Hey there, here's a quick demo of the Lemonade Stand business simulation that is part of GoVenture Entrepreneur. Entrepreneur has three levels of businesses: it starts at a lemonade stand, you can level up to a Kiosk and then you can level up further to a Full Business. This is a quick demo of the lemonade stand component. Lemonade Stand is a really great introductory level simulation. You can play it for a little bit of time, or a lot of time. It's also a really great tutorial for students who are going to progress beyond the lemonade stand to kiosk and full business. So you can play Lemonade Stand for a few several hours if you like, or you can do it as a tutorial before you progress to the other businesses. So let's go ahead and start this now, and the first step is to walk through a tutorial that explains to us how to set up our business, so we provide it with $100 to start the business then we can name our business. We'll call it Lemonzzz, choose a logo and then we can view our smartphone that gives us the current day.
So the simulation runs daily, using simulated days, and one simulated day takes about one or two minutes to play, and the amount of cash we have in our sales and so on. Let's continue! Our menu gives us access to a variety of options. We can review our consumer profile, so this is our neighborhood where we're going to sell our lemonade and the cool thing is as we become successful we can actually set up in different parts of the neighborhood and have multiple lemonade stands at the same time. But initially, we have to choose a location and there's different customer psychographics in each location. I'm going to stay in Peachtree for now because that's where we're going to start off. Alright, let's keep going here! We're going to choose a design for a lemonade stand, let's choose that one. Alright, that cost us $50 so we can see our cash is now down to $50 from the $100 we started with, and it's telling us we have to make and sell lemonade. Lemonade is made with water, lemons, sugar, and cups and we mix it all together. We can buy these ingredients at the grocery store, so here's a little grocery store map icon. We can go to the grocery store by clicking it and then we can buy a certain amount. Now it's telling us to start with 20 of each, so let's go ahead and buy 20 of each and notice there's an actual discount based on volume...but we're going to start with 20. It's going to cost us $17 and we have $50. So we have enough money to pay for this so let's go ahead and buy that. Alright, so we've got our inventory, we're down to $33 in cash, let's continue. This is our inventory table, which shows us the quantity of inventory that we have, then we can go to the recipe, and this is where we set the quality of our lemonade and you can notice we can choose Sour and Watery or Sweet and Lemony or even something in between. So, sour and watery is not going to be favored by our customers, but it's least expensive to make so I can actually hold a lower price, whereas sweet and lemony is more delicious for our custoemrs but costs me a lot more to make. So what it's telling us here is to actually set it somewhere in the middle at $1.20. So there's our cost of goods. It's actually calculating the cost of this recipe at $1.20 per cup so this signals me that I have to sell this for more than a $1.20 per cup. Let's go ahead and click that so there's our recipe. It's set you'll see the little number one because that designates our lemonade stand that we just created, and the other two we create will have a two and three above them as well, designating the order in which they're made.
It's telling us to set our price at $2, so let's go ahead and do that so that'll make sure we make some money becasue that's more than our Cost of Goods (CoGs). Alright so when we're going to open our business in a moment, we have to click this + button to mix the lemonade so every time we want to make lemonade we actually have to click the + button to mix it. Now that won't happen in the more advanced simulations, when we move up to Kiosk and Full Business there's going to be too much going on so we won't have to click anything later to make our products. This keeps it a bit more engaging and fun in Lemonade Stand. Alright, so let's go ahead and open for business. We're not ready, we've got our inventory we've got our price, we got our recipe let's go ahead and quickly mix our lemonade so we don't miss out on any sales.
We can hear some dings and that's the customers buying our lemonade and I'm not serving them fast enough, I gotta speed up. You'll notice the little icons floating above our lemonade stand, that's our customer feedback. You can see faces representing whether a customer is happy or unhappy or somewhere in between, and also the little icons that represent how they feel about specific aspects of our business like our price of our quality, or our speed of serivce. Now, I've actually run out of inventory. You can see I'm actually at 0 lemons and 0 sugar, so I can't make anymore to sell. I've just learned a valuable lesson, which is to make sure I have enough inventory but here's the interesting thing. I don't want to buy too much inventory because I may not have enough cash to buy more inventory but there's also damage and spoilage so you can see that some of our water has actually spoiled or gotten spilled, and if I had too much inventory I might actually get a higher spoilage so I've got to figure out a balance between ordering and forecasting how much inventory I should buy and not buy too much or too little.
So at the end of the day I can see I served 10 customers and lost 14. So I've actually lost more customers than I served because I ran out of ingredients. I sold 10 cups at $2 a cup, which means $20 in sales revenue. Cost of Goods was $12, so my gross profit is $8 and my gross profit margin is 40%. Now, don't worry if students don't understand these terms because we actually have built in microlearning modules that teaches those terms and even just by playing even without the microlearning just by playing this experience students will start to understand what that is. But that's a great thing about GoVenture Entrepreneur, it has built-in learning modules that teach you everything that students would need to know while they're actually running business.
Alright so that's the end of our first day in business, we made something, people gave us money for it, and it's pretty exciting. There's a summary of our results and now we're going to be on our own now, so the tutorial is completed and now we can continue playing the simulation.
For example we can go back to the grocery store to buy some more inventory, we can experiment by changing our pricing or changing our recipe and see how that affects our CoGs and as we progress and become more successful and get enough profit/cash we'll be able to start a second lemonade stand, and eventually a third lemonade stand in different parts of the city. We'll actually have to hire employees to man those lemonade stands because we can't be in two places at once, so we'll actually have to hire people to do that and then pay them and that'll come out of our profits, and of course we have to learn how to balance all our costs and expenses in doing so.
We also have the weather, because weather affects the traffic in the city and the buying habits of our customers so you can use the weather for forecasting the future weather events. We have access to a menu system which allows us to change a variety of settings. If you're using the online version of this program, it automatically saves online. If you're using the local version it saves to your local hard drive. This game saves at the end of every simulated day that you play. We also have a detailed report which is called the performance report, which is available to the instructor that gives a breakdown of everything that we've done including a skill score based on various metrics. Now there's only two metrics measured in the skill score for Lemonade Stand: Sales Revenue and Profit, but with the more advanced simulations we actually have much deeper metrics being assessed and analyzed, then we also have the microlearning modules which you can launch from the menu. There are over 140 microlearning modules, which consist of videos and quizzes. They are all based on different topics in business, from the basics of business to more advanced currency and accounting concepts. That's all available in here, and students can click on any one of these, and you as the instructor can decide which modules you want to make available to your students and then they can click through, watch a video of the particular topic and all of the videos are really short, only about a minutes or two and then you'll do a small quiz and then get a rating of either 1 star or 2 stars depending on how well you did on the quiz. Every module is rated and your overall score is provided as well. So in addition to playing the simulation and the performance in the simulation you also have access to the microlearning modules. So there you have it! That is Lemonade Stand. You can play this for several hours and continue to engage in the experience or you can play it for a short period of time and then level up to Kiosk and then eventually to the Full Business. Hope you enjoyed this demo!
Comments