Nobody teaches you how to start a business. Students spend years in school without ever seeing how a real business gets built, how an idea is researched, priced, designed, protected, and marketed. This course closes that gap. Over ten units, students take one idea of their own and carry it all the way through: a written business plan, competitive research, customer personas, a brand, a wireframe, a budget, a project board, and a live website they can send to a real customer.
Along the way, students get a working introduction to nine different careers. Starting a business means touching every one of them, which makes it one of the fastest ways to find out what kind of work you actually enjoy. A student may arrive wanting to launch a business and leave knowing they want to be a designer, a developer or a marketer and that is a successful outcome too.
Careers You'll Explore
Every business runs on these nine disciplines. This course gives students hands-on exposure to each one.
Artificial Intelligence
Using AI tools to research, create, and automate real work.
Marketing
Finding customers, understanding them, and reaching them.
UI/UX Design
Designing products and brands people trust on sight.
Law
Entities, contracts, liability, and protecting an idea.
Finance & Accounting
Budgets, pricing, taxes, and reading a profit statement.
Project Management
Planning work, leading people, and shipping on a deadline.
Software Engineering
Building and deploying a real website with AI tools.
Data Analytics
Measuring what happened and deciding what to do next.
Sales
Listening, negotiating, and closing with confidence.
Curriculum Overview
1Business Plan
Every business starts as an idea, and a business plan is what turns that idea into something you can actually act on. This unit walks students through the eight components every business plan needs, how to pressure-test an idea before spending a dollar on it, and how to research the market and the competition honestly. By the end, students have a written plan that guides every unit that follows.
Topics
- Why start a business — the problems worth solving and the mindset behind them
- The 8 components of every business plan and what each one is really asking
- What you actually need to start — the short list versus the myths
- Idea generation and market research — validating demand before you build
- Competitive analysis — mapping who else solves this problem and where the gaps are
- Cost and startup budget — what it takes to open the doors and stay open
2AI for Business
AI is no longer optional knowledge; it is quickly becoming one of the most valuable skills a founder can have. A single person with AI can now do work that used to take a small team. This unit teaches students to use AI as a thinking partner — brainstorming ideas, sharpening a business plan, researching a market, and producing marketing material in a fraction of the time.
Topics
- What prompt engineering is and why the way you ask changes what you get
- Using AI to brainstorm — generating, combining, and stress-testing business ideas
- Using AI to draft and refine a business plan section by section
- Using AI for market and competitive research
- Using AI for marketing — ad copy, social posts, email, and product descriptions
- Knowing when not to trust AI — checking facts, numbers, and legal claims
3Marketing
A great product nobody hears about is still a failed business. Marketing is the discipline of understanding exactly who you are selling to, what problem keeps them up at night, and where to reach them. Students learn to build real customer personas, find genuine pain points, and choose marketing channels based on where their customers already spend time rather than guessing.
Topics
- Creating user personas — turning a vague audience into a specific person
- Finding pain points — interviewing, listening, and identifying what people will pay to fix
- The marketing channel landscape — organic, paid, referral, and word of mouth
- SEO fundamentals — keywords, page titles, and how search engines decide what to show
- Social media marketing — matching the platform to the customer and the message
- Google Business Profile — getting found by local customers on Search and Maps
4UI/UX Design
Design is not decoration; it is how a customer decides in three seconds whether to trust you. This unit gives students the working vocabulary of a designer and the tools to use it. They will learn to gather visual direction into a mood board, sketch a product before building it, and apply the principles — hierarchy, typography, color — that separate a professional-looking brand from an amateur one.
Topics
- Creating mood boards — collecting visual direction before designing anything
- Canva — building logos, social graphics, and marketing assets quickly
- Figma — the industry-standard tool for designing real products
- Low-fidelity wireframes — planning a page or app before it gets built
- Typography — choosing and pairing fonts that stay readable and on-brand
- Visual hierarchy — guiding the eye to what matters most on the page
- Color theory — building a palette with contrast, meaning, and accessibility
5Legal
The legal side of a business is where new founders get hurt most often, usually by not knowing what they did not know. This unit demystifies it. Students learn what liability actually means for their business, how a business entity protects their personal assets, and how to read and write a basic contract so they understand what they are signing before they sign it.
Topics
- Business liability — what you are personally on the hook for and how to limit it
- Business structures compared — sole proprietor, LLC, and corporation
- The steps to form an LLC, including the Texas-specific process
- Reading and writing a business contract — the clauses that matter most
- When you genuinely need a lawyer, and how to work with one efficiently
6Finances
Businesses do not usually fail because the idea was bad; they fail because they ran out of money. Financial literacy is the skill that protects everything else students build in this course. This unit starts with personal budgeting and moves into business income, expenses, profit, and the tax forms every founder eventually needs.
