Strategies: Lessons from summer's lemonade stands

— -- Ah Summer! My favorite time of year: long days, warm nights, millions of budding entrepreneurs opening their first businesses – lemonade stands. There's a lot to learn from these first enterprises, as strategies for running a successful lemonade stand are much the same as those for any business.

If your child – or you – are planning on running a lemonade stand this summer, here are some of the necessary ingredients (in addition to lemons and water) for creating a successful business in any field:

•Core competencies. Can you make lemonade? In other words, do you have the skills necessary to run the kind of business you're planning? There are many types of businesses we'd like to run, but we need the right talents and traits. If not, who will you have to hire or partner with? If you're only five years old, you might need to 'employ' Mom.

•Sales Skills. It's not enough to make lemonade – no matter how good you are. You've got to be able to talk to customers, and collect their payment. A lot of people go into business with specific industry skills, but as soon as it comes to selling, they become tongue-tied.

•Competitive Analysis. Is your neighborhood already cluttered with lemonade stands? If so, how are you going to capture enough customers to make money? Realistically looking at your competition is a critical early step in developing a company. You'll have to find some way to be different (raspberry lemonade?).

•Competitive Advantages. For most lemonade stands, the key strategy is for the entrepreneur to be cute. Everyone's a sucker for an adorable child with a hand-painted sign. Most of us in business need other ways to compete besides just being cute. Identify your unique competitive advantage and highlight that in your marketing and everything else you do.

•Strategic Positioning. Think location, location, location. Being in a quiet residential neighborhood is going to limit lemonade sales but being in the middle of a highway will get you run over. Every business – whether retail or service – needs to target a clearly-identifiable segment of a market, one that's big enough to sustain your income, but not so large you're unable to compete.