The Sound Of Love

A police officer was passing by when he asked Omar, the boy Michael had hired to run the second stall for a three hour shift every afternoon after school, why he was loitering. Omar was also black, and the sight of a black boy on a street corner made the police officer suspicious. Omar tried to reason with the officer but when things started getting out of hand, he called Michael who immediately rushed to the aid of his employee. He tried telling the officer that they were running a lemonade stand on this and another street corner. The police officer was in a bad mood so he told them that they couldn’t do it, because they might be using the stand as a cover to sell drugs.

Michael told him to check both of them as well as their stands but when the police officer did not find anything he continued to have a problem. He told them that they couldn’t just randomly set up stalls, that they would have to get some kind of a permit in order to conduct business. He made Michael and Omar close up the stall and sent them home.

Michael was disheartened but not deterred. The very next day he had his father get a business license and a license to practice on the two street corners that Michael had set up his stalls on. He made his dad a partner in the business that he was running and set it up under his name.

And so, he was able to legally sell lemonade on the street corners and the police officer was defeated. It was the first of a great many victories that Michael was going to enjoy over the course of his life.

And so, Michael continued to expand his operation. However, he knew that he had to maximize his profits and continue to grow and thrive, and therefore he started to experiment with the recipe of the lemonade with his mother. He came up with quite a few delicious recipes and decided to start selling all of them, giving them clever names like “Citrus Storm” and “Berry Blast”.

These drinks ended up becoming quite popular indeed, so popular that Michael’s monthly income from the business increased to around fifteen hundred dollars per month. He was focusing entirely on the lemonade stands now, having quit his paper route after his first stand had started taking off. Out of these fifteen hundred dollars a month, Michael gave four hundred and fifty to his mother as her share of the business and two hundred and twenty five to his father as his share. He paid two hundred dollars to Omar as his salary for running the second stall. About two hundred dollars per month was spent on the various ingredients for the lemonade as well as repairing the stalls. Thus, after all of these expenditures, Michael was left with over four hundred dollars. A hundred dollars a week was four times the pocket money any of his classmates were getting, but Michael barely spent any of the money. He was saving up for yet another stall, and this time he was going to launch with a bang.

He knew that in order to help his business grow he would have to invest a bit more, which was why he decided to buy fancy cups to serve the drinks in. He realized that he would be earning slightly less per glass of lemonade but he predicted that his sales would rise so much that he would start earning a lot more money every month in total. He opened his third lemonade stand a month or so before his thirteenth birthday.

All of the progress that he had made had gotten a lot of people’s attention, and this got Michael the chance to go to a conference to speak with one of the most prominent businessmen in the city. He took advantage of this chance and asked the businessman what he would recommend that Michael do in order to make his business grow even more, because he was very ambitious indeed and wanted to make sure that his business had longevity.

The businessman suggested that Michael was on the right track with diversifying his product line and offering different flavors to people so that they could enjoy a variety of flavors instead of just the flavor of lemonade. However, he suggested that Michael think bigger. He suggested that Michael start thinking of what people like with lemonade and offer that to them as well.

He gave Michael a check for a thousand dollars and told him to keep working hard, and that someday he might find himself in the position to help a little boy invest in his business.

Michael used the thousand dollars well. He realized that if he offered something with the drinks at a discounted price it would drive sales up. Once again it would marginally decrease the amount of money that he would get per sale but since his total sales would be driven up, his monthly profits would increase a great deal.

He decided to take the risk and started offering a drink with a chocolate chip cookie for a dollar as a promotional offer. He offered this discounted deal at all three of his stalls and had a guitarist sit and play at each one to try and attract an even bigger crowd.

The deal was a huge success. Michael ended up getting over a hundred customers that day, the first time this had ever happened in his entire career. He took his parents, Omar and Stacy, the girl that managed the third stall, all out for pizza that night.

And so, Michael’s operations expanded. Halfway through his fourteenth year, he had started selling hot dogs and burgers as well which would be made hot and fresh right there. However, people were starting to complain about the fact that things were being cooked right there on the sidewalk, and were slightly annoyed by the smell. Hence, Michael had to do something, otherwise he would not be able to continue running his business.

He decided that he would do things. Firstly, he would hire a few more people. His total earnings from his business exceeded three thousand by now. He had given Omar and Stacy raises so they earned three hundred dollars apiece. About seven hundred was used to buy the sugar, lemons, hot dogs, buns and other ingredients. This left around two thousand, out of which his mother got six hundred and his father got three hundred leaving about eleven hundred every month for Michael. He paid himself five hundred dollars a month and saved six hundred.