We’re partnering with educators to give students access to financial tools, training, and skills so they’re ready to run businesses in the real world.
At Ambrook, we build financial management tools for independent businesses. And in our world, “independent” has often meant multi-generational: We work with a sawmill operator who brought on his son and son-in-law as partners, a sixth-generation producer who stewards land that’s been in his family for more than a century, a father-daughter duo who raise lamb together.
This means we can’t only focus on building tools that work well today or helping operators become profitable right now. We need to build financial infrastructure that will last them years and support their operations for generations to come.
Part of that is making sure our platform is designed to fit the needs of real economy operators, including producers, contractors, property managers, and trucking operators. The other part is providing future owner-operators with access to the tools and skills that will help them confidently take over the books, expand a family operation, or start their own business.
We’re launching Teaching with Ambrook, a program where we partner with educators to give them and their students free access to our platform and hands-on financial management curricula. So far, we’ve kicked off the program with 11 educators across 10 schools. Now, we’re opening it up to more classrooms across universities, trade schools, and community colleges, and we’re excited to support more students as they prepare for operations in the real world.
Why we started the program
We’ve heard from many operators that grants and loans are getting more competitive over time, with lending institutions like the American Bankers Association and Conterra Ag Capital reporting significant increases in agricultural loan demand in 2025.
The businesses that win funding are the ones with clean books. While bookkeeping used to be something operators could pick up over the course of their careers, it’s now a skill they feel they have to nail from the very beginning.
At the same time, educators have told us how quickly they’re seeing the tools of the trade changing. Pen and paper and spreadsheets aren’t the norm they used to be. Instead, operations are turning to faster, newer software that fits the workflows they’ve always used in the field, in the truck, or on the job site.
For the student who helps out on the ranch after class, or the one who’s planning to launch a construction business after graduation, practicing real financial management workflows and learning the tools that are actually used in their industry is how they start ahead.
How we partner with educators
At the beginning of the semester, instructors and their students get free access to Ambrook with the support of our team. We help educators set up the platform by creating custom sets of sample transactions for the regions and operations students care about: a West Texas cow-calf and hunting-lease operation, for example, or an Indiana trucking business.
Throughout the course, we work with educators on lesson modules they can plug directly into their syllabus. Students learn how to set up a chart of accounts, read balance sheets, classify transactions, report tax deductions, and understand enterprise profitability. Then when educators need support, our education team helps host live sessions with the class or workshop course materials.
Above all, our goal is to help students learn something they can take with them beyond the classroom. Students keep their free access to Ambrook for one year after the course ends, so the skills they’ve built during the semester can carry straight into a real business.
Stories from our pilot semester
Tony Dunkerley, a professor at Midwestern State University in Texas who taught Ambrook in his agribusiness management course this past spring.
In the spring of 2026, we worked closely with three instructors in particular to understand how Ambrook could work for their classrooms.
One of those instructors was Tony Dunkerley. Tony teaches the Intro to Agribusiness Management course at Midwestern State University in Texas, and for years, he taught with spreadsheets and later QuickBooks. Neither felt totally right for his students. “There wasn’t anything that dealt with agriculture,” he told us. “You can’t break things up into classes vs. enterprises.”
This past spring he taught Ambrook for the first time. He liked how intuitive it was to get students set up on the platform, but also that he could get support with course content. When the semester ended, he knew one graduating student in particular was planning to launch his own operation. Tony encouraged him to take advantage of his continued access to Ambrook and use it to start his business. Read Tony’s full story.
For other instructors, the course content itself was a highlight of the program. Some educators had students create business plans for an operation, then use Ambrook to test the plan with financial data and bookkeeping workflows. Others used Ambrook to teach accounting principles with hands-on exercises.
Dr. Bonnie Warnock, dean of the College of Agriculture at Sul Ross State University, ran a Farm and Ranch Records class on Ambrook (and moved her own ranch onto the platform, too). “The education modules are really good,” she said. “It’s so easy to use and everything I need is in the software.” At the end of the semester, one senior in Dr. Bonnie’s class told her bookkeeping on Ambrook was the most valuable and applicable skill they had learned in college.
Bring Ambrook to your classroom
Are you teaching students about financial management for agriculture, construction, property management, or other real economy industries? If so, we want to talk to you! Here’s what the process looks like:
Schedule time to chat with our education team.
After the call, send us your course syllabus or core topics. If you have it, share a class roster so we can start getting students set up with Ambrook.
We’ll send back tailored course resources and an Ambrook onboarding guide.
Before and during the semester, join our team’s office hours for support with course materials.
We’re honored to help prepare the next generation of owner-operators to build businesses that last, and we can’t wait to do it alongside educators.
