In the spirit of the holiday weekend, I’m going to take a break from the Account Governance series and have a little fun telling a few stories.

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When I was younger, I was the kid in the neighborhood who always had the “idea” and most of the time it was about how we could make money.

Like most kids, the easiest, fastest, and most fun way for us to make a few bucks was a lemonade stand. Take a couple of Mom’s Kool Aid packages, two cups of sugar and we had an instant money maker. A kid cash machine.

Location was not on our side as we lived down a quiet street. So, after the usual Mom and Dad customers patronized us, new customers were hard to come by. Recognizing that we had a huge population of other kids, I changed our strategy. We were going to target them with candy. The strategy, buy their favorite candy at Jacks, the corner store a few blocks away and sell it at a discount. The idea was, by selling it cheaper than Jacks, they wouldn’t have to ride their bikes all the way to the corner store. They could just buy from us. Killer value proposition, uh?

It worked brilliantly! All the kids came by and bought up our entire inventory. I was so excited, I went back and bought more, sales were going through the roof. We couldn’t keep the “shelves” stocked.

Eventually we saturated the market and sales came to a close. Excited we sat down to dole out the profits and the oddest thing happen — we had less money than we started with. It was the strangest thing. Sales were through the roof . . . hmmm, some money must have fallen out of the money box some how or someone had given out the wrong change.