Build
Your First
Business.

We're Josh and Bethany. We've been married since 2002, we've raised three kids, and since 2013 home education hasn't been a philosophy we admired from a distance — it's been our daily life, from phonics at the kitchen table all the way to college campuses.

Family Aspirations is what happens when more than a decade at the homeschool table meets a career inside business education — a curriculum company built by a couple who know entrepreneurship and homeschooling inside and out, not from theory but from living both. Build Your First Business is our first course, and we made it because a teenager with a real problem to solve, real tools, and a real plan doesn't just learn business. They learn what they're capable of.

We weren't homeschooled ourselves. We chose this road, kept choosing it, and watched it work. Our oldest is in college now, pursuing a math emphasis. Our daughter earned her A.A. degree the same season she completed high school, walked at her college graduation, and is now pursuing her bachelor's at the University of Central Florida. Our youngest tested into college coursework at fourteen. Three different kids, three different paths — and the same lesson underneath all of them: education works best when it's personal, purposeful, and aimed at real things.

We know something about building real things, because we've been building them our whole marriage. Bethany was an entrepreneur by her twenties, turning formal photography training and an internship under a working professional into Bethany F Photography, a Portland wedding and portrait business with a client list she built one referral at a time. Later we built a company together: when food intolerances reshaped how our family ate, Josh developed a gluten- and dairy-free cookie recipe good enough that strangers would pay for it — then took a community college course called "Getting Your Recipe to Market" to learn what we didn't know. Armed with that, we launched Jude's Foods: we earned our kitchen certification together, baked together, and grew a family recipe into a commercial operation with cookies on the shelves of every New Seasons Market in Portland and — a goal we'd set from the start — Whole Foods in the Pacific Northwest. The kids grew up watching, and joining, the whole unglamorous, thrilling process. Portland Community College later named Josh a Diamond Alumni award winner for it, but the lesson belonged to the whole family: one practical business class, taken at the right moment, can change a family's entire trajectory.

Our homeschooling story didn't start with a philosophy. It started with a kindergarten teacher. Our kids began at a Christian Montessori school, and when our oldest repeated kindergarten there, his teacher — who knew him well and cared about him — told Bethany plainly that homeschooling would be the best thing for him. She was right. In 2013, when he started first grade at seven, Bethany went all-in on home education, carrying both callings at once — teaching by day, photographing weddings on nights and weekends — until 2016, when she stepped away from her business to give homeschooling her whole focus.

That work has always been bigger than academics. Our oldest is on the autism spectrum, so Bethany's homeschool years have also been years of occupational therapy, speech therapy, and doctor's appointments stitched between lessons — the kind of schedule thousands of Florida scholarship families know by heart. And through it all, the teaching deepened: Classical Conversations, My Father's World, Abeka, Saxon and ALEKS math, Handwriting Without Tears; a partnership with Paisley, a public charter school serving homeschooling families through remote enrollment; then Florida's PEP and FES-UA programs and dual enrollment as our kids reached college-level work early. Different curricula, different kids, different seasons — planned, taught, and re-planned one child at a time.

Josh's work took a different shape. He trained at Multnomah University in theological and biblical studies with a minor in intercultural studies and spent his first career in full-time ministry. He then led student success and retention work in higher education — years spent learning, one student at a time, why some people flourish in education and others quietly give up. Since 2015 he's been with the company behind LivePlan, the professional business planning software used by over a million businesses, where he directs the academic and government channel — the same software your student will use in this course, and the same tools taught in the entrepreneurship centers and small business programs he serves every day.

That's the story that brought us to this work. We'd be honored to be part of yours.