#66/100 in #100extraordinarywomen
The Austin, Texas, girl founded a successful company, Me & the Bees Lemonade, securing a $60,000 investment on the TV show “Shark Tank” and a contract with Whole Foods. She’s been featured on “Good Morning America” and NBC News, and in Forbes and Time magazines. She was named among the Top 25 People Shaping Retail’s Future by the National Retail Foundation, spoke onstage with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella before 15,000 people at the WE Day Seattle conference in 2016, and introduced President Barack Obama at the 2016 United State of Women Summit.
And all this before her 13th birthday.
The path to CEO started in a most unlikely way for the 12-year-old, after she was stung by a bee twice in a week at age 4. Her parents suggested she channel her newfound fear into a research project, so Mikaila began reading about bees and was soon fascinated by them — and concerned about their dwindling numbers. At the same time, her great-grandmother, who passed away in late 2016, sent the family a 1940s cookbook that included her recipe for flaxseed lemonade.
That fall, her mom and dad encouraged her to make a product the lemonade for a local children's business competition, the Acton Children's Business Fair, and Austin Lemonade Day. Mikaila's lemonade was a hit. "The first time I sold it, I thought, 'This is only going to be a one-time thing. I am going to do it once, get the money, donate some and then save some and then use the rest to buy this awesome toy that I wanted.' I do not remember what it was!" Mikaila tells CNBC. But though she was exhausted, Mikaila adds, "I realized I am really enjoying doing this." Six months later, she and her family made more lemonade and sold it. Then, when Mikaila was seven, a local pizza shop asked to carry her lemonade. "It seemed like no matter how many lemons I squeezed, we would always sell out," she says.
The research about the bees was also an eye-opener. “I learned that bees are dying at an alarming rate, so we need to save them,” she says. “Because of my research, I decided to start a business that could save the bees and use my great-granny Helen’s recipe as well.” Mikaila was soon selling her flaxseed and honey-sweetened beverage at events and her own lemonade stand. With the help of parents Theo and D’Andra Ulmer, the budding social entrepreneur and bee ambassador started her company in 2009 at the age of 4, growing it into a thriving enterprise that donates a percentage of its profits to organizations working to save honeybees. The company’s evolution has surprised Theo Ulmer, who initially saw his daughter’s venture as a valuable learning opportunity and a way to foster positive relationships. “I don’t know that I foresaw anything of this magnitude when we started, not at all,” he says. “But Mikaila has always been impressive in that regard. I’m not surprised that it was something that if she put her mind to it, she would be a success at it.”
She wanted to use her Great Granny Helen’s recipe to help honeybees. So instead of sweetening with anything else, she decided to sweeten the lemonade with local honey. It would not only have helped the bees and the beekeepers, but would also have been a lot healthier, as well. It was a sweet success from the start. She started off with a lemonade stand in the beginning, and used to tout: Buy a Bottle…Save a Bee! She started with one lemonade stand, and stuck around for three years, during which she kept on selling out. Due to the drastic increase in demand, she decided to expand and got into her first pizza store, and that’s how she started going big. Over the period of time, BeeSweet Lemonade started getting sold out at entrepreneurial events as well. The locals also loved the idea that her lemonade was made from locally-sourced and natural ingredients, and what cheered them even more was that some portions of the profits were being donated to support organizations who were working to save the honeybees.
But the path to profitability has had some bumps — most notably, when the company had to change its original name, BeeSweet Lemonade, in 2016 over a trademark issue. Mikaila came up with the name, which signified both her personal mission and a plea to the world to be kind to bees, and she had an emotional connection with it. “She had to work hard to let something go that she’d grown comfortable with,” Ulmer says. The brand-savvy businesswoman got to work on finding a new name, soliciting suggestions from contacts and customers and holding informal focus groups with her classmates. It was a challenging time, Ulmer says, but one that led to personal and professional growth. “She got a lot of support from people during the process, and that really helped her,” he says. “It brought people into the story, and I think that helped her to become a lot more comfortable with what she’s doing and why she’s doing it.”
