Lemonade Day Project

Lemonade Day Project

Chassidy Lindsey

 

Lemonade Day is a fun, experiential program that teaches youth in K-5th grade the math, business and financial skills needed to start, own and operate their very own business - a lemonade stand. Kids create a business plan, set a budget and financial goals, and calculate expenses, sales, profit and more!

Children experience the feeling of earning real money, using 100% of their profit to spend, save and share based on their own goals. “Lemonadeday.org”

I have managed to get students through Quest who will volunteer and help with us starting our own Lemonade Day. We also have a sponsor who will be donating us our Lemonade stand and also $50 to get all the supplies we need to make this Lemonade Day a huge success. We will be hosting our Lemonade Day at Sunset Park on Saturday from 9am until like 4pm rotating the kids out to give them a break. We decided that with the money we make we will donate it to a Charity to help the misfortune. I acquired a few quotes from the book:

 

What Is a Business Plan?

By the time you complete this book, you will have written a business plan that you can use to design, start, and operate your own venture. A business plan is a document that thoroughly explains a business idea and how it will be carried out. The plan should include the following:

business plan

a document that thoroughly explains a business idea and how it will be carried out.

• the story of what the business is and will be,
• all costs and a marketing plan,
• description of how the business will be financed, and
• an estimate of projected earnings.(Pg45)

The Business Plan Is an Operations Guide

Whether or not you need to raise capital, a business plan will be a vital tool for guiding the internal operations of your enterprise. Business owners and managers increase the probability of success by taking the plan in their heads and committing it to paper. The transition may be bumpy, because the process of writing a coherent plan will require answering difficult questions. However, in addition to guiding you as the entrepreneur, developing the plan will generate an increased clarity of vision, mission, and goals for your entire team. With your business plan as your benchmarking tool, you can compare your company’s progress to your stated plan. You can also use the business plan as a point of reference when it seems you are going off track or becoming distracted from your goals. The presence of financial and operational goals and measures, as well as mission and vision statements, can feed a drive for success and motivate a team to excellence.

Marketing Strategy and Plan: Reaching Customers

A description of how you will reach your customers and your anticipated sales volume brings the opportunity and research discussion to the bottom line of sales. Your marketing mix will be the combination of the four factors (the “Four Ps”) that form your competitive advantage—also known as core competency—product, price, promotion, and place. As you choose the elements of your marketing plan , always keep your vision in mind. What benefit is your product or service providing to customers?

Funding Request and Exit Strategy: The Ask and the Return

Your business plan should explicitly state the amount of funds you will need in accordance with the financial projections you provide. Whether the need is $500 or $50 million, the reasoning for the request will have to be clear and compelling. Then you should identify the type of financing you require or are requesting and include your own financial contribution and that of any partners or co-owners, the amount of debt (loans) you will need to take on, and the percentage of equity (ownership) you want to retain. This is where you state the financing terms you would like, including rates and repayment periods. Recognize that this is part of a negotiation process and that the request should be carefully structured. If you intend to sell shares of stock in a corporation or are forming a business partnership, legal counsel will be essential so that you do not violate federal regulations and laws or create an improper agreement. The importance of your “ask” cannot be overemphasized. Business plan readers need to know what you want.

 

Your Company’s Mission Is to Satisfy Customers

The mission of your business, expressed in a mission statement, is a concise communication of your purpose, business definition, and values. The function of a mission statement is to clarify what the business is trying to do in the present, but it can provide direction and motivation for future action through a clear and compelling message.

As noted in Chapter 2, a well-crafted mission statement will not only tell your customers and employees what your business is about, but can (and should) be a guide for every decision you make. It should capture your passion for the business and your commitment to satisfying your customers. A mission statement should be limited to 21 to 40 words to induce clarity in concept and expression. The mission statement should address the following topics: target customers; products and services; markets served; use of technology; importance of public issues and employees; and focus on survival, profitability, and growth.

Your Company’s Vision Is the Broader Perspective

The vision for your business is broader and more comprehensive than its mission, painting a picture of the overall view of what you want your organization to become in the future, not what it is at the moment. It is built on the core values of the organization. It should energize your people, and they should embrace it with enthusiasm and passion. This means the vision has to be compelling across the organization. It has to matter. Employees need to be empowered to fulfill the vision. Examples of vision statements for various organizations appear in Exhibit 3-3

 

 The Six Factors of Competitive Advantage

Competitive advantage comes from one (or a combination) of six factors:

1.    Quality. Can you provide higher quality than competing businesses?

2.    Price. Can you offer a lower price on a sustained basis than your competition, or does your higher price reflect quality and/or uniqueness?

