kind of tangential. That’s the other career. I think for your families, just understanding college, planning, all this sort of stuff you’re going to help them through is so vital and I’m glad to be here and part of it.
Yeah, that’s a great story. I’m always interested in hearing how … It’s one of those things where like, how did I get here? And it seems like a interesting shift for you. You spoke a little bit about L-EAF Lab there for a second, but I think it might be important for us to take a step back and maybe even just like the 30-second pitch on what L-EAF Lab is and you’re speaking with someone. Sure. What does it mean for someone who’s maybe never heard of it before?
Right. So if I’m talking to a young person, I’ll explain L-EAF Lab as a place to break that paradox of you can’t get a job without experience and you can’t get experience without a job. And that just faces tons and tons of people. So seven or eight years ago with my co-founder of the lab, Jeff Burstein, we thought, “Oh, how can we solve this problem?” Jeff has worked with, he’s an executive coach of the highest caliber, working with NASA, working with Department of Energy and Commerce, very high level stuff. And so what Jeff and I realized we needed to do through our professional networks was get back burner business problems from our network, which was lots, back burner projects that would take three, six, nine, 12 months. And if we could get those real world business challenges that didn’t come with time pressure, we could train the students in the lab in these lean and agile methods, and then they could actually take big chunks out of these projects once they learned, which means they could then demonstrate what they had done to any employer in the form of the digital skill badges, certifications, et cetera, that students would get through the lab.
So this would be a way to break that paradox of, “I can’t get experience without a job.” We give them the sort of bleeding edge tools to actual work on problems and demonstrate progress against those problems. And that’s what really distinguishes lab graduates from other graduates. And they work in Chase Bank and Deloitte and they work in places that value this. That was way longer than 30 seconds, so I apologize. But basically that’s what the lab exists to do is to equalize opportunity regardless of constraint to this sort of knowledge and certification.
No, no, that’s great. I mean, I think everyone has either had the experience or know somebody who’s been looking for a job and is at that point where, well, you’re looking at the job description as three years experience needed, but there’s no jobs to get the experience. So here we are, what do I do now? And you’re reluctant to even apply because you see that and it’s like head trash. In your practice and getting a little more granular about what might be specific about what you’re teaching, what are some of the skills you’ve identified that matter the most for early career success?
So when we developed the L-EAF Lab, it was built on the scaffolding of the Learning Educational Agile framework. And so when you ask what do we do, what they learn are six business practices that are the six L-EAF practices. And if anyone goes to LEAF, which is spelled L-E-A-F.org, they can see all that stuff there. We’ve got lots of blogs about all these practices. Essentially what the practices are are the things that companies do that create value and nothing else. So that would be planning of work, refining of work, collaborating on work, retrospecting about how the work went, and then applying improvement. And the website talks about it. But so these students learn in short cycles how to do all these things in an organic way that doesn’t require hours of lecturing because the students learn the practices by working on the business problem. So unlike normal school, which says, “You’re not safe to do anything until you know everything, you can’t do anything to do everything.” And we’re like, “Nope.” Sufficiency is actually the standard.
Once you know enough to make an improvement and it’s safe and you check with your coach, which is me and the partners, you can actually do that. So unlocking permissionless innovation is critical and that only works in a safe environment. So the lab exists as a place for young, bright people to really try to do things that are different without time pressure, because we know that’s what creates the opportunity for real creativity and novelty and problem solving to emerge. And if we think about how many organizations are just stuck, just blocked, frozen so many ways, these practices that the young people learn are how to unblock those systems. If anyone else in the organization will listen, we know this because we have run ourselves significant books of business and da da da da. We just wanted to take it to the kids and break it down so that this opportunity cluster bomb that young people are just getting blocked out of life gets smaller, gets broken down, gets more equitably distributed.
As you’re talking about these six business practices and really just in general, it’s becoming evident to me that the skills that we’re looking to prepare young people for, or even anybody for that matter, for the workforce are more almost like these soft skills like teamwork, feedback, resilience, as opposed to technical skills that are out there. I mean, is that something you find to be true? It’s more important to kind of be able to work with people and work on these projects than actually know the actual material?
Yes. And with AI, that’s just getting more so. So those technical things humans still need to do. We just allow students and bring tools to the students so that they’re often solving problems with AI on the technical side. But what we teach them, to your point, is all the other stuff, because that’s what no one really takes the time to teach them, and then they get bent out of shape. They’re like, “Well, we hired these people, but they don’t know anything.” It’s like, “Oh, well, of course, duh.” So we just took it back to the studs. We broke the whole thing down, took the rebuild back to the studs and said, “What are the practices? What are the soft skills? What are the coordination methods? What are all those things that make corporate life hellish, and let’s just work around those and bake those out of the system from the beginning.” So just like in any sort of lean manufacturing, agile shop, you’re just focused on customer value and delivering business value.
