Georgetown's Entrepreneurship Academy Starts Today: A Parent's 12-Week Home Version for Teens Who Did Not Get In

On Sunday, June 7, 2026, Georgetown University's pre-college Entrepreneurship Academy begins a two-week program for current 8th through 12th graders, running through June 19 [1]. Students spend each day inside a blend of classroom lectures, field trips, hands-on activities, and group discussions. The published curriculum covers personal and professional development, leadership and teamwork, networking and personal branding, ethical business, global entrepreneurship, diversity in entrepreneurship, risk management and finance, research and prototyping, and entrepreneurship ecosystems [1][2]. The week wraps with a team pitch competition.

Babson's summer entrepreneurship program runs in parallel and uses a similar arc: in two weeks, students build, brand, and launch a real product using AI and digital tools, test ideas, experiment with marketing, and learn from real customers [3]. LaunchX's online program for high schoolers runs five weeks from July 13 to August 14 and follows the same structure: real businesses, real customers, real pitches [4]. The good news for a parent whose teen is not enrolled is that the curriculum is not the secret. The secret is the structure: a published syllabus, a real product to build, real customers to interview, and a public deadline to pitch.

Phase one (June 8 to June 28, three weeks). Idea, research, decision. The teen picks one problem worth solving, interviews 15 to 25 real people about that problem, and writes a one-page business plan with the customer, the offer, the price, and the unit economics. Idea generation in week one. Customer interviews in week two. Plan in week three. The job for the parent is to ask the same five questions every Sunday at dinner: who did you talk to, what did you learn, what did you change, what is the next experiment, what is the deadline.

Phase two (June 29 to August 9, six weeks). Build, sell, learn. The teen ships the first version of the product or service in week one, sells it to 10 paying customers by week three, and runs three small experiments to improve the offer by week six. The math is intentionally specific. Ten customers is the smallest sample that produces real learning. Three experiments is the smallest cadence that turns the teen from someone running a business into someone running a business with a method.

Phase three (August 10 to August 30, three weeks). Pitch, reflect, decide. The teen prepares a five-minute pitch with three slides: the problem, the customer's reaction, the next 90 days. The pitch goes to a real audience: family, neighbors, a local Lemonade Day organizer, the local chamber of commerce [5][6]. After the pitch, the teen writes a one-page reflection that lists three things they would do differently and one decision: keep going through the school year, pause, or pivot. The reflection matters more than the revenue.

The right business depends on the teen's age, the family's network, and what is already in demand on the street. For most 11- to 14-year-olds, the proven options in summer 2026 are pet sitting and dog walking ($15 to $25 per visit), lawn care ($18 to $24 per hour, sometimes higher with weed trimming and leaf raking), pop-up product sales (baked goods, bracelets, friendship bracelets, slime), and lemonade or cold drink stands tied to neighborhood events [7][8]. Lemonade Day, the free national kids entrepreneurship program, runs registration year-round and has local event days throughout the summer in dozens of cities [5][6].

For 15- to 17-year-olds with more autonomy, the proven options expand to babysitting ($15 to $28 per hour depending on the city), tutoring younger students ($18 to $25 per hour), small-batch e-commerce on Shopify or Etsy, video editing for local small businesses, photo retouching, and lawn care scaled to a small route of regular customers [7]. The single most important constraint is to pick a business the teen can deliver on alone, with at most one parent intervention per week. A business that needs the parent to drive every transaction does not teach the teen anything. A business the teen runs alone, with the parent as a once-a-week advisor, teaches everything.

The parent is not the operator. The parent is the board member. That distinction is everything. A parent who hands the teen a list of customers, drives them to every job, and keeps the books is running the business. The teen is just helping. The parent who lets the teen find customers, negotiate prices, deliver poorly the first week, fix the offer in week two, and only intervenes when there is a real safety issue is running the experiment. The teen is actually learning.

The weekly cadence helps both sides. Sunday afternoon, 20 minutes, five questions: who did you talk to, what did you learn, what did you change, what is the next experiment, what is the deadline. Most teens running their first business will dread question two for the first three weeks, because the answer is usually that they did not learn very much. By week four, the answer changes. By week eight, the teen is asking the questions back. A planning workspace, a Foundra page, a Notion table, or even a shared Google Doc that holds the customer list, the prices, the weekly experiment, and the running revenue keeps the conversation grounded in data and not in feelings. The document is small and boring. That is the point.

Number one. Revenue per week, tracked on a simple line in a spreadsheet or notebook. The number should be visible to the teen, not buried inside an app. Week-over-week growth (or shrinkage) is the single best signal of whether the business is alive.

Number two. Hours worked per week. Most teens dramatically undercount the time they put in. Tracking it accurately turns the abstract idea of a wage into a real hourly rate and forces a conversation about whether the work is paying enough. A teen earning $18 per hour for lawn care who finds they actually worked seven hours for $90 is earning under $13. That math is a feature, not a flaw.

Number three. Number of new customers per week. A business with zero new customers in week four is a business that is going to die in September. The new-customer count is the leading indicator that the marketing is working, the pricing is reasonable, and the offer is something people actually want. A teen who understands this number by Labor Day understands the most important number in any business they will ever run [7].