3.    Location. Can you find a more convenient location for customers?

4.    Selection. Can you provide a wider range of choices than your competitors can?

5.    Service. Can you provide better, more personalized customer service?

6.    Speed/turnaround. Can you deliver your product/service more quickly than the competition?

The importance of each factor will depend on the wants and needs of target customers. More isn’t always better, if customers aren’t interested.

Checking Out the Competition

One useful exercise is to learn everything you can about particular competitors, especially those that have earned the respect of the marketplace. Try to identify the sources of their competitive advantage. Examine their Web sites. Conduct Internet searches. Track their advertising and promotion, including print, broadcast, Internet, and sponsorships. If they are retailers, shop their stores or have your friends and family do so. Get to know them (but do not do anything unethical or illegal to obtain information). You will also need to keep an eye on your competition after you have started your business, because new factors might undermine your competitive advantage.

Today’s entrepreneurs, even those starting microenterprises and lifestyle businesses, may face competition from far beyond their neighborhoods, because customers can go shopping on the Web. Optimism is a trait that frequently goes with entrepreneurship, so beginning entrepreneurs tend to get excited about the Web’s huge customer base. What they often do not consider is that the competition is already selling to their potential customers through the Web. Therefore, get online and conduct a thorough search of your industry. You may find that there is literally a world of opportunity or, conversely, that the world is full of competitors.

To determine whether you have a competitive advantage that will enable you to outperform your closest and strongest competitors, ask these questions:

unique selling proposition (USP)

the distinctive feature and benefit that set a company apart from its competition.

• Competitive offers. How does your offer compare with those of your leading competitors? What are the key features of each?
• Unique selling proposition. Based on that comparison, what is your unique selling proposition (USP) , the distinctive feature and benefit that sets you apart from your competition? This will require a comparison of offers and identifying what is unique about yours. What is it about your offer that your competitors cannot or will not match?
• Cost structure. What is different about your business activities and the cost of doing business, compared to the competition? Overall, are you at a cost advantage or disadvantage?
   

Marketing is the development and use of strategies for getting a product or service to customers and generating interest in it. Marketing is the business function that identifies customers and their needs and wants. Through marketing, the name of your business will become a brand and come to mean something clear and concrete in the customer’s mind. A brand identifies distinctively the goods or services of one organization from others through a design, symbol, name, term, or other distinguishing features.

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Research Your Market Before You Open Your Business

Large corporations spend a great deal of money on marketing and marketing research before they introduce a product or service. They need to get it just right. Take a lesson from the big companies: research your market. Introduce your product to potential customers. Be open to honest criticism. It is not always pleasant to hear, but it can be valuable. Criticism can help you fine-tune your business. Use the information you receive to create a product or service that meets the needs of your customers.

Today, there is an added focus on getting products and services to customers earlier in the development process, to get their feedback sooner and bring in revenues more rapidly. The leading information on lean launches is from Eric Ries in his 2011 book, The Lean Startup , as noted in ­Chapter  3 . The Lean Launch Pad and other “lean” start-up methods involve the research methods described here with accelerated and iterative primary research. For additional information, visit Steve Blank’s Web site at http://steveblank.com, which offers considerable information about the process and “minimum viable products,” or see The Startup Owner’s Manual, by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf. This is frequently paired with the Business Model Canvas described in Chapter 2.

 

Customer Research

You will want to find out everything you can about your ideal customers. What do those individuals eat, drink, listen to, and watch on TV? How much do they sleep? Where do they shop? What movies do they like? How much do they earn? How much do they spend? If they are businesses, questions may revolve around their products, employees, or customers.

A large corporation might hire a consulting firm or advertising agency to conduct marketing research or may have its own marketing division. Small business owners can and should conduct research, too. This can vary from a simple survey that can be carried out in a day to detailed statistical studies of a large population.

Several of the methods described previously are well suited to learning about your prospective customers. If you already have a customer base, you should be learning from it, too. A few examples follow.

• Surveys. Well-designed marketing surveys ask people directly, in interviews or through questionnaires, what they would think about a product or service if it were available. Your marketing survey should ask about
• product or service use and frequency of purchase;
• places where the product is purchased (the competition!) and why consumers like to purchase from these businesses; and
• business names, logos, letterheads—everything that will represent your business in a customer’s or potential customer’s mind.

Make sure your marketing surveys also gather specific information about customers that will help you understand them better. They should include

• interests and hobbies,
• reading, television-watching, Internet, and social-media habits,
• educational background,
• age,
• occupation,
• annual household income,
• gender, and

 

 

 

 

Developing a Marketing Plan

After you understand how customer-focused marketing should permeate your business, you will be ready to develop a plan for introducing your product to your market. The marketing plan can serve as a stand-alone document or be part of an overall business plan. Either way, it should be a functioning, evolving part of your business. We began with customer analysis because before you can develop a marketing vision, you will need to know who your customers are and what they want.

