The Children’s Business Fair inspires children to discover their inner entrepreneur. As the largest entrepreneurship event for kids in North America, this one-day marketplace gives children the opportunity to showcase their very own businesses. Entrepreneurs from each school will meet once a week after school for 6 weeks leading up to the event, and a Bootcamp Mentor will help them get ready for the bid day.

We will accept a maximum of 25 businesses from each of our local school, totaling 125 kid businesses.

Applications/payments must be submitted online. Please submit one application for each business, and up to 3 children are allowed per business. Each student will need to pay for entry into the CBF.

The application asks kids to think through some simple, but important elements of their business (you don't need all the details figured out since we will address this in training):

What product or service do you plan to sell?
What price will you charge, and what will be your cost?
How will you pay for your startup costs? If someone is helping you with your startup costs, how will you pay that person back?
How will you advertise/market your business?
At the end of the fair, how will you determine if your business was a success?

If you do not know what business you want to have, that is ok! Just mark that you don't know yet, and we will help you decide during the Bootcamp Training.

A ton! We believe in FUN hands-on learning and games to help entrepreneurs prepare for the real world. Here are some of the lessons entrepreneurs will learn each week:

Sweet Spot: What are your Passions, your Skills, and the Needs of the World according to you? Where do those 3 things collide to create your sweet spot?
Unit Economics Games: Profit and Cost
Listening to the Customer and Pricing Your Product
Making Your Product in Class
Marketing your Product and your Booth
Pitching Your Product/How to Sell (Safely) to Strangers
Online Sim Games- Coffee Shop, Price Point, and Robo Rush, etc. Fun and safe online games that help students learn supply, demand, pricing, customers, managing cash and other fun lessons.

Each class will be about 75 minutes long after school once a week in a classroom on campus. Parents are asked to join the last prep day to help students with their Pitch and gather info about the Fair itself. We will email you the dates of the weekly training days leading up to the Fair.

Each student will pay $75 if accepted. This gets them entry into the 6-weeks of training and reserves them a booth at the fair. Although we can't promise what each student will make at the fair, the average business makes hundreds of dollars. Last year, over a dozen students made $1000+ with their amazing businesses. But it all depends on you.

Two cupcake businesses? Not a problem. In general, we will let market forces play out, though we will let later entries know if another applicant has a similar idea so the later entrant can decide what to do.

The fair will be a tented outdoor event with booths. Each business will be given a booth with an 8-foot table (to share with one other business), full-cover tenting, and 1-2 chairs. Table cloths will not be provided. We only allow a few businesses to to have electricity on a first-come, first-serve basis.

This is by request only. Our fair will have limited spots for this, so please make sure to sign up early to request this.

This event is designed to give children the experience of selling a product or service. If a parent is found selling or promoting a child’s product or service, their child’s business will be disqualified from the competition.

Parents of younger children may sit in the booth, but the children should be responsible for set up, customer interaction, and sales.

Parents may help their child fill out the application, but we expect the children to do as much as possible by themselves.

Jeff and Laura Sandefer and a few other families wanted to spark a sense of wonder and entrepreneurship in their children so they created the first Acton Children’s Business Fair in Austin, Texas, in 2007. That year, there were seven entrepreneurs and around 25 attendees. Now, there are almost 100 fairs around the country and 1000s of kids.