Busn 115 - Lemonade Stand Informal Business Report

Lemonade Stand Informal Business Report

Nicholas Hayes

DeVry University

BUSN115 Introduction to Business and Technology

Professor Towers

Lemonade Stand Informal Business Report

INTRODUCTION

When life gives you Lemons! We are a fantastic local company that sells quality lemonade at a very fair price. We take pride in keeping our business local and demonstrating some of the best CSR in our community. We are self-motivated and a goal orientated company.

BRANDING STRATEGY

When it comes to branding we at When life gives you Lemons! are going with a Market Penetration strategy. We are firm believers in our product and do not feel that we need to alter, changer or add more products to enhance our business and sales. We provide a top of the line lemonade at a fair price and it seems to have the community quite happy. We are however going to push harder to sell more of our same lemonade and really penetrate the market. According to Foundation (2015) Growing the business by penetrating its market more thoroughly is typically the first step a business takes to grow. We stand firm behind our product and plan to execute Market penetration to a tee.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR NEW LOCATIONS

We have been very successful at our current location within the community but we are wanting to open up a new lemonade stand on the other side of town. We want to maximize exposure to our product and feel that we could increase sales if we have two easily accessable locations for customers to indulge in our mouthwatering lemonade. According to Smith (2015) Your business's location is key to successful operations and overall growth. This is exacly why we feel at When life gives you Lemons! that we should expand and open another lemonade stand.

PROMOTION PLANS

We currently are preparing a $10,000 budget for promotion. We want to take a direct marketing approach to get our product out to the public. We plan on sending out emails and letters to make our product visible to everyone within the community. We'll also use business cards aided with word of mouth to really get business booming. We plan to allocate $8,000 in letters and emails with $2000 going towards business cards. According to the Direct Marketing Association (www.the-dma.org), a trade group of advertisers and marketing agencies, direct marketing efforts, on average, yield twice the return on investment of other marketing efforts.

EMPLOYEE TRAINING

Due to so much success within the business and the expansion of another lemonade stand I had to hire more employees for my company. Sadly enough sales have dropped off some. I used a Theory Y approach and hired employees that seemed self-motivated and driven to succeed but it seems that strategy fell a little short. I'm going with a new strategy to give away a free Samsung Tablet for the best employee every month. So I'm starting an incentive program. This strategy was started last week and I can already see the difference it's making. Customers seem happier and employees seem a bit more excited to be working. According to McQuerrey (2015) Incentive plans were created for the express purpose of urging employees to motivate themselves to higher achievement levels. This is exactly what I'm doing at When life gives you Lemons. Implimenting incentives to increase company morale and production.