LEMONADE STAND LEMONADE STAND
PLANNING
While the planning part is hard for any grown person due to the fact that everyone wants instant gratification, it is a million times harder for kids. This is the really boring stuff and not easy to hold their attention while completing. Because of their short attention spans, we broke this into smaller sessions which made this one of the longest parts.
The first part they worked on was deciding what to call their business. This was an especially difficult process as they each had different ideas and would not consider each others. I finally stepped in and took a couple ideas from each boy and presented them one at a time. This eventually led to combining a couple ideas into one, "B-Brothers". This worked since each boy's name starts with a "B".
Once they had a name, they felt like they had a group identity and we constantly referred to the endeavor by the company name to build on this.
Now that they felt like a team, we started talking about what roles each person would play. The main one they had to decide on was the treasurer because this would be the money person. That was an easy call for the oldest brother since he was the only one at that time that could add large amounts of money. I had him start a new spiral notebook to track everything moving forward. He built small tables on different pages using a pen and a ruler - nothing complicated just a few columns. He used these tables to track their initial purchase list with costs. He would later use this to track each day's earnings with who worked that day for an even split. He also developed a rudimentary balance sheet in the notebook.
After we had decided on the company name and roles, we started working on some basic marketing concepts. These included defining their product, logo, company image, and location to sell. The boys began to think about what would set their product apart or make people want to pay a premium for it. They toyed with the idea of going organic but decided against it. This is covered in detail in the recipe section. After a lot of discussion they decided that they/themselves would be the differentiator for their product. The decided to put together a cool looking table and to all wear the same yellow golf shirts. They also agreed that the younger boys were very cute and would attract customers with their smiles.
For more details on the table they designed and built (with dad's help) please see the "Recent Shots" section on the family website. I have posted the actual design of their lemonade stand table and banner.