The Lemonade Stand

The Lemonade Stand: What Every Entrepreneur Should Know to Succeed in Starting and Running Any Business by Ara Bagdasarian and Nick Gustavsson, 192 pages

This is the March Business Reads book, and focuses on entrepreneurs and starting small businesses. As in other business books, the authors offer up a list of principles for their "Lemonade Stand" method; what makes this one different is that Bagdasarian and Gustavsson have some fairly unorthodox principles, including forgetting about a business plan and investors, and not setting out to compete. When they explain themselves, these actually make sense, especially for someone with a small business in mind (they often use the example of someone starting a lawn-care business or car wash). There's also a LOT of emphasis on optimism and learning from problems, which are probably pretty good ideals for everyone, not just entrepreneurs.

What I didn't particularly like about this book was the fact that they pushed the "lemons into lemonade" analogy a little too hard; it got annoying pretty quickly. It's not a bad metaphor to use, but it gets old quickly. I wish they'd introduced the idea at the beginning and maybe touched on it again toward the end rather than referring to problems as "lemons that must be squeezed" on nearly every page of the book.

On the whole, however, this was an easy-to-read book with some good ideas. Anyone thinking of starting a business would probably appreciate some of what the authors are trying to say.