Young Entrepreneurs Learn The Art Of The Sale

On a recent sun-drenched morning, Nyla Shepard, a ninth grader at Eli Whitney Tech, approached a white Honda on the corner of Legion and Sherman Avenues, a bottle of lemonade in each hand. The driver shook her head, then redirected her eyes at the road. 

“People are gonna do that,” she said, as the light turned green. ​“You just gotta get used to it.”

Nyla is among the 11 participants in the Gorilla Lemonade youth ambassadors program that started in early July. Its mission, according to Kristen Threatt, co-founder of Gorilla Lemonade, the local beverage supplier with the motto ​“community over competition”: ​“teaching our younger generation, through instruction and practical experience, that if you do the work, and do it right, you’ll get rewarded.”

The program, which currently has no tuition requirement, begins at 8:30 a.m. each weekday at its headquarters outside Threatt’s residence on Greenwood Street with stretching, calisthenics, and jogging, followed by prayer.

Then Threatt, who formerly ranked #7 in sales nationally at Frontier Communications, shares lessons on financial literacy, including setting financial goals, book-keeping, and investing; on how to make an effective sales pitch, on how to deal with and keep customers. 

“I teach them to maximize their ability to reach people through sales with a smile and the fact that they’re kids,” Threatt said, smiling himself. ​“But it’s serious too, because we’re asking them to treat the product they’re selling like it’s their own franchise and that’s how they learn the hustle and grind of business.” 

Then it’s sales time. The group packs the coolers with bottles — they get bags of ice from a nearby bodega — and wheels them to the intersection of Legion and Sherman. ​“The first case was given to them at the beginning, those 24 bottles are their start-up capital, and every case after that they invest in themselves to make a profit,” Threatt said. 

Each bottle costs $3. Customers can get two for $5.

“Everyone loves the two-for-$5 deal,” said Michael ​“M.J.” Smith, a fifth grader at Ross-Woodward School, counting the bills from a sale as cars trundled past along Sherman Avenue. He, like all the ambassadors, records each day’s profits and expenses in a notebook. ​“Kris says we’ll love math, now that we can apply it in the real world,” he said.

“Kris has taught me to be more disciplined with my time, and to think with my head and not with my emotions, and not let the no’s get to me,” said Tradiq Scurry, a sophomore at Hillhouse, relaxing on the steps of Threatt’s house as he finished his lunch — it’s provided by the Eat Up Foundation—beside the empty coolers. ​“He’s putting us all on the right path.” 

“Tradiq showed up one day and asked, ​‘Can I be on the team?’” Threatt recalled, as some of the kids tossed a football under the Greenwood oaks, among the after-lunch activities. ​“I told him, ​‘as long as you show leadership.’ Right away I could tell he was a leader.”

Each ambassador, he said, has a gift. M.J., for example, ​“has that hustle and Tae [Cunningham], he’s good at anything he puts his mind to,” he said. The idea ​“is to give each young person permission to be themselves, to be their best selves.”

Just then, Gorilla Lemonade co-founder Brian Burkett-Thompson stopped by on his way to work. ​“Having access to people who can show the hard work it takes to be successful makes a huge difference in someone’s life, especially when there’s not a lot of role models,” he said. ​“Plus there’s nothing like the feeling you get, that self-esteem, with having a job and earning money.”

“Right?” he asked Shepard, who had just thrown a perfect spiral to Cunningham.

She nodded, a grin lighting her face.