Entrepreneurs – born or bred?

Our oldest two daughters, Allie and Julianna, are already displaying signs of being little entrepreneurs. The neighbors across the street donated the lemonade stand they built for their kids years ago, and on day one they were peddling lemonade at the edge of the driveway.

I think they had somewhat of a monopoly, as there were no other lemonade stands in the entire neighborhood that day, so even though lemonade was $1.00 a cup (an extra shot of sugar was $0.25) the locals were a-clamorin’. On a day where there is another group of kids down the block setting up a stand the price might drop to $0.75 as market forces take over, with three or more groups service and flavor are the determining factor.

If you enlarge the picture, you can see Allie’s look is one of “I have all this inventory that’s getting warmer by the second and there are no customers”, while Julianna is just content to kick her feet up and wait.

We won’t let them into the street to attract customers, but they can hold a sign at the edge of the driveway. They are quite the persuasive little salespeople, which likely comes from Jera’s days selling online advertising. She worked out of the office in our house and balanced watching kids at times, so they got to hear her on the phone with General Motors or Ford.

I do wonder how much of the entrepreneurial personality is with us at birth. Both of us have somewhat of a problem with authority, which means we are going to do much better when the vision is ours rather than our boss’s, or his/her boss’s vision. We are also risk-takers, and we’ll throw caution to the wind if there is something we believe in. We were never content to work for someone else’s dream, and we were willing to forsake the relatively secure corporate environment (“my company will take care of me”) for the possibility of being able to make our own decisions, even if that meant financially we would have less short-term security.

Finally, we both come from a sales background, and we are used to overcoming objections on the fly. This comes in handy when dealing with the rejection that comes with selling a product, and we’ve been turned down more times than I care to count.

I see many similar traits in our kids. We try to foster the spirit without overwhelming them by encouraging selling things, even at their young ages. I used to hate going door-to-door selling candy bars for little league, but my daughters look for things around the house they can sell, and then they want to walk around the neighborhood selling them.
We have to rein them in!

While motorists along our street can drive on by, the family pushing strollers down the sidewalk is low-hanging fruit for these two, like shooting fish in a barrel. The girls are counting their greenbacks before the family is even within shouting distance!

We talk about charity and saving as things you do first before you spend. I think they get the philanthropy. In fact, Allie had saved $63.00 and gave every penny of it away to her school for a fund raiser without even telling us about it. Jera decided that since Allie was so giving she would buy her something she wanted that cost even more than what she had donated.

They have a tougher time understanding saving at this point, as immediately after counting up their tally from the day, they want to go spend it all on Webkinz. They now have more Webkinz than they can possible keep fed, played with, and clean on Webkinz.com. In fact, I’m afraid if I logged in to their accounts it would look like one of those animal shelters that gets busted on Animal Planet. I hope there is no animal welfare department for cyber-pets, because Allie and Julianna would be facing serious charges!