Lemonade Stands and Long-Term Thinking

Written by James Murphy (opens in a new tab)

<h2>The seed</h2>Lemonade stands were some of my first business ventures. Growing up in Florida, I loved working with friends under the hot sun, making a few dollars that we'd bike down to 7-Eleven to spend on treats. Running my own stand was a starting place for me in understanding economic independence. I didn’t have to ask my parents for permission to purchase something — I made the money myself. Something about earning that freedom crystallized a motivation I’ve carried ever since. A key piece to LMNT's mission is to support people in reclaiming sovereignty over their health. That starts with questioning conventional wisdom when it doesn't serve you. It demands the courage to try something different.Those same principles apply to economic independence.When a child runs a lemonade stand, there are fundamental learnings in the process: I work, I earn, I gain choice. Running stands helps kids build neural pathways that connect effort to outcome, discovering they can influence their circumstances rather than simply react to them. They're experiencing what sovereignty can mean: the ability to govern your own decisions and start to wield your will in the world.Running a lemonade stand also requires courage to stand in public and offer something to strangers. I remember being mildly terrified at times — doing it with friends helped. We had to handle rejection when someone walked by without buying; practice social skills such as eye contact, clear communication, and gracious transaction; and navigate the unpredictability of weather, traffic, and human behavior with creativity.None of that happens behind a screen. And this is what we wanted to fuel: practical experiences that required self-reliance, purpose, and intentionality. We wanted to give kids — and the adults supporting them — permission and tools to build something real and tangible, together. <h2>The kit</h2>So, in tandem with launching Lemonade Salt in May 2025, we manufactured and shipped 1,000 fully-equipped lemonade stands to kids across the country. Each included a permanent table, branded cups, enough Lemonade Salt to get started, and an Entrepreneur Kit with business cards, a profit-and-loss ledger, and tips from my own experience running businesses.<h3>“Return on investment” </h3>

Kelly LeVeque with her family around an LMNT Lemonade Stand

Could we justify the ROI of this expense through a traditional marketing attribution model? Nope. If we evaluated this purely on short-term return on ad spend, it wouldn't clear the bar.But that's not how we think about building LMNT.We sell one of the oldest commoditized products in existence: salt. We don't claim a proprietary formula. We publish the recipe online and encourage people to make it at home. Some value of our business is held in how we operate, not just what we sell. Every customer interaction. Every piece of content. Every decision about what we stand for — and what we don't.Trust and relationships are enduring assets. Putting our core brand principles into action — empowering agency, autonomy, and the long-term development of the communities we serve — compounds over time in ways that aren’t immediately measurable.Extractive business models ask: How much can we get from this customer? How quickly can we convert attention into revenue? Generative models ask: How can we create conditions for people to thrive? What demonstrates our values in action?I’m really proud of this ongoing project. The lemonade stands are generative in multiple directions. For our team, they help connect our work to tangible purpose. For our customers, they enable meaningful experiences with their family and the folks in their neighborhoods. For the kids, they help show that effort translates to autonomy.

Kids posing next to LMNT's Lemonade Stand

<h2>The nominations</h2>Reading through thousands of nomination forms was a pretty meaningful experience.These weren't parents looking for free stuff. They were folks investing time and thought into articulating why a child in their life would benefit from the experience of building something. The quality of responses was striking. One nominator wrote about a young boy with cystic fibrosis who wanted to share what LMNT had done for his condition with his community through a lemonade stand. Another described their daughter's plan to raise money for the Cowboy Crisis Fund, supporting injured rodeo athletes while her parents volunteered as first responders.Then there was Mo, a 10-year-old who had already created the "Sour Face Challenge" with his brother — getting customers to suck on lemon wedges without making a face, raising money for childhood cancer research after watching a family friend lose his sense of taste during chemotherapy. Mo had used social media to invite an NFL player to his stand (and he showed up). The boys donated the proceeds to the athlete’s foundation.So many of the kids nominated wanted to build something meaningful. To contribute, solve a problem they cared about, and connect with their neighbors.<h2>The stories from letters we received </h2>Within weeks, letters and photos started arriving:

Raw unflavoredLMNT electrolyte stick, exploding with blue salts. Blog text in the background.

<h2>The long-term </h2>I plan to be in the CEO seat for a while (the next 30+ years). And I could sprinkle some strategic platitudes about why we did this, but a large motivation behind the initiative is that I find it fun and purposeful. Sometimes that’s enough of a reason. A saying we like here at LMNT is “built to serve, not to sell” — which applies both to how we don’t plan to sell the business, and how we approach selling and marketing our product. We’re here to serve folks’ metabolic health. Maybe someone who runs a stand comes and works for the company one day. Maybe they start their own business to support people on their owned path to health. I loved running lemonade stands and so I was able to build the entrepreneur kit with some tips and explanations that I wished I had back then. That’s also the intention of this section in our newsletter — I hope to share some ways of operating our business that other folks might take inspiration from when choosing how you operate yours. And I’ll bet a lot of you have some nuggets of wisdom in your toolkits as well that we could learn from. What’s your version of a lemonade stand? If you’ve got something to share, write me a letter at 1716 W Babcock St, Bozeman, MT 59715. I look forward to hearing from you.