The time each student spends on their study depends on the level they’re enrolled in and their style of learning. The below table suggests average time requirements, which can be used as a guideline.

Parents of MINIBOSS students notice positive changes in their children in the first year of study, as early as in the first 1-3 months. Children start asking important questions, showing initiative and noticing opportunities. The timeframe does, however, depend on each student, on how strong their views are, how open they are to alternative ways of thinking, and how supportive their family environment is. We can discuss this with you after the interview, once we meet your child in person.

Firstly, we offer a comprehensive program that aims to develop your child’s full potential. It means that we do not just provide knowledge in specific areas such as finance, leadership or project management. While we cover 18 subjects during our 8-year program gradually layering all the business-critical concepts, our main goal is to help you raise a confident person, enhance and develop his/her creativity, emotional intelligence, calculated risk taking, and other qualities that form our holistic 8Q approach. We focus on the long-term results, the impact we make on each student for many years after they finish our school, which includes how each student interprets new information, how they perceive challenges, how they approach problems, how they communicate with people, etc. Our program’s impact is a psychological shift in the students’ mindset.

Secondly, our education method is based on games and interactive learning practices. Our students learn in a fun and engaging environment, which doesn’t feel like learning in the traditional sense offered by the main-stream schools. It increases the children’s motivation to know and do more, and this method also provides the most effective way of absorbing and recalling new information.

Thirdly, we have a very strong focus on practical real-life experiences. We don’t just teach students how to start a business, we introduce your children to successful entrepreneurs who’ve done it many times before, we coach your children while they’re creating their own startups, and we give them opportunities to pitch their ideas in a competitive environment. Our students continually practice the new skills and knowledge they learn each each year and this attributes a key factor as to why our program is so successful in raising entrepreneurs and business leaders.

Our methodology has been developed and refined over 20 years across different nations. We are proud of our more than 5,000 MINIBOSS graduates, most of whom have become serial entrepreneurs and experienced business leaders by the time they finish school. Everything we do as part of our program is aimed to make our graduates competent and confident to realise their dreams. In more practical terms, our graduates significantly outperform their peers who have not studied at MINIBOSS, and often leave behind their more “mature and experienced” counterparts. The experience our graduates gain in the MINIBOSS business school puts them ahead of the competition and enables them to choose their own career path.

As soon as your child is enrolled in our program on the Foundation or Certification level, they will create a start-up by the end of the first year, and it is a requirement that their business produce revenue inorder to qualify for the championships. If legal registration is required (e.g., to use a bank account for accepting payments), usually students’ parents come to an arrangement of who becomes the official account owner, and the agreement is documented by a contract amongst students’ parents.

All the money the students make are owned by the team, and there are no financial or IP liabilities to the MINIBOSS Business School in relation to the start-ups. In most cases there are no financial obligations to the investors as they offer grants in a form of non-refundable charitable financial assistance. In some cases, however, investors may require some form of payback, but this can only be agreed with the students’ legal guardians

Whether a student has a specific idea about what they want to do, or none at all, at the beginning of the Business Incubator stage we facilitate a number of ‘creative thinking’ sessions, when every student comes up with a number of ideas. While we guide our young entrepreneurs through all stages of forming a start-up, we do not push our ideas on them. One of the key points of our program is for each student to explore their own ideas and capabilities. We do help to narrow-down ideas to a smaller number in order to form teams. The criteria for us to suggest which of their ideas students should consider for implementation change to help students gain a broader experience. Each student chooses the idea they want to implement.

If your child is onto a winning idea, they’ll be on their way to building their financial wealth straight away. But this is not the point. One of the main objectives of our program is for students to gain practical experience of creating start-ups. Not all of them become great success stories, and this is exactly the point - for children to learn from real-life experience, in the environment of minimal risk and maximum support.