• Q: Why does a customer go to a hardware store to buy a drill?
• A: Because she needs to make a hole.

The hole is what the customer needs, not the drill. If the hole could be purchased at the store, the customer would not bother with the drill. If you are marketing drills, therefore, you should explain to the customer what good holes they make. If someone invents a better hole-maker, drill manufacturers will soon be out of business.

Your marketing plan must include an understanding of prospective customers and their wants, needs, and demands. It should also identify and analyze market segments. The plan should incorporate industry research and trend analysis. It will state your market-positioning approach. In short, a marketing plan looks at all aspects of the market space for your enterprise, from the broadest perspective to the narrowest.

education reform. Yet, when he was growing up in Hollis, Queens, in the 1960s and 1970s, Simmons never could have imagined that his life would have turned out like this.

Window of Opportunity

Early on, Simmons decided that he wanted to make his own way in the world. His father had been a teacher, and his mother worked as a recreation coordinator. Both enjoyed stable jobs, but Simmons was not driven by a need for security. He wanted to live a fast-paced life and call his own shots. In 1977, Simmons, who never liked school very much, enrolled at the City College of New York as a sociology major. That year, something happened that permanently changed the course of his life. He went to hear a rap artist named Eddie Cheeba perform and was amazed to see how the rapper had cast a spell over the audience with his freestyle rhymes. In Simmons’s own words:

Just like that, I saw how I could turn my life in another, better way. . . . All the street entrepreneurship I’d learned, I decided to put into promoting music.5

5 Russell Simmons, Life and Def: Sex, Drugs, Money + God, New York: Crown Publishing, 2002.

At that time, rap and hip-hop were underground musical styles, but Simmons set out to change this. He believed that rap music had the potential to reach a larger audience, and so he teamed up with another aspiring rap producer, Rick Rubin. Rubin had built a recording studio for rap artists in his New York University dorm room. Together, they decided to transform Rick’s studio into a viable record label. By 1985, Def Jam Records was officially underway.

Def Jam experienced its first surge of success when it scored a hit with Run DMC’s remake of the Aerosmith classic, “Walk This Way.” Bridging the worlds of rock and rap music turned out to be a stroke of genius. Simmons and Rubin single-handedly introduced a whole new market of mostly white, suburban, heavy-metal music fans to hip-hop. Suddenly, Run DMC was being featured on MTV, and rap was no longer an underground fad.

 

The Four Marketing Factors

Learning Objective 1

Combine the four Ps—product, price, place, and promotion—into a marketing mix.

The four Ps—product, price, place, and promotion —together will communicate your marketing vision and competitive advantage to your customer. If you tweak one P, you will have to pay attention to how it affects the others. If you raise your price, for example, are you now still selling the product in the right place? Or will you need to move to a location that will put you in contact with consumers willing to pay the higher price? Where will you promote your product now? Will you have to take out ads in different magazines or newspapers to reach these new consumers?

promotion

the use of advertising and publicity to get a marketing message to customers.

As you choose the elements of your marketing plan, always keep your vision in mind. What is the benefit your product or service in providing to customers?

• Product. The product or service should meet or create a customer need. The product is the entire bundle, including the packaging. Your customer might not be consciously aware of your packaging, but that does not mean it is unimportant. Starbucks revolutionized the American coffee shop in part by introducing Italian names for the different serving sizes.
• Price. A product has to be priced low enough so customers will buy it and high enough for the business to make a profit. Price should also reflect your marketing vision. If you are marketing a luxury item, a relatively low price might confuse the consumer, who will be led to wonder about its quality.
• Place. The location where you choose to market your product—whether in a retail storefront, in a customer’s home, on an online store, or from a cart on the street—must be where customers who will want or need it shop. Selling bathing suits on a beach in Alaska in February is not going to fill a customer need. Where should you go to bring your product or service to the attention of your market? If you are selling luxury items, you will need to place them in stores that are visited by consumers who can afford them.
• Promotion. Promotion is the development of the popularity and sales of a product or service through advertising, publicity, or other promotional devices, such as discount coupons or giveaways. Publicity is notice that is free; advertising is purchased. If a newspaper writes an article about your business, it is publicity. If you buy an ad in that newspaper, you are advertising.

 

 

 

Letter: Good Morning Ms. Lindsey,

 

This sounds like a great opportunity for the student here at Quest Preparatory Academy-Bridger Campus. Please let me know when there is a good time to discuss this further.

 

Regards,

 

Tiffany

 

 

 

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