Topics
- Building a personal budget and understanding where money actually goes
- Income, expenses, and profit — the three numbers that decide if a business works
- Personal and business taxes — what gets taxed, when, and why
- The tax forms you will actually see — W-2, W-9, 1099, and Schedule C
- Pricing your product — covering costs, reading the market, and protecting margin
- Separating business and personal money, and tracking it from day one
7Project Management
Project management is the discipline of planning, executing, and overseeing tasks to achieve specific business goals within a defined scope, timeline, and budget. It is the skill that turns a long list of good intentions into shipped work. Students learn the five project phases professionals use, how to write the documents that keep a team aligned, and how to run their own work on a real Kanban board.
Topics
- What project management is — scope, timeline, and budget as the three constraints
- What makes a great leader — communication, delegation, and accountability
- The 5 project phases — initiating, planning, executing, monitoring, and closing
- Writing a PRD (Product Requirement Document) to define what gets built and why
- Writing an SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) so a task runs the same way every time
- Trello and Kanban boards — visualizing work, limiting what is in progress, and shipping
8Building Your Website with AI
AI coding tools have changed what a non-programmer can build. A student who has never written a line of code can now describe a business and get a working, deployed website out the other end. This unit connects everything so far: students take the business plan, personas, and design direction they created and turn them into a live site they can send to a real customer.
Topics
- Turning your business plan into an AI prompt that produces a real website
- Website anatomy — headers, hero sections, calls to action, forms, and footers
- Vibe coding tools compared — Lovable, v0, and Claude Code
- Building marketing and landing pages that convert visitors into customers
- Writing website copy that matches your personas and their pain points
- Publishing your site — domains, hosting, and getting it live on the internet
9Sales
Sales is the most misunderstood skill in business. It is not talking someone into something they do not want; it is listening closely enough to find out whether you can genuinely help, then being clear about it. These are communication skills that pay off in interviews, negotiations, and everyday life long before they pay off in revenue.
Topics
- The art of listening — asking questions and hearing the answer underneath the answer
- Negotiating — preparation, anchoring, and finding the deal both sides can live with
- The ability to say no — protecting your time, your pricing, and your reputation
- Handling objections and rejection without taking it personally
- Creating a sales plan — targets, outreach, and follow-up that actually happens
10Analytics
Once a business is live, guessing stops being good enough. Analytics is how founders find out what is really happening: who is visiting, what they do, where they leave, and what they were searching for in the first place. Students learn the free tools professionals rely on and, more importantly, how to turn a dashboard full of numbers into a decision about what to change next.
Topics
- Google Analytics — traffic, sources, and user behavior on your site
- Hotjar — heatmaps and session recordings that show where users get stuck
- Bing Webmaster Tools — indexing, search performance, and site health
- Google Trends — spotting demand, seasonality, and rising interest early
- VidIQ — researching and optimizing YouTube content
- Turning data into decisions — choosing the one metric that matters right now
What You'll Build
Every unit ends with a real, practical deliverable students can use or show off.
A Complete Business Plan
Unit 1 — Business Plan
Competitive Research Report
Unit 1 — Business Plan
Idea Validation
Unit 2 — AI for Business
Customer Personas
Unit 3 — Marketing
Social Media Post & Campaign
Unit 3 — Marketing
Brand Mood Board
Unit 4 — UI/UX Design
Low-Fidelity Wireframe
Unit 4 — UI/UX Design
Startup Budget & Pricing Model
Unit 6 — Finances
Trello Board for Launching a Business
Unit 7 — Project Management
A Live Website Built with AI
Unit 8 — Building Your Website
Who This Is For
The same curriculum, adjusted in depth and pace for each student.
Middle School Students
A first real look at how businesses and careers work. Sessions stay hands-on and project-driven — designing a brand, building a mood board, and planning a small business idea they actually care about.
High School Students
Explore career paths before committing to a college major, and finish with a portfolio of real work — a business plan, a wireframe, and a live website that stands out on applications.
Working Professionals
A practical, structured path from idea to launch. Build the plan, the entity, the budget, the site, and the sales approach for a side business or a full transition into working for yourself.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is business coaching for?
Middle school students, high school students, and working professionals. Every session is one-on-one, so the pace, depth, and examples are matched to the student. A seventh grader designing a first brand and an adult forming an LLC work from the same curriculum at very different depths.
Does my student need a business idea before starting?
No. Units 1 and 2 are built around generating and validating ideas. Many students arrive with nothing more than a vague interest and leave with an idea they have researched, priced, and built a website for.
Do we have to complete all ten units?
No. The curriculum is modular. Some students work through it start to finish; others come in for specific units from marketing and analytics for an existing business, or design and website building for a project already underway.
Is this just theory, or do students build real things?
Every unit produces a real deliverable. By the end, students have a business plan, competitive research, customer personas, a mood board, a wireframe, a budget, a Trello board, and a live website they can share.
Do students need coding experience to build the website?
None at all. Unit 8 uses AI coding tools like Lovable, v0, and Claude Code, where students describe what they want in plain English. The skill being taught is clear thinking and clear communication, not syntax.
Are sessions in person or online?
Both. In-person sessions are available in Clear Lake, League City, Friendswood, Seabrook, and the surrounding Houston area, and online sessions are available anywhere.