Growth Club
1851 Growth Club
Catching the Entrepreneurial Spirit
What it means to be a small business owner and your own boss
Last summer, I was headed to a Cubs game on the 4th of July with my now husband and we came across a young girl, around 9 years old, operating a lemonade stand. At first glance, it seemed like an ordinary lemonade stand, but upon further inspection, I realized it was quite an operation. Even though we were late for the game and were going to have to fight for prime territory in the bleachers, I stopped and bought two cups from her. During this short interaction, I noticed that her lemonade stand was on wheels, and had an umbrella and built-in coolers, with several extra jugs stacked behind her and a pile of money in her cash box. I asked her how long she had been in the lemonade business and she said she had been at it for several years and that her dad, who was standing behind her, beaming, had helped her along the way. I then asked her what she wants to be when she grows up and she said, “I want to be my own boss,” which brought tears to my eyes. I said, “You already are,” put the remainder of my cash into her overflowing tip jar, wiped my eyes and headed to the game – but this interaction has stayed with me.
In a meeting last week, we were talking about entrepreneurship and it reminded me not only of this girl but also my own personal attempts at business ownership at a young age. My brother Matt and I had two businesses when we were kids – The Slime Club and The Boukas Detective Agency. The former entailed he and I working side by side in our bathroom, concocting experiments to create slime out of household products – lotion, shampoo and cotton balls were our main ingredients. We then sold these to unsuspecting neighborhood kids for $.50 a pop. While my brother and I were counting our riches (which was probably roughly $2.00), my parents were fielding calls from angry neighborhood parents, whose kids forked over their money to us for a Dixie cup filled with watery, soapy goo. We ended up having to give the money back and had to close our operations shortly thereafter, but we were undeterred.
When science didn’t provide the lucrative business opportunity we craved, we opened up The Boukas Detective Agency with big dreams of finding lost dogs, solving mysteries and catching bad guys. After spending a long and hot afternoon going door to door in the neighborhood trying to drum up business, my mom, who probably felt bad about the whole Slime Club debacle, was our first – and only – client. She had lost a piece of jewelry that her parents had given her and put us on the case. About five minutes later, we found it in her bedroom, solved the case and quickly determined that it would be our last day as detectives.
Obviously our two “businesses” are hilarious and ridiculous, but I’m also proud that even though they were short-lived, my brother and I had the drive to put ourselves out there to try to earn a few dollars at such a young age.
Stories about entrepreneurship – of a far greater caliber than my own personal journey – cross our desks every day at No Limit Agency*. We love hearing about the stories behind our franchise clients – whether it’s a husband/wife team that was burnt out from corporate marketing gigs and scraped together enough money to open a pizza franchise to the founder of jewelry and watch repair franchise Fast Fix who sold the business several years ago and missed it so much that he came back to join the franchise sales team – these are the stories that fuel our day-to-day work. Telling these stories to the media is what No Limit Agency does best – painting a picture of the person behind a brand and how they got to a place in their lives where they are their own boss.
I can only hope that in a few years, we’ll be lucky enough to be pitching stories about a lemonade stand franchise with a female CEO that started its operations as a one-girl-shop outside of Wrigley Field.
*This brand is a paid partner of 1851 Franchise. For more information on paid partnerships please click here.
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