If you can just clear the deck of the politics of all the other stuff and just get those teams, they do insane stuff. I mean, I would love to just show what these students are capable of doing once you remove those usual obstacles, get them some good AI tools for the technical problems, and then let them figure out how to do all this other stuff, the coordination, the collaboration, the soft stuff that really is in an AI world, increasingly high value.
And being that I’ve gone to college, got my MBA and understanding how the curriculum usually works, I started to realize at a certain point how the smartest kids weren’t always the most successful. And maybe it’s not fair, but it is what it is. There’s skills that aren’t taught and there’s skills that maybe are inherent.
So actually, you’re 100% right. And I can illustrate how right you are with the following aphorism. In education, there’s this aphorism the A students preach and teach and the B students work for the C students.
The B students work for the C students… interesting.
Because the C students are those kids who don’t fit in, are wanting to do something else, are often bored. The C students are not the dumb ones. The C students are the ones who don’t fit in.
Now sometimes, yes, there are students who are just like different caliber stuff. I’m not saying that we’re all the same. However, the blockers that we think are out there are usually not them. So it’s the C students who are thinking about something else, doing something out of line. I was an A student for the most part, except that I’m dyslexic, so I sucked at math. But I was on the preach and teach track until I met people who actually had built things and almost none of them were A students. They were the B and C students because they wanted to build stuff with the knowledge, not simply propagate the knowledge. So we’re as a team of good balance of that.
Yeah. Yeah. As a parent, it’s starting … My kids are very young on the young side, eight and five and just- Ooh,
You have a full house…
Well, yeah, they’re twins too. So it’s eight year old twins and five year old twins. And they’re all so different. And that’s part of my point is I’m starting to see the contrast between them and how they learn and how, for instance, one of my sons is, if he’s really interested in something, like it’s a technical and more of a STEM type of a project, he’s all in, man. He is so focused. But if it’s something he’s not interested in, he’s like, his head’s in the clouds where my other one’s a little more consistent. But I always found that fascinating how I do believe, and it’s tough. I mean, you have a classroom full of 30 kids, you have to keep them all interested. And in a class of 30 kids, you might have kids who are learning differently and have different learning styles.
And I think it’s a big challenge. All right. So I want to talk a little bit about how … Obviously we talked a little bit about L-EAF Lab and some of these concepts around what that could mean. I’m really curious to now kind of take a deeper dive and get a little more granular as to what the experience might look like in the beginning. So let’s just say I’m a parent and I have a student who’s bought in, they’re ready to get started. What does the process look like in the beginning, middle, and give us a little bit of insight into what people could expect.
Yeah. Yeah. So the beginning really requires the young person to do some self-organizing and take some initiative and be communicative on their own. For many people, this is a struggle and they need coaching or they need to kind of get over the hump. The basic thing as a parent is your kid meets a couple of other young folks who is similarly motivated. We bring them together, we coach them on a team agreement. They form that team agreement. We then go to the workshop where all the pieces of work and projects are. They’ll select some. They’ll take a piece of one of those projects, they’ll bring it to their digital workspace where they’re met by coaches who will then help coach them through the attacking of that problem, through iterations, that sort of thing. In the middle, it’s really the teams go through the normal stages of team excellence, which is they’re forming, storming, norming, and then performing.
And that’s kind of the standard teaming progression model. Those things take different amounts of times. Forming is easy. We do that. The storming, that’s often done actually pretty easily amongst the students themselves because they know how to organize themselves and they generally don’t need someone to tell them how to talk to each other. Norming, that’s where because we meet multiple times a week for short amounts of time, they get very clear, consistent coaching to get into that productive pattern. At the end, what they’re doing is they’re producing these pieces of work, they’re developing a digital portfolio, it’s a blockchain entity, it’s got skill badging, all that sort of stuff. So as a parent, you’re just seeing your kid getting together with other kids on Zoom doing stuff and demonstrating progress. So in that way, it’s a little bit unusual, but it’s a very standard thing for anyone who’s worked in an agile or lean work environment.
Yeah. It almost feels like you’re simulating getting a job and needing new people and just putting together literally just kind of like what the office experience could potentially look like. So you have a little bit of a taste of what that could mean.
Yes. And that’s exactly right. And it’s by design because half of last year’s first year college student hires got fired in their first year. So clearly we have some mismatch in preparation.
Is that a real stat? That’s insane.
It is insane.
Wow. Okay. Well, so with that said, I mean, you talked a little bit about this already. Is there any other way you actually measure progress and success through this whole process?
