Program Highlights

Hands-On Activities: Unlike the classroom learning experience, Beta Bowl is all about implementation and putting what students learn into practice in real life. That’s exactly what students do throughout this entrepreneurial extracurricular program. Each lesson is accompanied by multiple hands-on tasks that take students one step closer to turning their idea into a living, breathing, thriving, and profitable business. These hands-on tasks include real-life idea validation, customer research, building a mockup, functional prototype, or landing page for their business to present to potential customers and investors, building a complete financial model to illustrate the business’s projected revenue and profit, and a professional pitch deck ready for review by real investors. Beta Bowl students don’t just learn about business; they build one themselves.

Startup Mentorship: Teens don’t participate in Beta Bowl’s Summer Entrepreneurship Program alone – in addition to their peers going through the program, they get individual attention, feedback, and guidance from experienced Startup Mentors who have built businesses themselves. The Startup Mentors include full-time entrepreneurs, top business school students, and the Beta Bowl founder. Every day these mentors host group calls to imbue their expertise and assist on your student’s entrepreneurial journey. Additionally, students  get 24-hour email and text support from their startup mentors, so no matter their question or request for feedback or assignment review, teens have an expert mentor at their fingertips, just a call or an email away. Multiple teens who have gone through the Beta Bowl program have touted the 1-on-1 mentorship as the biggest benefit of the program, and they’ve referred to the weekly calls and feedback as “invaluable” and “access to a wealth of knowledge” that leads to both ah-ha moments for their businesses and an augmented learning experience overall.

What You’ll Gain

Financial Literacy: Beta Bowl gets down to the nuts-and-bolts of building a business, and that includes the financial side of things. Students don’t need any prior knowledge coming into the program, but when they leave, they will have a deep understanding of financial projections and building a profitable business on a budget. We teach students the necessary elements of any business, the cost drivers, and their revenue-generating counterparts, and we equip them to put profit at the forefront of their spending. Additionally, we put a great focus on idea validation, concept testing, prototyping, and pre-selling before spending money on tech or manufacturing to ensure that when our students do build businesses in the future, they make sound financial decisions and never “break the bank” before locking in sales. Furthermore, students will come away with an understanding of financial modeling, and they will create a custom financial model that reflects the budget and projections for their Beta Bowl business. These are skills students can use in the real world, whether in a college business class, when planning their own personal investments, or when building a future business.

Business Professionalism and Confidence: Beta Bowl doesn’t just give teens the tools and resources to build a financial model and pitch deck; it also cultivates their professionalism and confidence in their own entrepreneurial abilities along the way. The daily calls are conducted just like startup meetings with entrepreneurs and investors, and teens are encouraged to present their unique viewpoints when discussing tweaks and changes to their businesses. Teens develop the confidence to voice their opinions, make educated suggestions and informed decisions, and present their findings and business-building progress on each group and individual call, as well as in their pitch deck and optional video. Many participants who have completed the program have developed a deeper passion for entrepreneurship, and with the professionalism and confidence they’ve acquired throughout the program, some have gone on to expand their beta businesses, pursue funding, and plan to make a career out of entrepreneurship.

Innovation Potential: Students come into Beta Bowl from diverse backgrounds, with varying levels of experience, and different business ideas. However, regardless of whether they come into the program with 10 ideas or none, they come out with a proven process for finding, testing, and validating their ideas. In fact, most students end up deciding between two or three ideas and planning to revisit the runner-up ideas in the future, when building another business. Entrepreneurship isn’t just a tangible skill set or a formula for profitability; it’s a way of thinking and a creative, but educated approach to planning, evaluating, and launching a business. That’s exactly what students learn and put into practice, and after going through Beta Bowl and developing the analytical mindset, problem-solving skills, and business acumen we help instill, they come away with the innovation potential to become serial entrepreneurs, building, launching, and growing successful business after business in the future.