Business

Side Hustle Startup

A 90-minute, 4-round basic Express simulation on starting a one-person service business from zero, for high-school Career and Technical Education (business, marketing and landscape), entrepreneurship and personal-finance courses, DECA and FBLA chapters and youth-entrepreneurship programs.

4 rounds Undergraduate English, Español

Preview

About this simulation

A 90-minute, 4-round basic Express simulation on starting a one-person service business from zero, for high-school Career and Technical Education (business, marketing and landscape), entrepreneurship and personal-finance courses, DECA and FBLA chapters and youth-entrepreneurship programs.

Isaiah Varnadoe, 16, a fictional sophomore in Largo, Florida, mows his neighbors' lawns from 31 May to 19 September 2027, scored in four four-week periods.

Round by round you set the price of a visit and choose the tools, choose how to find customers and how to keep the books, decide what to do when there are more customers than hours and which add-on to sell, and keep the business going when school starts while handling a customer's cracked glass door.

Each period is scored on profit, profit per hour, weekly customers, reputation and records and compliance; flyers in mailboxes (18 U.S.C. 1725), or weed and feed applied for pay without the license Florida requires, caps the score. English with Spanish.

Who it is for

An introductory simulation that assumes no prior knowledge of the subject, designed for undergraduate courses. It also works in vocational and high-school programmes and in onboarding sessions.

How a session runs

  1. The instructor creates a session from the Eureka dashboard and invites the participants.
  2. Participants play 4 rounds. In each one they submit their decisions and the simulation calculates the results. The first round opens with: Saturday 29 May 2027: the price and the tools.
  3. The simulation can be run in English, Español.
  4. The instructor follows each participant's progress and results from the dashboard, and uses the class results for the debrief.

Decisions participants make

The decisions participants make during the simulation:

  • Your price for a weekly visit
  • Your tools
  • How you find customers from 28 June
  • How you keep the money from 28 June
  • When demand passes your hours
  • The add-on from 26 July
  • The business in the school weeks
  • The cracked glass door

Ready to use Side Hustle Startup with your students?

Contact us and we'll set you up with a free trial session.

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