Yep. So we use kind of standard measures of lead time and cycle time, familiar to anyone who does lean manufacturing, cycle time and lead time or just how long is it taking to get little bits of work done?
When it comes to these social experiences, I imagine it’s a little harder to … It’s kind of subjective, if you may. You’re not really looking at it in a way like, “Hey, one, two, three, four, five.”
You’re right. So it is more subjective, but when you’ve been a coach or a manager long enough and you’ve worked with enough different teams, you can start to bring to those teams small questions that gets them sort of moving in a getting more stuff done, ironing out the rough spots, figuring out where is their disconnect, all the sort of problem solving that you would do. And people of every age appreciate being able to do more with less. So a lot of it is getting them used to working with each other. And frankly, that inner sociability that they need to work in a team, they have a lot of that. These young people are used to being online together. It’s getting the sort of interventions in the right place so that when they hit a wall, they don’t just stop there. So the coaches, the business coaches don’t allow that to be what stops them from getting stuff done.
And you’re right, it is subjective, but it’s not without qualities. You can talk about how quickly things are moving or not. You can talk about who’s doing what. And there are a lot of really nice, like ReadAI, for example, does a really nice after meeting summary of who talked how much, did you interrupt? All these sort of metrics that for the curious student, they have lots of ways to get coaching to really help them on the social side as much as the technical side.
This reminds me of some hiring managers that I’ve known and worked with throughout the years as to how they actually love working with kids who play in sports. And it really reminds me of how there’s subjectivity there too. I always appreciated, I was a track athlete, I ran cross country and track in college. That was nice because you had the times, right? Like you could see how you’re … Or you’d run intervals and you’re like, “Oh wow, my training is working.” With other sports, it was never so cut and dry. Like soccer, like you might have a good game. For whatever reason, the way that your position maybe lent to that game might be a little bit more pronounced versus one team versus the next. But to me, I don’t know, it’s reminding me of like how just you work with a team, you have different positions, everyone has to work together and you might not have the best game every game, but you have to understand it’s not a straight line to success and what that means.
And the coach is looking, “Hey, this player’s playing well. I know I can count on them or I can’t, or they’re not ready or whatever it is. “
Bingo.
As a side note, it’s one of the things I feel like that I got from sports and just being a member of a team and just that idea. And it feels a little bit like that. So do you have a vision for the scalability of this and like how it could potentially be integrated in the schools? I mean, obviously when it comes to curriculum and these, I mean, I’m sure that the layers of bureaucracy are so thick to actually get in there and like potentially make penetration. I’d love to hear your insight into like what you think that could look like or is it something you have a vision for?
Yeah. I mean, it certainly is something we had a vision for because I’m a lifelong school administrator, school leader and I see how many dollars are being spent, how poorly often we’re seeing young people being underserved because the structures that they’re trying to work within haven’t been updated in 120 years. So yeah, scalability, we built that into the framework because we use the L-EAF framework, which is a scaling framework. We knew from the beginning that if we wanted to really make an impact, it had to be scalable because otherwise you’re going nowhere fast. So we’re able to interact with college career centers, with high school guidance counselors, with high school administrators. Truly anyone who is working in an educational learning environment, we have stuff for them that absolutely scales. And I can share some of those notes and stuff, but scalability is there and we’re making good, slow progress into a very ancient culture where resistance to change is endemic, some of which is well intentioned and some of it is not.
Some of it is just sandbagging and our kids are suffering as a result of that. But there are tons of great teachers out there who are doing really awesome stuff. The lab has partnered with several other groups that are putting stuff out into the world for sale now that parents can absolutely get connected to to get their kids into these ways of working that are available from elementary grade forward because those habits of mind, collaboration, breaking work down, working iteratively, all that sort of stuff, those are right in there. They’re available. They’re not hard. Honestly, a lot of parents do this already naturally, good engaged parents do this already. They’ll let their kid fall down and not immediately rescue them. They’ll talk to their kid about why something went bad instead of just trying to like brush past it. So these ways of working and learning are quite ancient in many ways.
We’ve just brought them into the digital world for a specific time in the world when access to opportunity has to be broadened out if we’re going to get the sort of wealth spread that the country needs to remain stable in the future.
Do you have a plan? Is this a business opportunity for people who might want to get on board and like franchise or like how are you looking at that as far as the idea that this may never become part of a curriculum, but I feel like it seems like there’s a need for it.
