‘Bee Fearless’ Wants You to Dream Like a Kid Entrepreneur

At the time of this writing, only 13 of the word’s 500 largest companies are led by women. Of those, according to Forbes, none of them are women of color. The business world is white-male dominated, which isn’t news, but it’s that landscape that makes the story of Mikaila Ulmer stand out all the more: Bee Fearless is a middle-grade memoir about a young Black girl and her family starting a business and having it grow beyond their dreams. Written with ghostwriter Brin Stevens, Bee Fearless captures Ulmer’s voice as a bright-eyed entrepreneur learning the ropes of business and eager to share what she’s learned. And it all starts and ends with bees: she was stung twice as a child, and instead of fearing bees her parents encouraged her to learn more about them. That experience, coupled with a local kids’ business fair and her grandmother’s recipe for lemonade with flaxseed, put Ulmer on a path that would lead her from a curious 4-year old child to a deal with Whole Foods and meeting Michelle and Barack Obama at the White House.

Now she finds herself as one of TIME magazine’s 50 most influential teens, but her decade-long journey to today is one of small successes that gradually accumulated into big ones. Since founding the small lemonade stand in Austin, Texas, it has grown into a company with its product sold in over 100 stores. The tone of Bee Fearless is a kid-to-kid guide to following your passion and doing what she did, sharing with young readers the lessons and vocabular…