“The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity,” the influential management guru Peter Drucker once said. That lesson seems to have come naturally to a young entrepreneur in Canada this week.
According to CBC News, nine-year-old Elina Childs saw her opportunity Wednesday when Canada legalized cannabis nationwide, becoming the second country to do so. As crowds lined up at a cannabis store in Edmonton, Childs and her father showed up with a wagon full of thin mints, cookies and other munchies.
God bless this girl selling girl guide cookies outside of nova cannabis. 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼#yegpic.twitter.com/dnI9HdBXPc
— Emily Fitzpatrick (@_emilyfitzCBC) October 17, 2018
Childs was raising money for Girl Guides, Canada’s scouting movement for girls. It took her only 45 minutes to sell out of her stock of munchies, collecting $120 for the Girl Guides in the process.
“It amazed me how quickly they went,” Seann Childs, Elina’s father, told the CBC. “Even people in cars driving on the avenue there would stop and roll down their window and ask for cookies.”
Childs added that the experience was much more fruitful than her previous efforts of selling Girl Guide cookies door to door. People were often not home, and Elina was once bitten by a dog. The reception outside the cannabis store, he said, was much more friendly—not to mention a positive lesson in entrepreneurialism.
“Everybody was respectful, everybody was happy, and she walked away from it as this incredibly positive experience as well as selling out all her Brownie cookies,” he said. “She can go and be happy that she’d done that and help support the Guides too.”