BNH Book Review: Bee Fearless

“Bee Fearless: Dream Like a Kid”
by Mikaila Ulmer
2020/G.P. Putnam
$17.99/240 pages

When she was just four years old, Mikaila Ulmer was stung by a bee. A few days later, it happened again but with a different bee. She cried, of course, because it hurt, but her parents encouraged her to learn why those things happened. She discovered that bees are in serious trouble, and she became fierce about helping them.

At around that same time, Ulmer saw a flier for the Acton Children’s Business Fair that was being held near her Austin, Texas home. She told her mother that she wanted to be in the fair. Kids in Austin were participating in a city-wide Lemonade Day to learn about business and Ulmer saw an opportunity. She’d sell lemonade and, to help the bees, she’d sweeten the lemonade with honey!

At first, she made a lot of mistakes in her new business, but that was okay. The thing is that there’s so much to learn about running a business, but the two most important things are that it should be fun, and you should want to make a difference. After that, there are three steps to actually starting your business: identify a problem that you or someone else has, do your homework on the problem and a solution, and make sure you’re really passionate about the product.

Being an entrepreneur isn’t just for grown-ups, and this book allows you to mindfully mentor a kid with ideas. Mentorship is something that author, entrepreneur and Shark Tank dealmaker Mikaila Ulmer advocates, and she urges readers to seek wisdom if they don’t know or understand something, which is great advice for any age.

For the adult entrepreneur, this book could also serve as a business primer because it’s kid-friendly simplicity doesn’t diminish a reader.