Teaching Your Child to Harness the Power of Leverage Using a Lemonade Stand?
by Amanda van der Gulik

“Leverage? What’s that?”

Do you know what it means to leverage something? If you do then you’re very lucky and among a very small population of people who understand its true meaning. If you don’t, don’t worry. Most of us were never taught about leverage and how we can harness its power to make pretty much all of our dreams come true!

Okay, that’s a pretty bold statement to make. I’m not talking about Magic here either. I’m talking about using a special power, a tool if you will, that can take all the stress out of your life, give you more time with your family and allow you to receive the gift of acquiring more money with less effort so you can take advantage of that extra time you’ve created to really enjoy your life with your family to the fullest.

Have I got you interested yet? Would you like to know what leverage is and how you can use it…AND teach its incredible power to your child?

I know I was completely blown away when I finally ‘got’ what leverage was and how I could use it in my life, and then how to teach it to my own two children, Xanthe and Quinn, so they could start using it in their lives.

So what is leverage? In short, leverage is the ability to move or change something using another something to make it happen. Sound confusing? Let me show you an example:

Imagine you were walking down a beautiful autumn path in the woods and suddenly you came across an enormous rock in the middle of the path. There was no way to walk around it, and you didn’t have the strenght to push it out of the way. You might think you’d have to give up your walk, turn around and head for home.

What if you instead looked around you and saw that there was a strong branch lying there alongside the path? You could take that branch and push one end under the rock and then using your own weight, you could lean down on the other end of the branch, the part that was sticking up into the air, and the force of your weight on the stick made the rock roll out of the way so you could pass.

You would be using the power of leverage. You took the stick as your tool, and created the possibility of moving the rock, doing the work, without actually having to put in a lot of your own effort; you simply used your weight and gravity to move the rock rather than having to use energy to push it.

The power of leverage gives you the ability to make something difficult and almost impossible to do and make it easier to achieve or manage. That’s the kind of leverage I want to share with you today and help you teach to your child.
You see, what if that ‘rock’ was your ‘mortgage’? What if you were finding it near impossible to pay your mortgage every month. Let’s assume that you work full-time, you have no more hours in a day to put towards earning more money. Using the hours you have, and the job you have, you are not able to earn any more money and you definitely can’t create more hours in a day!

…or can you?

Ah ha! Here’s where the magic begins.

Did you know that you actually can create more hours in a day?

Yup, you really can!

“How?”

By using the power of leverage. By finding a tool, like that branch…in this case let’s say ‘other people’…to create more time for you.

“What? How’s that possible?”

Let me show you an example that you can actually have your child do to help you see how you can use other people’s time to leverage more time for yourself. If you do this with your child, then by doing it, you are actually teaching it! Cool eh?

So here’s an example from real life for you…take this example and see how you can change it to work for your life…and for your child’s life.

Example:

Your daughter wants to have a lemonade stand. She sets up her lemonade stand on the corner of your street, it’s sunny and hot, and she has 30 customers visit her stand that everyday. She sells her lemonade for 50 cents a cup. It costs her 10 cents for the lemonade and the cup. So she earns 40 cents for every cup she sells. At the end of each day she earns $12.00. She’s happy but she wants to earn more.

She sets up signs in your neighbourhood and that helps her bring in a few more customers. Now she’s averaging 40 customers a day, earning $16 per day. She is already using all of the daytime hours she can. She can’t create more hours in a so she had reached her earning limit.

How can she reach her goal of earning more money?

Well, she can try to add more goodies to her menu, like selling cookies or donuts, but in the end, she still only has so many hours in a day and can only service those 40 customers.

“So what can she do to make more money?”

Her best friend, sees how your little girl is making money with her lemonade stand and wants to have one too, but doesn’t know how to set it up or how to advertise it, etc. So your daughter decides to build a franchise. She already has the materials set up, she has the lemonade, the cups, the ads, etc. So she offers to set up her friend’s lemonade stand for her, have everything ready for her so that all her friend has to do is sit there, pour out lemonade and take in the money.

Her friend doesn’t have to worry about where to find the materials she needs; she doesn’t need to worry about how to market her lemonade stand. It’s all done for her. She just has to show up.

