Mychal Connolly Jr.
CEO, Realistic CEO: Age 19
One of the intriguing aspects of 40 Under Forty turning 20 is the opportunity to welcome multiple generations into the club. But while Mychal Connolly Jr.’s father, the creator of entrepreneurial enterprises like Stinky Cakes, Stand Out Truck, and Marketing and Cupcakes, was inducted into the class of 2009, this 19-year-old — one of the youngest honorees ever — has created his own very different, and very impactful, niche.
It’s called Realistic CEO — an enterprise inspired by a school project during which a teacher told Mikey that his dreams of being a CEO were, well, unrealistic.
Connolly has turned that motivation into a leadership and success platform serving young people from elementary school through college through books — including a much-distributed illustrated book that tells his own story — as well as curriculum, workshops, media platforms, and speaking engagements.
“The last couple of years, we’ve impacted about 17,000 students through our books, our curriculum, and our programs, and we’ve been working on expanding our reach from the local area — Springfield and surrounding towns and cities — to going a little farther, to the Boston area and Worcester,” he explained.
“Our goal is to be able to impact 500,000 students. The whole goal behind Realistic CEO is to help students with career readiness, workforce readiness, and financial literacy,” he went on. “My goal is to help students prepare for careers — and we do it in a way that we want every single student to feel like they’re worthy enough to be an executive.”
Connolly also hosts the Realistic CEO podcast, now topping 100 episodes, in which he interviews local business leaders about their journey and how they seek to inspire others. And he also launched Realistic Lemonade, a nonprofit that raises money and seeks sponsorships to enable him to go into more schools. Oh, and he’s doing all this as a full-time honor roll student at Holyoke Community College.
“My favorite part is seeing the difference in the way students light up,” he said of those visits and speaking engagements. “Maybe the lightbulb needs to be twisted a little more to be totally turned on. And you see the light is fully on after we speak. That’s my favorite thing — to see the students believe in themselves, to hear them after we’re done, saying, ‘thank you, I needed this.’
“We know how bright and smart the students in the community really truly are,” he added, “and we’re able to create a bridge that allows them to cross.”
—Joseph Bednar
