Today you’ll ask kids to put on their thinking caps—or hairnets—and step into the shoes of a concession stand worker or ice cream shop owner.
For Day 17 of Financial Literacy Month, we’re taking a page from the FUTURES: Financially Literate Kids for a Financially Literate Society™ program and offering three fun and engaging, right-sized scenarios for your budding young entrepreneurs. Kids are often hungry for and with a sweet tooth for success.
A big part of financial literacy success starts with discovering your drive to accomplish a positive result—a great lesson and reminder for all of us. Success starts with an understanding, increased awareness, and of course, enough self-confidence to take a smart business risk—then the real work begins. By helping kids to think like future business owners, these business concepts and strategies will become more familiar to them.
Share the following prompts and tools with your kids and students to spark and tap into their potential entrepreneurial flair. In a family setting, share all three ideas and let the family choose one scenario to do together. In a class setting, break up into small groups and present the solutions, asking the other kids to serve as advisors.
Scenario 1: Concession Stand
Ask kids to create and figure out how they’d run a snack concession stand at school during basketball or football games. Customers will pay for snacks, but ask kids how they’ll decide what to charge, where they’ll get the snacks to sell, what kinds of supplies they’d need, and how much they’ll need to pay the people who work at the concession stand. Use the PDFs as worksheets to prompt the discussion.
What are some other expenses that might flow from this business?
What needs to happen for the concession stand to stay in operation?
What relationship should exist between revenue (the money coming in) and expenses (the money going on) for the business to succeed?
Scenario 2: Bake Shop
In this scenario, your “sweet-toothed” future entrepreneurs will open up a bake shop in your neighborhood called Flo’s Funnels, serving—what else? Funnel cakes, of course. Do some quick research with your kids to confirm the ingredients list for funnel cakes. To make the funnel cakes, Flo must buy flour, oil, and powdered sugar. Tell kids to create a shopping list with approximate prices to help Flo build her budget. Then talk about those famous words: location, location, location to delve into entrepreneurial topics like paying rent and employees’ wages, or earnings.
What will Flo need in order to hire people to make the funnel cakes? What’s her payroll expense?
Does she sell enough cakes to pay the rent, pay her staff, buy ingredients and keep her business going?
Once you and the kids explore these topics, add this dose of reality to the scenario: tell kids that recently it seems that not many people have been buying funnel cakes—it’s time to figure out why and what to do in order to help Flo stay in business. What would your kids advise Flo to do to turn her business around?
Predict whether or not Flo’s will stay in business.
If you were in charge, what could you do to keep Flo business running?
Scenario 3: Ice Cream Shop
Present this final scenario to your kids:
After looking at both the concession stand and Flo’s Funnels, it’s time to tackle a business of your very own. You own and run your very own ice cream shop. Let’s assume you really know what you’re doing and your business is going really well. One big thing to keep in mind as an entrepreneur and business owner is that things can change very quickly in business. Entrepreneurs have to anticipate surprises and react in smart, thoughtful and strategic ways to business events. In this scenario, we’ll practice our entrepreneurial skills some surprising and “sticky” ice cream business scenarios. Predict how these each three events will affect your business, and how you would react to each one as the entrepreneur/owner of your ow ice cream shop:
The freezer breaks and all of your ice cream melts. What would you do?
Another ice cream shop opens in your town—just down the block. How would this change business? Is Competition good or bad?
You just signed a really big contract to provide daily ice cream every day at 11:15 to the local high school for lunch—and it starts next week. What do you need to do be ready?
Think Like an Entrepreneur
Finally, ask kids what other scenarios might affect their small ice cream shop business. Encourage them to dream up even outlandish possibilities. Explain to kids that by generating ideas of what might go wrong and what to do, entrepreneurs can be better prepared when things do go wrong, which they will. Be sure to work through solutions for each scenario to help kids see that most business issues are fable to be fixed. This extension discussion is designed to help kids understand that some scenarios can be controlled and other events are beyond our control. It’s also important to tell kids that as an entrepreneur, you do NOT have to be able to DO it all; but you DO have to be the one who is willing to decide what should be done—and when. That’s the real cherry on top!
Keep in mind that the ice cream shop owner is probably not able to jump in and fix the broken freezer personally. That’s ok. In fact, that’s really not the entrepreneur’s job. Here’s what is: knowing that the next step is to call experts, get estimates, and hire an expert to fix the freezer quickly and correctly. That IS the entrepreneur’s job. It’s also important to think beyond the obvious: a smart, social entrepreneur thinks ahead to take all those the banana split bananas that will rot before the freezer is fixed right down to the local food pantry to help provide a nutritious donation to help others.
As an entrepreneur, what factors can you control?
What choices can you make to run a successful business?
What would you do next?
Who could help you?
How can you turn a negative into a positive?
What would you learn for next time?
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Tune in tomorrow as we continue Financial Literacy Month with an overview of the Entrepreneurship stand of the FUTURES™ program.
For more information about FUTURES: Financially Literate Kids for a Financially Literate Society™ for students in kindergarten through eighth grade or to download any of the 29 sections of the program, please click below.