Lessons From A Lemonade Stand

Employees of the Litteken Lemonade Stand

Dearest Joshua and Luke,
     What started out as a usual, fun Saturday, turned into a day for some of the entrepreneurs in the family.  You had tried a lemonade stand a few times before at our previous house, it was nothing like the stand you had here.  We started out by buying Country Time Lemonade at the local grocers.  Joshua insisted that the Lemonade had to be Country Time brand because that is what all of the restaurants use (according to Joshua).  He also confirmed that it's taste was just as good as the restaurants.  Here we started to learn about quality control. More on that later.   As a part of the lemonade offer, the boys offered fresh lemon slices in the cups and ice cold cubes of ice. 





Joshua's sign on the scooter read,
"If you want some great lemonade,
follow me!"

     Joshua and Luke made lemonade stand signs, offering one cup of lemonade for a quarter.  They wanted to try charging $1 per cup, but I told them I did not think they would sell much lemonade at that price.  They brought out their small card table and four chairs from the basement, then set up the stand in front of the house.  The first two customers, two very sweet neighbor girls, became the first employees at the lemonade stand.  Then, came another girl customer who became the third employee, the fourth sweet girl became the fifth employee, until we had six sweet neighbor girls helping the cause. (By the way, the cause was a new Pokémon DS game.)  By this time, Daddy had moved the round patio table to the front yard so that the kids could sit out of the sun and under the umbrella.  Several customers came to the lemonade stand, and everyone wanted part of the profits.  Some of the other customers were parents, neighbors, older kids walking to the lake to fish........ I think we went through 15 pitchers of lemonade during the stand!  Joshua and several of the employees rode scooters and bikes around advertising for the lemonade stand. 

Then, one of the big brothers of the employees came over and decided to increase the customer base.  So they started making lemonade deliveries.  They went door to door and to the neighborhood pool to drum up some business.  They decided on a 25 cent delivery charge for the lemonade.  They made several trips to the pool for deliveries.  Door to door sales were successful, too.  Daddy gave you guys another incentive for the lemonade sales. If a customer referred another customer to the stand by telling them how wonderful the lemonade tasted, then, the original customer got a free cup of lemonade.  As we started to deal with the reality that the lemonade mix would not last forever, the CEO's panicked a bit and briefly discussed lowering the quality of the original product by increasing the amount of water in the mix.  Luckily, the CEO's had previous experience and realized that they did not want to deliver lemonade that was not as tasty as the first cup!  I was so proud!  (The quality control lesson) 

Just had to sneak in this great picture of Luke
with his new goggles and duck call.

As what happens in real life, the lemonade stand employees were getting restless after hours of delivery and hard work, it was time for pay day.  Joshua and Luke decided to pay each employee 50 cents for the help during the day,  and mentioned to them that they had all the lemonade they wanted while they worked.  While it was not the profit making project they had hoped, everyone did have fun and learned a lot about being an entrepreneur. 

While you both learned a lot about running a business from your lemonade stand, it was also obvious to me how much you have learned from your dad about business.   Several episodes of Shark Tank and Mad Money (with Jim Cramer) have certainly not hurt you either!  :)  Boo-yah!

I love you more today than I did yesterday.

Love,
Mama