Morning Express with Robin Meade

So you want to be a DJ? Did you know you can go to school for that?

Founded by the late Run D.M.C.’s Jam Master Jay and music enthusiast Rob Principe, the Scratch DJ Academy is teaching students of all ages how to mix it up behind the turntables.

You may want to pay close attention to what your kids are saying at the dinner table. It might inspire you to start a small business just like Tiny Pies, owned by Amanda Bates and her mother, Kit Seay. 

“We had made pie at dinner, and we were sitting around the table with my sons. My youngest son, Andrew, wanted to take a piece of it in his lunch to school. Pie is really messy, and I was just explaining to him that it was going to be really difficult to do that because it would just be all stuck to whatever the container was by the time he got ready to eat it,” Bates explains. 

You don’t often think of math and snow skiing as going together. But engineer Pete Wagner is using algorithms to create custom-fit snow skis in his factory outside Telluride, Colorado. 

“Once [our algorithm] figures out what your perfect ski’s going to be mathematically, then it actually creates a recipe for all our shop equipment here,” he says.

Christen Bakken left her job in the classroom to follow her passion for teaching yoga.

“I taught second grade…for about three years,” Bakken says. “I left teaching not because I didn’t love what I was doing during the school day, but I really felt a desire to work with kids’ hearts more so than their test scores.” 

Many people may not know what a piroshky is, but customers at the Piroshky Piroshky bakery in Seattle’s Pike Place Market are in love with these traditionally Eastern European pastries.

“A piroshky is generally a savory pie filled with any number of different fillings,” Piroshky Piroshky owner Oliver Kotelnikov explains.

Chris Stafford and Warren Conard are in the business of scaring people.

“We actually met working at a haunted house as teenagers,” Stafford says.

Cigar aficionados and tourists alike have been coming to family owned El Titan de Bronze cigar factory in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood for 17 years.  

“Being Cuban, born in Cuba, it’s a part of our heritage," says owner Sandy Cobas. "Part of our tradition.”

Ben Jacobs grew up eating Native American cuisine.

“I’m from the Osage nation of Oklahoma. I was raised in Colorado. My parents owned a restaurant in Denver called Grayhorse when I was 6 years old,” Jacobs says. “After it closed, there were only specific times we could get our food, which was powwows, special occasions, birthdays.” 

Sewing and embroidering may sound like something you did with your grandma, but teaching people those skills is the secret behind Diana Rupp's business success: Make workshop in New York City.

Rupp is largely self-taught - and she believes her story shows you don't have to have professional training to be the next Coco Chanel.  "I think it’s really encouraging for my students – maybe people who want to be fashion designers - to realize you don’t have to go to fashion school to learn to make things yourself or even to learn how to be a designer," she says. 

Alphonso Brown has always been able to speak ‘Gullah’, a creole-based dialect spoken by some of the African-American population in South Carolina and Georgia.  Much of the history of towns like Charleston is bound up in the culture of its Gullah community, but Brown couldn’t find a tour that specialized in introducing people to that side of the city.  So he started one. 

“The big drawing card now is to talk about black history,” he says. “It is something that has been hidden or not explored for years.”  Accordingly Gullah Tours shows visitors to Charleston a uniquely ‘Gullah’ side of the city, including sweetgrass basket makers and the house of famous ironworker Phillip Simmons.