Lemonade Anyone?
As a total business nerd, I had a proud dad moment a few weekends ago. My daughter had her first business venture - a lemonade stand. My mom made her a super cute stand and also provided her with the essential products. My daughter had a great time. Not so much selling lemonade but having my wife and I and my parents pretend to be customers. I had just as much fun (or likely more fun?) coming up with things we could do to improve the "business" or relate what we were doing to business principles.
One thing we kept talking about was attracting customers. Marketing 101. Every business deals with this and our lemonade stand struggled. We only had one couple stop by our stand. They were the only people we saw. (so a perfect hit rate that counts for something, right?) How could we have improved? Well, next time we could set up the stand in a more populated area like the local park. We could put up some signs advertising the lemonade stand or post on social media about our new lemonade stand opening. There are tons of different ways we could have gotten the word out there about our stand. We are already planning away for next time.
The lemonade we sold was just the Walmart brand. Nothing fancy. What if we made our own homemade lemonade? Our lemonade would taste better than a generic brand. Or our recipe could be different in another way like zero sugar. This would help set us apart from the competition. Then if we became popular enough, we could set up deals to get into grocery stores and they could handle the retail portion. Brands are powerful. Maybe just maybe we could stumble upon the next Coca-Cola!
Now my daughter got bored pretty fast. She had better things to be doing. She wanted to ride her bike, walk around, or kick her ball. This type of situation is similar to a lot of owners. How can we better use our time? We could hire an employee and train them. Then the business can still operate without us having to be there 24/7. Or, we could franchise our brand/system and have people set up their own lemonade stands. Then we just take a fee! Could this be the next McDonalds?!
I also kept saying to my Mom that she was like our initial investor who provided the start-up capital. She gave us the lemonade, the stand, the cups, etc. Just like an investor in a tech start up, gives the owner cash to hire employees or buy new computers, stuff like that. Unlike the normal investor, my mom was nice enough to not want any of the profits or an ownership percentage. Lucky us!
As I kept bringing up my ideas or teachings, my daughter ignored me and kept urging me to play. She didn't care about the business part of it… yet. But it was fun coming up with these little thought experiments.
Maybe one day soon she'll be the one bugging me with different business ideas.