New Venture Lab: Equipping Christian Entrepreneurs

An opportunity arose several years ago to teach a very young Julia and Maria (my two oldest daughters) when my in-laws announced a large garage sale at their nearby upscale home. My creative wife kicked into high gear with a project to teach our daughters an entrepreneurial lesson by selling breakfast to the early morning crowd of bargain hunters.

The first lesson was to help them forecast the potential demand for various breakfast items. The next lesson was to have them put their own personal capital at risk for the raw materials. Then there were production lessons of preparing the products and logistics lessons in transporting and vending the finished goods, both hot and cold. 

The marketing lessons included the strategic placement of their display and their pricing menu. And of course there was the sales and customer service aspect. To my amazement, they were very persistent little saleswomen. One time I had to wave off eight year-old Julia as she doggedly followed a woman around the garage with multiple offers. Later, as the woman was walking back to her car past the girls’ stand, she finally broke down and bought a coffee for the road, crystallizing a lesson in persistence and placement.

As the garage sale wound down, the girls marked down their menu in an effort to exhaust their highly-perishable inventory of coffee and donuts. They learned about disposing of obsolete inventory when they bartered with me to buy their unsold juice and their financial lessons included calculating unit margins, breakeven, and accounting for their revenue and expenses.

Finally, as we tore into the leftover donuts, we determined that they had made enough money to buy one baby doll each, but what mattered most were the lessons they were learning about being entrepreneurs.

By now – several years later – the girls are veterans and helping to train their younger sisters. Everything they do is now completely upgraded: better signage and product line proliferation with more package deals like coffee and donuts or a breakfast sandwich and juice. When we participated in a large recent neighborhood garage sale and dumped many of our old items, the haul for the girls on food and beverage sales alone was $300+. Not bad for simply serving the unmet needs of hungry and thirsty garage sale browsers.