Bit by bit, distribution expanded. Soon, Whole Foods started carrying “Me & the Bees Lemonade”. The business was growing so fast, and so big that Mikaila and her family were finding it exceedingly difficult to produce the lemonade. Hence, they decided to get external help and pitched a potential expansion on the 6th season of the TV show ‘Shark Tank’. Shortly after her product hit the shelves of Whole Foods, Mikaila appeared on ABC's hit reality show "Shark Tank." What’s more, Mikaila Ulmer, then in the capacity of the “BeeSweet Lemonade” founder and CEO, amazed the nation when, at nine years old, she walked away from ABC's hit reality show "Shark Tank" with a $60,000 investment deal with Daymond John. Now for all those who aren’t aware, Shark Tank, is a TV show that is hosted by few highly successful billionaires, namely: Kevin O’Leary, Barbara Corcoran, Daymond John, Robert Herjavec, Lori Greiner, Mark Cuban, Ashton Kutcher, etc., who invest in businesses out of their personal capacity. And believe me when I say this – Shark Tank is a tough nut to crack! They rarely have sympathy for the old or the young. But luckily, one little girl impressed these sharks with her sweet lemonade so much that, fashion mogul – Daymond John invested $60,000 in BeeSweet for a 25% stake. And since then there has been no looking back for BeeSweet (later Me & the Bees). The visibility helped the business. In the year after the show aired, sales grew by 231 percent, says Mikaila. She also received a low-interest “local producer loan” from Whole Foods, which helped her to expand beyond the lemonade’s original flavour and experiment with other versions. Although, the Terms weren’t disclosed, but its loans run up to $100,000!
Me & the Bees Lemonade is based in Austin, Texas, but the Generation- Z influencer and her privately-owned company have garnered national attention. Over the past few years, Ulmer has visited the White House and met former president Barack Obama on numerous occasions. Earlier this year, Ulmer launched the Healthy Hive Foundation and became a member of Microsoft's People of Action network. She also travels with Dell Women's Entrepreneur Network (DWEN) throughout the world, most recently to Cape Town, South Africa, where she taught Finance 101 at DWEN's youth program. In July, a group of NFL players and businessmen invested $810,000 in Ulmer's company.
The exposure led to invites from the White House, first in 2015 for the annual kids’ “state dinner,” then to the following year’s White House Easter Egg Roll, where Mikaila served up her lemonade and popsicles to about 10,000 guests as one of the event’s celebrity chefs. Her first time meeting the president was intimidating, she admits. “I’d never met Mr. Obama yet, and we all know that he’s very important. I was definitely nervous,” she says. Not so when the then 11-year-old introduced President Obama at the women’s summit in June 2016. Wearing a white, eyelet-trimmed dress with sandals and a matching hair wrap in her trademark yellow, she delivered an impassioned speech about entrepreneurship with poise and confidence beyond her years. “Entrepreneurs hold the American dream, and the biggest dreamers are kids,” Mikaila said, to applause and cheers. “We dream big. We dream about things that don’t even exist yet. We believe in our dreams. We jump out of bed in the morning because we had the craziest idea and can’t wait to grab a notebook and get started. We believe in the impossible. We see possibilities, while others just see problems.” Obama strode onto the stage a few minutes later, clearly impressed. “What an amazing young lady,” he said, then quipped, “I will be back on the job market in seven months, so I hope she’s hiring.” She may well have been. The company’s lemonade, made at a commercial facility near San Antonio, Texas, is sold at a growing number of grocery shops, coffee shops and natural and organic food stores nationwide. Aside from lemonade — currently available in flavors with mint, ginger, iced tea and prickly pear — the company’s products include tote bags, ball caps and gift sets. And Mikaila is always thinking bigger. “She’ll tell you, ‘I want to see my lemonade product global, but I also want to have brand extensions,’” her father says. “To have someone at her age talking about brand extensions and different lines of business that she wants to get into, all integrated and interrelated with her current product, that’s surprising.”