We teach a broad range of practical business skills, and it depends on your child’s personality, prior experience and learning style which of the new skills will become the most prominent. The top 3 qualities every graduate displays by the time they finish MINIBOSS are:

1. Independent thinking and creative problem-solving: our graduates do not blindly follow others’ opinions or advice as they understand the difference in people’s needs and perspectives, and are able to develop a point of view and a solution that reflects the needs and objectives of the involved parties.
2. Confidence and perseverance: our graduates know from their own experience that no one can succeed all the time, and rarely achieve great results from the first try. They know that every “mistake” is a discovery and a learning experience, and that they have to persevere if they want to achieve exceptional results.
3. Soft skills: our students continuously practice professional and interpersonal styles of communication, and by heightening their EQ over the course of our program, they graduate aware of others’ needs and personalities, and know how to select and fine-tune most relevant communication techniques.

Think about your objective: do you want to introduce a business concept to your child to simply increase their awareness of what people do with money, or do you want to help your child become proficient in converting their ideas into successful projects?

If the former, then the MINIBOSS Business School is not the right choice for you. While financial education and economics is an important part of our program, our program is not about improving students’ financial literacy. The reason MINIBOSS started, and the reason why we opened the school in Australia is to make a significant impact on every student’s life after school, to enable them to choose their own path in life, and to have all the knowledge, skills and experience they need to make themselves happy and successful. We guarantee such results because of how our methodology works and how our program is structured. It is similar to bringing your child to a fluent poet/author level in a foreign language. If you’d like just to introduce your child to a concept of business, like some parents sign their children up for language classes for a year, our program will not suit you. The short-term courses do give students some understanding, but rarely make a lasting impact.

We see the path of becoming a happy and successful person as a process, which is at least as complex as learning a language and the culture of people who speak it. It takes years of regular practice to master all forms of language application (reading, writing and speaking), and then it takes more years to acquire the accent of the native speakers, to understand the subtleties of idioms, and to become fluent in the style of speaking that fits the culture of the native speakers. This is how we prepare our students – through a gradual layering of knowledge while they acquire practical skills and gain experience.

Just like a 1-month overseas language course will not transform a person into a native-speaker, short business and entrepreneurship courses give only fragments of skills, which fade away with time if not practised continuously. Once again, we focus on the long-term results, which cannot be achieved within a short period of time.

We do, however offer a condensed version of courses for our older students closer to the end of the program, enabling them to finish MINIBOSS at the same time or shortly after graduating from a main-stream school. After the initial years of following our methodology in a normal pace, our older students become more acceptive of absorbing new information more efficiently and quicker.

Our theory classes are offered only on weekends. These are intense interactive lessons, where every student learns something new, and is expected to form opinions and answer questions on topics they haven’t thought of before. These are mentally intense sessions, which is why it’s important that our students are in a state of their best performance. coming home after a full day at a main-stream school students’ minds are tired and sometimes overwhelmed, and their ability to learn something new drops significantly after 3pm. Students’ minds on weekends are more available and open to learning.

Our Foundation and Certification level students have coaching sessions scheduled on week days after school. These are short (45min) sessions designed for the students to provide information they’ve prepared on their business, and for the coach or mentor to comment and provide recommendations.

During the enrolment process we’ll advise on the time of the sessions available for your child. Depending on the selected level and your child’s age, there might be more than one session available during the same day (e.g., Saturday), or on either day (Saturday or Sunday). Once your child is enrolled to a class, they will be expected to attend the same session every weekend.

In case of an illness a student will need to book a catchup session prior to the next weekend to cover missed material. 

Due to unpredictable COVID-19 situation and to avoid unnecessary disruptions, we will continue to offer our courses in 2022 online only.

If the situation improves throughout the year, the Startup Forum in October and National Championship in December will be organised in a face-to-face environment in Brisbane. If the pandemic state improves during the year, we will consider re-opening our offices in 2023.

Our interactive method and games have been adapted to the online way of teaching/learning, and we’ve received positive feedback from parents since moving online in 2020.

Some parents have raised concerns about the effectiveness of online classes as compared to face-to-face. There is, undoubtedly, an additional value of improving children’s EQ and communication skills in the face-to-face environment. However, online collaboration has already become and will continue to be a normal part of every business. It is important that children are comfortable in this environment and know how to make the most of it, especially when they learn and practise their leadership and people management skills. Different techniques and approaches are required for effective team collaboration online, and it is critical for students to acquire and practise these skills.