Happy Friday POU!
Hope you’re enjoying our series on young, gifted and black entrepreneurs. Today we feature 3 youngsters that are already making their marks in the business world and are barely out of elementary school.
Asia Newson
Asia Newson started Super Business Girl when she was five years old. Her father taught her how to make candles and she turned her new skill into profit. Today, the “super business girl” says her mission is to “recognize the true potential in every child and to develop intrinsic security that makes optimum use of their individualized talent.”
Newson’s online store, superbusinessgirl.com carries t-shirts, candles, accessories and more.
Asia hopes to open up shop in Downtown Detroit, become the cities “Youth Mayor” but also plans to finish middle & high school so she can attend Michigan State University. Asia has appeared on the Ellen Degeneres Show, America’s Got Talent, Disney World’s Cinderella Stage, MSNBC, 20/20 ABC News and NPR just to name a few. She was featured in preeminent photographer Bruce Weber’s Detroit exhibit and was a keynote speaker for TEDxDetroit.
Mikaila Ulmer
Mikaila Ulmer caught our attention when she pitched her lemonade business on the cutthroat show Shark Tank. At 10 years old, Ulmer shared her BeeSweet Lemonade with the “sharks” in hopes that they’d love her beverage and offer a sweet deal. Investor Daymond John put up $60,000 for a 25% stake and agreed to mentor the young boss. BeeSweet Lemonade is sweetened with local honey and a portion of the sales go to saving honeybees.
Per Mikaila, this is how it all started:
When I was just four, my family encouraged me to make a product for a Children’s business competition (the Acton Children’s Business Fair) and Austin Lemonade Day. So I put on my thinking cap. I thought about some ideas. While I was thinking, two big events happened.
- I got stung by a bee. Twice.
- Then my Great Granny Helen, who lives in Cameron, South Carolina, sent my family a 1940’s cookbook, which included her special recipe for Flaxseed Lemonade.
I didn’t enjoy the bee stings at all. They scared me. But then something strange happened. I became fascinated with bees. I learned all about what they do for me and our ecosystem. So then I thought, what if I make something that helps honeybees and uses my Great Granny Helen’s recipe?
That’s how BeeSweet Lemonade was born. It comes from my Great Granny Helen’s flaxseed recipe and my new love for bees. So that’s why we sweeten it with local honey. And today my little idea continues to grow.
It was a sweet success from the start. Year-after-year, Mikaila, sells-out of her BeeSweet Lemonade at youth entrepreneurial events while donating a percentage of the profits from the sale of her lemonade to local and international organizations fighting hard to save the honeybees. That is why she touts: Buy a Bottle…Save a Bee.
Today, the award-winning BeeSweet Lemonade is buzzing off the shelves of Whole Foods Market, the world’s leader in natural and organic foods, and available at a growing number of restaurants, food trailers and natural food delivery companies.
Cory Nieves
When he was just nine years old, Cory Nieves realized his dream for making the world a better place through Mr. Cory’s Cookies, where he is founder, CEO and head of distribution. His entrepreneurial efforts were also an effort to save money and buy his mom a car so that they wouldn’t have to take the bus anymore, as he shared on Ellen. Today, Mr. Cory, who is also known for his dapper sense of style, bakes delicious flavors—like Lemon, Peanut Butter and Healthy Melty—with all natural ingredients. Cookie lovers can place orders and pick them up at Mr. Cory’s Kitchen.
What makes his cookies so good? Nieves says, “Well, it’s made with love. And they’re all-natural. And no preservatives. None.”
Nieves started the company five years ago after moving to New Jersey with his mother from the Bronx.
“One day, we were on the bus and he just came out and was like, ‘Ma, you know, I wanna get a car or whatever. Cause it’s too cold.’ I said, ‘Cory, how am I gettin’ a car, off of my looks?’ I told him that and then, he said, ‘Well, we can sell hot cocoa,'” said Nieves’ mother Lisa Howard. “And then, he wanted to add something to that, like, something, a dessert base. And he wanted to try the cookies.”
When Nieves started, he didn’t know much about baking.
“I didn’t really know,” he said. “I just looked it up with some magazines, websites. Looked it up. Little search. ‘What is this? How you make that?’ And I didn’t like the recipes, so I just started changin’ it around.”
From his tiny home kitchen, Nieves built up a business to the point where he’s had to move the operation into a commercial space. These days, he sells up to a thousand cookies a weekend at almost $1 a piece.
“We incorporated the business into an LLC corporation, ’cause we couldn’t use our regular kitchen unless this whole house is commercial,” he said.
His mother and chief operating officer Lisa is now legally required to do the baking, but make no mistake, Cory is the man in charge.
Nieves said he thinks he has a head for business, though his mom helps him sometimes.
“I look over, like, financials and stuff,” Nieves said. “The profit and loss statements, you know.”
“Sometimes I cannot believe my son is my boss,” Nieves’ mother Lisa said. “Like, hold on a second. And sometimes, I have to correct him. Because he sometimes takes that to the head. And I have to say, ‘Hold on, Cory, I gotta cut the check. You can’t. So, let’s get it together.'”
“He knows more about business than many small-business owners,” said Frank Sorrentino, president of ConnectOne Bank in Englewood Cliffs. Sorrentino, who was told about Mr. Cory by a fellow businessman, met with him in his boardroom. “He wowed everyone in the office,” he said. “Plus he dresses better than I do. I could take fashion tips from him.”
Sorrentino continued: “He knows accounting terms, he understands various business concepts, he can track his own profitability and loss. Talking to him was like talking to any other businessman, except he’s 10 years old.” And like a good businessman, Mr. Cory walked out of his meeting with the bank with a new client: He is going to be supplying cookies at various bank events.
Todd Brooks, executive director of Englewood Hospital and Medical Center’s Foundation, couldn’t agree more that the youngster is a biz wiz.
“He is so professional that it is hard to remember sometimes that he is just a kid,” Brooks said. “And then you get an email from him and it’s filled with emoticons and exclamation points. It’s great. My finance director does not have emoticons in his emails to me.” The hospital recently became a client.
James Dunn, of the 125-year-old insurance company Birtwhistle & Livingston in Englewood, is also sometimes taken aback that Mr. Cory, his client and today the company’s new cookie supplier, is a kid. “It’s odd to be told, ‘Mr. Dunn, I’ll have to deliver that after school.’ ”