And what does your daughter get in exchange for setting up her best friend’s new business? A franchise commission. For every cup of lemonade that her best friend sells, she gets 10 cents.

So her friend sells her lemonade for 50 cents, pays 10 cents for every cup for the materials needed and pays 10 cents to your daughter as her franchise fee. She ends up earning 30 cents for every cup and your daughter ends up earning 10 cents for every cup her best friend sells.

Now your daughter is earning $16 per day from her own lemonade stand plus $4 per day from her friend’s lemonade stand. Her best friend is earning $12 per day and is happy about that because she doesn’t have to do any of the set up and marketing for her stand, she just has to show up , smile and pour lemonade.

So your daughter has just raised her daily income by 125%! Instead of her original $16 per day earnings, she is now earning $20 per day!

Her little brother, your son, wants in on the business to and so your daughter sets up another franchise for him to run a street over, and now he is earning $12 per day and your daughter is earning $24 per day!

With each new lemonade stand your daughter’s income goes up but her hours remain pretty much the same. So she is harnessing the power of leverage by using other people’s hours to create more hours for herself without having to actually work those hours!

Pretty clever eh?

And everyone is happy. It takes effort to set up the stands, organize the advertising and the materials, so her franchisees are happy to pay her the small commission so they don’t have to do the extra work.

Eventually, your daugther has so many franchisees that she no longer sits at her own lemonade stand but has it run by another friend and spends just a few hours each day setting up new franchisees and making sure the materials and the advertising are in place for each. So she has found how to harness the power of leverage to not only create more hours of earning potential, and earn more money…but also how to lower the amount of hours that she herself has to work!

She has created time and money freedom! How cool is that!
Now this doesn’t happen over night. This is not a get-rich-quick scheme, this is a get-rich-slow-but-steady system…which is a much more reliable one!

So how can you use this in your own life and the life of your child?

Well, let’s think about it. Is there a way you could hire someone to do some of your work for you so you can have more hours? Is there a way to duplicate what you already do and get a small commission for setting it up? Or can you think of a way to create a new side-income that you build bit-by-bit that over the long-term could replace your current income like your daughter did in the example above?

My children, Xanthe and Quinn, for example have now already created two streams of income using the power of leverage. The first one was a book they wrote in memory of our sweet doggie who passed away a few years ago, “Remembering Candy”. They put the effort in once by creating the book, then using the power of leverage, they put their book on Amazon and pay a commission to Amazon for promoting their book. Every time their book get sold, they don’t earn all of the money, Amazon take their commission first. And my children are okay with that because they don’t have to sell their book themselves. So they take a smaller amount and let Amazon do the selling for them.

And the second source of income that they created for themselves, harnessing the power of leverage, is they created 90 fun, short videos that they then uploaded to YouTube. They did the work once and then they allowed Google Ads to be presented on their videos so that everytime someone watches their videos they get paid a small ad fee. They leveraged other people’s ads on their videos. They don’t have to make or promote the ads, they just have to put up their fun videos and then leverage the efforts of others to earn them money.

There are so many ways to harness the power of leverage. The main key is to find a way to use someone else’s time and someone else’s money to increase your own but to do it so that everyone is happy!

People who rent houses, for example, they usually don’t spend all their own money to buy the house. They usually get a mortgage (the banks money) for the house. So they are using the banks money instead of their own. When they get rent, they first pay back a portion to the bank, and then keep the rest. So they get to make money on the banks money! How cool is that?

Anyway, I just wanted to help you open your mind to the possibilities of how you too can harness the power of leverage to give yourself more time and money and teach this to your children. Use yourself as an example, or do it together with your child.

Here’s to both your success!

Cheers…Amanda van der Gulik…Excited Life Enthusiast! ;o)
Best-selling author, Amanda van der Gulik has been homeschooling her own two children for over 11 years and is the founder of www.TeachingChildrenAboutMoney.com. Visit Amanda’s site today to grab your FREE copy of her eBook, “50 Money Making Ideas for Kids and Teens” or her “The 6 Magical Piggy Banks” cartoon.