Being a middle-school CEO has benefits and drawbacks. Mikaila gets help from her parents: Her mom assists with marketing and her dad with the finance operations. But she also has to do her homework first before working for her company. (Her favorite subjects in school are science and Spanish.) Her business responsibilities include doing trade show demos, media interviews, business presentations, workshops about bees and about entrepreneurship, depositing her money in the bank, putting in money orders, depositing checks, checking the business email and posting on social media. Mikaila adds, “I still get underestimated for being a 13-year-old entrepreneur, so it can be hard looking for investors or partners because they're like, ‘You're a kid, we love your product and your mission but come back when you're a little bit older or come back when you're willing to work with your company full time and not got to school.’ That is definitely a challenge. Another challenge is balancing school, work and play. I still go to school during the week, I still have to do my homework and I still have sleepovers, so it's hard to balance all those things along with running the company.”
For Mikaila, life as a seventh-grade CEO involves some tradeoffs. After school, when her peers are playing sports or hanging out, she usually heads to the company office with one or both parents to do homework or attend to business — maybe an interview or photo shoot, or dealing with a production or distribution issue. The family often travels on weekends, visiting prospective retailers or taking Mikaila to speaking engagements. Sleepovers and birthday parties are sometimes passed up, school occasionally missed. “When I’m traveling during school, it is hard because there’s a lot of makeup work that greets me when I return,” Mikaila says. “This year, procrastination was one of the main things that I had to learn not to do.” But the sacrifices are worth it. Mikaila relishes being the owner of a business, using her profits for a worthy cause and teaching people about bees. She’s also a mentor to other budding female entrepreneurs. She helped her friends at school launch a company making soaps and bath products to sell at a business fair, and traveled to South Africa to speak to girls at a women’s entrepreneur conference about how to start and run their own businesses. “I think what people recognize most about Mikaila is that she’s not just in this to create revenue, but she’s also in it to solve a bigger problem,” says her mother.
Me & the Bees is at a key juncture, with opportunities for growth and the attendant challenges of taking a family-run venture to the next level as a viable commercial enterprise. It set a goal of quadrupling sales annually, but achieving that will require scaling up production and expanding distribution. The company is also competing with major beverage manufacturers that have large budgets to pay for marketing and in-store demos that can attract customers and boost sales. Technology is helping to facilitate the day-to-day operations — the family uses various Microsoft apps and programs to collaborate, keep in touch and create presentations, and the company increasingly relies on technology to support sales and automate some processes. Managing home life, full-time work and a growing company is a constant balancing act for the family, which also includes 9-year-old Jacob, the company photographer, and Khalil, 21, who is studying computer science in college. D’Andra runs business operations and manages the household, while Theo works full-time as a program manager at Dell and processes orders for Me & the Bees at night, sometimes working 20-hour days. Trips for Mikaila’s speaking engagements often double as mini-vacations, with the family spending an extra day or two sightseeing together in a new city. “That’s one of the ways we find balance,” D’Andra Ulmer says.
For Mikaila, her enterprise is an environmental and social mission. She donates more than 10% of the profits from the sale of her business to organizations including: Heifer International, Sustainable Food Center of Austin and Texas Beekeepers Association, which help save the bees. She can often be seen educating families about the importance of honeybees and how to save them, and also passionately facilitates workshops about honeybees and entrepreneurship as well. One of her advices for other kids, or in fact for anyone who might also like to start their own business is: GO BIG! In fact, in addition to being a well-known speaker, and being featured as a panelist at several conferences like SXSW ECO, SXSW EDU, and SXSW Interactive; she’s been featured in Oprah magazine and even has her own YouTube channel. Today, Mikaila leads workshops on how to save the honeybees, and she participates in social entrepreneurship panels. "I think she is a pretty hard worker," D'Andra told NBCBLK. "I'm impressed with how she gets her homework done during her travels. She has a gift for public speaking but what makes me very proud is that she is not only a smart entrepreneur but she's a good person and she's kind to people. That's more important than business."
Now 13, Mikaila Ulmer has been named one of TIME magazine's most influential teens of 2017 and says that she is reflecting on her nine years of experience as an entrepreneur to write a children's book on how to start and grow a business. And yes, she reminds us, she’s doing it for the bees!
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