Trap one. Picking a business that depends on a one-time event. A lemonade stand on the Fourth of July sells out and then sells nothing for the rest of July. A microbusiness that depends on a single weekend, a single market day, or a single neighborhood event teaches the teen about selling, but not about running. The version that teaches both is the same product or service sold every week for 10 weeks.

Trap two. Confusing busywork with business work. A teen who spends 15 hours building a logo and a website but has not talked to one customer is doing busywork. A teen who has talked to 25 customers but has no name and no logo is doing business work. The order matters. Customers first, brand later.

Trap three. The parent quietly taking over the hard parts. If the parent ends up handling the money, the customer disputes, or the scheduling, the teen never actually learns the hard parts. The hard parts are the lesson. The teen will be uncomfortable. That discomfort is the experience the Georgetown Academy charges thousands of dollars for [1]. The home version delivers it for free, but only if the parent stays out of the way.

The week-12 pitch is the artifact that turns a summer of work into a memorable milestone. It does not need to be elaborate. Three slides is enough: the problem the business solves, the customer evidence (what real people said and bought), and the next 90 days (what changes when school starts). The audience can be small: parents, a sibling, a friend's parent who runs a small business, a local chamber of commerce member, a librarian who hosts the kids program. The format should mirror what the Georgetown Academy uses: five minutes of pitch, five minutes of questions [1].

The value of the pitch is not the polish. It is the practice of standing up, telling a true story about a real thing the teen built, and answering hard questions on the spot. A teen who has done this once at 14 has a structural advantage every time they have to do it again at 20, at 25, at 35. The pitch is the moment the parent gets to step from board member back to parent, sit in the audience, and watch the teen close out a summer that started on June 7 with an idea and ended on August 30 with a real business.

Three moves a parent can make in the first seven days. Move one. Sit down with the teen on Sunday afternoon and write three possible business ideas on paper. The criteria: each idea should solve a real problem for at least one neighbor, cost under $50 to start, and be something the teen can deliver alone. Move two. Pick one idea by Wednesday and write the one-line description, the price, and the first two people the teen will call. Move three. By Saturday, the teen should have talked to five real potential customers and changed the description at least once based on what they heard. If the teen has not done this by Saturday, the parent should push for the conversation, not do the conversation. The teen has to talk to the customer. That is the entire summer in one sentence.

Does a teen need a business license to run a summer microbusiness in 2026? In most states, no, as long as the business is small and run from the home. Fourteen states explicitly do not require permits for lemonade stands run by minors (California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, North Dakota, Nebraska, Texas, Missouri, Louisiana, Illinois, New York, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Connecticut) [9]. Most other states have similar exemptions for very small, occasional, kid-run businesses, but a parent should check the city or county website before the teen sells anything to the public.

Can a 14-year-old earn enough this summer to fund a custodial Roth IRA? Yes. A teen earning $15 per hour for 10 hours a week over 12 weeks makes $1,800, all of which is eligible to be contributed to a custodial Roth IRA in 2026 (the limit is $7,500 or earned income, whichever is lower) [10]. The earlier this contribution starts, the more dramatic the compounding by retirement age.

What if the teen quits in week four? That is fine. Quitting is a real outcome and the lesson is real. The parent's job is to make sure the teen writes a one-page reflection on what worked, what did not, and what they would try differently. Three weeks of selling and quitting teaches more than 10 weeks of fake enthusiasm. Many teens who quit in summer one return to entrepreneurship in summer two with a better idea.

How is this different from a Georgetown or Babson program? The home version trades curriculum polish for real customer feedback. Georgetown and Babson give the teen structured lectures, peer projects, and a polished final pitch in a controlled environment [1][3]. The home version gives the teen real customers, real money, real failures, and a real reflection at the end. Both are valuable. Most teens who attend a paid program report that they wish the program had pushed them harder to talk to real customers, which is the exact thing the home version forces from week one.

Should the teen use AI tools to run the business? Yes, in moderation. Using a free Claude or ChatGPT account to draft customer-outreach messages, design a simple flyer, or summarize what customers said in interviews is a useful skill in 2026, and the Georgetown and Babson programs both teach it [1][3][4]. The line to hold is that the teen, not the AI, has to talk to every customer and make every decision. The AI is a tool. The business is the teen's.

1. Entrepreneurship Academy Summer Programs for High School Students (Georgetown)
2. Georgetown University Summer Pre-College Program Entrepreneurship Academy (TeenLife)
3. Want to Be an Entrepreneur Summer Courses for High Schoolers (Babson Thought & Action)
4. Top Online Entrepreneurship Program for High School Students Summer 2026 (LaunchX)
5. Teaching Kids the Power of Entrepreneurship (Lemonade Day)
6. Do You Need a Permit to Sell Lemonade A Guide to Legal Requirements (Lemonade Day)
7. Side Hustles for Teens 28 Ways to Earn Money While in School (10Web)
8. Business Ideas for Teens Top 15 to Start in 2026 (Dorik)
9. You Might Need A Permit To Run A Lemonade Stand Unless You Live In These States (Tasting Table)
10. Custodial Roth IRA Your guide to Roth IRAs for kids (Fidelity)