Yeah. So it is already a part of curriculum in various schools, but it’s slow. And yes, so we work through a reseller network and we work through a reseller network just because trust is local. So if any of your listeners are like, “Ooh, this sounds interesting, we’d love to talk to them about helping them in whatever educational systems or leaders are around them to make life easier.” Often we’ll talk to leaders and they’ll be like, “Well, this sounds great, but we don’t have the effort to do more.” And we’re like, “No, no, no.” Lean and agile begins with doing less, stopping doing the ineffective things so you can pivot, reorient, reallocate resources and really get the kids to the center. And that’s what the L-EAF framework that I mentioned does at any fractal inside of an institution from a classroom to groups of classrooms to all the way up.
Do you get any pushback from school leaders and those who are just kind of set in their ways or-
Constantly.
And just against this concept as a whole or is it more just like, “Hey, this isn’t going to go anywhere.”
Yeah, so we don’t get, “This is stupid.” Everyone’s like, “Ooh, this sounds interesting.” But then when you get to the, do you want to do something about it in your school? They’re like, “Ah, budget,” or, “Ah, we’re too busy.” So we get pushback constantly, but it’s not active. It’s much more passive.
Yeah, I can see that. Obviously, we’re money managers and we walk with a lot of people. Is there a part of your program where you feel like there’s a place, a part of your program that might involve financial literacy and just … Because I do think it’s a money skills or something that’s lacking. And just obviously you study finance, but to really, really kind of understand what it means to work with money and even at a personal level.
100%. So when I was a boarding school headmaster, one of the first things, and really the only major thing I did was to bring financial literacy into the curriculum and make it a graduation requirement. We had people in finance who designed a great program for us and then endowed it so that all kids could have that. Yes, in the lab financial literacy, those sort of products are things that we’re often building. So if there are people in your audience who are interested in talking about that, we’d be happy to. We have financial literacy curriculum available as well. It’s all digital, so if people want to hear about that, or you have people who are financial advisor, whatever, and they just want to learn about some of this stuff to partner with us, we’d love to do that too.
I’d be actually really interested in learning a little bit more about what that looks like and how that is. Because I mean, just at a young age, we get that question all the time from parents who are like, “Yeah, I’d love to instill these values.” And I’ve always thought that there’s a lot of opportunity there. Is there anything else that we didn’t talk about today about your program you feel like is something that we should leave our listeners with?
Yeah. I mean, I think the thing that’s most important to understand for parents and young people is you have better options that cost less than ever before. It requires you to reach out, grow your network, look outside of the normal options, but the normal options are not doing well for a lot of people. And so especially in Florida, in places where there’s like school choice, there’s gazillions of options for parents. And for me, the joy of what I get to do is helping people and helping organizations get closer to where they want to be in that sort of collaborative, cooperative, lean, agile, digital business way, because it’s fun. People like being productive. You can take waste out of a system and leave no one worse off, like Pareto efficiency. Parado efficiency, there’s a huge opportunity. So parents don’t worry, reach out. The options are there.
If you’re frustrated, just start talking to people. There are ways for your kid to have more success than they are now, full stop.
Excellent. Well, I love the idea of what you’re doing and just even, like I said, even my own experience, I think I mentioned earlier in the episode that I can definitely see how just between my four boys, how they all learn differently, they have all different interests. There’s some great teachers out there. I mean, I’m so happy with the school that they go to and I feel like we’ve been lucky enough some of our sons … To me, it’s just as much about chemistry as it is the teacher themselves. I guess my point is, is there’s a lot of different layers to learning and putting someone or a child in, or even a grown child into an experience where it makes more sense for them and who they are. So I would love for you to share where people could get in touch with you.
Is there anywhere people could learn about you, reach out to you?
Yeah. The easiest thing is LinkedIn. Simon Holtzaphil on LinkedIn. For people who are in the wealth management world, Crowe Box Partners is my consultancy, which serves multifamily office, single family office, RIAs, that sort of thing with this similar sort of leaf programming. Unfortunately, what I’m showing now won’t be visible to your audience, but to your point, kids love this sort of stuff because it’s active and it gets them engaged and part of it instead of just being a passive participant. And that’s really the thing that changes the game for kids. So like your son, if it’s a stylistic match and they just vibe, that’s great.That’s all it takes. For these girls here, you can see this was a project that I was doing with them about how do you write a persuasive biography, tell a story of someone else, and it involves this kind of thing.
It’s active, it’s not passive, and that’s really what young people are looking for these days. So find me on LinkedIn, L-EAF Lab, leaf.org and CrowboxPartners. I’ll send you all these links to share with your audience and I respond to every email I get and I respond to every LinkedIn message that I get.
Great. We’ll link to that in the resources section of the show notes. Thanks again, Simon. And thank you to everyone who tuned into today’s episode. Don’t forget to follow The Agent of Wealth on the platform you listen from and leave us a review of the show. We are currently accepting new clients, if you’d like to schedule a 1-on-1 consultation with our advisors, please do so below.
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