How a classroom kit gets third-graders selling and raises $600 in one workshop
Suzanne Appel is founder and CEO of Young CEO Squad, which supplies classroom business kits that let students as young as third grade set prices, market and sell – a class of 30 can raise $600 in a single workshop. The story is worth reading because she paired that hands-on classroom product with a practical AI setup that turned her LinkedIn contacts into a working sales pipeline and reclaimed hours of follow-up time.
A focused, unglamorous AI use case – building an agent to handle post-meeting notes, CRM updates and follow-up sequences – can multiply a solo founder’s outreach capacity. That payoff only happens after you do the upfront work: define your brand, product catalog and ideal customer so the AI stops asking and starts acting.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
My daughter was twelve, selling Disney pins on Instagram Live to fifty strangers, and making real money. She handled the pricing, the inventory, the customer questions, all of it. I watched her build actual business skills in real time and thought: every kid should get to do something like this. That’s what Young CEO Squad is. I put real businesses into classrooms, starting as young as 3rd grade. Kids open a business kit, set their prices, market to their classmates and school community, and sell. A class of 30 can raise $600 in a single workshop. The money is real. The decisions are real. The skills stick because of it.
What makes it different from other entrepreneurship programs is honestly pretty simple: teachers don’t have to be entrepreneurs to run it. Everything is in the box. The lesson plan, the products, the student guide written at a reading level kids can actually follow. A teacher with zero business background can open it on a Monday and have a classroom selling by Friday. We’re in 300+ classrooms nationwide, and most of those started because a teacher who tried it once wanted to do it again. The real outcomes are problem-solving, resilience, confidence, the ability to make a decision and adjust when it doesn’t work. Those skills hold up regardless of what the job market looks like in ten years. That’s the whole point.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Most of my new business comes through grant-funded channels. I’m actively working to expand beyond that into school districts that self-pay — and honestly, that’s where I wish more of it came from. A district that chooses to budget for Young CEO Squad is a different kind of validation than a grant that covers the cost. It means someone made the case internally and won.
Here’s a real example of how I’m getting there. I’ve spent 25 years building a network, but when I looked at my LinkedIn contacts I had no way to identify or prioritize who I actually needed to talk to. As a solo founder, I don’t have a sales team to work a list. And follow-up is honestly not my strength — I’m good at starting conversations and terrible at maintaining them unless I have a system to support me.
So I took the time up front to give Claude a detailed picture of my ideal customer. Who they are, what they care about, what role they need to be in to actually move a purchase forward. That investment paid off because Claude now knows my business well enough that I can bring a new request without starting from scratch every time.
From that foundation, we identified my top 50 prospects from the list, built a multi-touchpoint outreach sequence for each segment, and mapped out the follow-up messages for people who went quiet after the first email. A real pipeline, built in a fraction of the time it would have taken me alone.
That’s the version of AI that actually changed how I work. Not the flashy stuff. The unsexy project management layer that a solo founder can’t usually afford to hire for.
What I’m really looking for now are the district administrators and curriculum directors who are already asking "how do we add more entrepreneurship and financial literacy programs into our schools." Those conversations are the ones I want more of.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
One thing I’ve fully handed over is post-meeting follow-up. I went to a Founders Conference earlier this year and came back with more coffee chats than I could manage. For a solo founder, that’s a good problem that can quietly become a bad one if the follow-through falls apart.
So I built an agent around it. After every meeting it pulls the transcript, drafts my meeting notes with action items in the format I prescribed, adds the contact to my CRM, drops all action items onto my to-do list, and puts a follow-up email in my drafts ready to review and send. What used to eat an afternoon now takes minutes.
The thing I went back to doing myself is product development. I had built several classroom products from scratch, and as I got more comfortable with AI I started using it to improve them. And here’s the honest part: the suggestions were like a siren song. Everything felt like it could be better, more thorough, more complete. The problem is I design for eight-year-olds in a classroom. Longer is not better. More is not better.
But there’s another reason I took it back. Product development is where I get to flex my creativity. It’s my favorite part of this work, and it brings me genuine joy. And right now that creativity is going toward something I’m genuinely excited about — building AI tools designed specifically for student entrepreneurs. Using AI to deliver entrepreneurship education is a different challenge than using AI to run a business, and that distinction is where I’m spending my best thinking.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
I haven’t had someone reach out and say "I found you through ChatGPT" yet. But I’ve searched for myself in AI assistants and I show up, which relieved me more than it surprised me. I hadn’t done anything special to make that happen. The years of consistent content, the press features, the classroom presence apparently added up to something an AI could find and reference.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Pay for a class. Find something that fits the way you learn and your schedule, and let somebody lead you through the maze. It is worth it. There are great options out there that come loaded with skills and templates you can use on day one.
Then do the setup work before you do anything else. Your brand guide, your product messaging, your product catalog, your writing style, your ideal customer profile. The more context you give AI about your business up front, the more useful it becomes across every request. That investment compounds. You’re not re-explaining yourself every time you sit down to work.
What to ignore: don’t stress about which AI tool to choose. The major platforms are all paying close attention to each other and rolling out new features faster than most people can keep up with. I use Claude. But the honest answer is that the tool matters a lot less than the habits you build around it. Pick one, learn it well, and go deep before you go wide.
Thank you to Suzanne Appel and the team at Young CEO Squad for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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