On Tour with Prism Book Tours
Welcome to the book tour for Twelve Weeks to Midnight Blue by Steve Searfoss! Today I have an exclusive excerpt for you for this tour. Download your own copy and be sure to check out the rest of the tour! Best of luck entering the giveaway!
KidVenture: Twelve Weeks to Midnight Blue
(KidVenture #1)
By Steve Searfoss
Middle Grade Fiction, Contemporary
Paperback & ebook, 125 Pages
January 26, 2020 by Steve Searfoss
Chance Sterling launches a pool cleaning business over the summer. Join Chance as he looks for new customers, discovers how much to charge them, takes on a business partner, recruits an employee, deals with difficult clients, and figures out how to make a profit. He has twelve weeks to reach his goal. Will he make it? Only if he takes some chances.
KidVenture stories are business adventures where kids figure out how to market their company, understand risk, and negotiate. Each chapter ends with a challenge, including business decisions, ethical dilemmas and interpersonal conflict for young readers to wrestle with. As the story progresses, the characters track revenue, costs, profit margin, and other key metrics which are explained in simple, fun ways that tie into the story.
Read an excerpt:
When I was done, I emptied the bucket of debris into our large trashcan and I put up the nets. I headed to the kitchen for some of my mom’s iced tea. Addie was at the table drawing. She was always doing art. Ponies and puppies, bears and bunnies, that sort of thing. Lots of pinks and purples, sparkles and glitter. Girly stuff. Rainbows and sunsets. Boring stuff, if you ask me.
I reached into the fridge, poured myself a glass and took a big gulp. Ah, that felt good. I downed the full glass and then poured myself another one. As I sipped it I flipped through the newspaper my dad had left on the counter. Nothing caught my eye. Then I glanced over at what Addie was drawing. I bet she’s drawing a unicorn or something just as silly—
“Wait a minute! Addie! What are you drawing?” I said, shocked.
She quickly scooped up her papers and stuffed them into her sketchbook and closed the cover. Mighty suspicious.
“Nothing.” She grinned.
“That didn’t look like nothing.”
“Just drawing.“
“What were you doing?”
“Why do you care?” she said defensively.
“I want to know.”
“It’s none of your business.”
“Oh, it is my business.” I glared at her. “It’s very much my business. In fact, I think you were actually drawing my business. Was that a swimming pool you were drawing?”
“No.” She cracked a smile. “I was just drawing water.”
I scowled.
“Water inside four walls!” I said, accusatorily. She started giggling. “In a backyard! With a diving board!” By now she was laughing uncontrollably.
“Let me see that!” I reached for her sketchbook. She pulled it away from me, but as she did that, a bunch of papers went flying into the air. And there it was. One of her drawings floated slowly down to the ground and when it landed I could see it, clear as day. Not just a swimming pool, but in bright orange big letters it said Pool Cleaning Service.
“Addison!” I shouted. “What are you doing?!”
“It’s called marketing,” she said in the voice of a grown-up, tired of explaining the same thing over and over again to a child.
“You don’t even know what that is!”
“Yes I do,” she huffed. “Dad told me what it means.”
“Oh yeah, well what is it?”
“I am making flyers to promote my pool cleaning business.”
“You don’t have a pool cleaning business!” I stomped my foot. “I do.”
“Not yet, I don’t, but I expect that soon I will.”
I looked down again at the flyer she had drawn. There was a phone number on it. I pointed to it.
“Mom said I could use her number,” she said.
I was about to tell her this whole thing was crazy, it would never work. But I was stopped short in my tracks. I do believe my jaw was open. I might have even been drooling, if you want to know the truth.
“Addie!” I gave her a big hug. “This is a great idea! That’s exactly what I need to find new customers.”
“But you don’t know how to draw.”
“Yes I do,” I said defensively.
“No, you don’t,” she smirked. “Even your stick figures don’t look like sticks, they look like nervous spaghetti.”
“You have a point. Maybe you can draw them for me.”
“No thanks,” she said and quickly picked up her papers and started to head out of the kitchen.
“Wait! Addie wait!”
“I’ll pay you.”
“How much?”
“I don’t know. A dollar.”
“No way,”
“Two dollars?” I said hopefully.
She shook her head
“Three?”
“Half.”
“A half dollar?” I giggled. “Ok, sure.”
“No, I want half of everything you make cleaning pools.”
“What?!” I shrieked.
“That’s right, 50-50.”
“No way, not a chance! Get lost.”
“Ok,” she said in that you’re-going-to-regret-this tone of voice and started to walk away.
I swallowed. There was something stuck in my throat. Ok, you might even say it was pride. I swallowed my pride and called out, “Addie! Come back.”
“Yes, brother?” she teased.
“I’ll give you a third.”
She pretended to think about it, and then said, “No.”
“Forty percent.”
“No.”
“Forty! Addie, that’s a lot.”
“I don’t want forty, I want to be your partner. An equal partner.”
“My partner?” I said sarcastically.
“That’s right. Your partner.”
“But you don’t know anything about cleaning pools. And you’re too little to carry heavy buckets of wet leaves.”
“And you don’t know how to draw. And it sure doesn’t seem like you know much about marketing either.”
“You want me to give you half of my business just because you can draw flyers? That hardly seems fair. I can get anyone to draw pictures of a pool for me.”
“It’s not just drawing, Chance. It told you, it’s called marketing. I have Mom’s phone ready to go, so we can take calls. I made a map of the neighborhood so we can write down which houses we visited and left flyers with, and what they said. I’ll find us new customers, if you make me your partner.”
I scratched my head. There was something appealing about what she was proposing. It was no fun knocking on doors all day in the hot sun, hoping someone needed their pool cleaned. “Ok, ok. Maybe we can do half of any new customer you bring.”
“No,” she said. “I want to be a full partner in the whole business, or I’m not interested.”
Excerpted from Kidventure: Twelve Weeks to Midnight Blue by Steve Searfoss, Copyright © 2022 by Steve Searfoss. Published by Steve Searfoss.
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About the Author
Steve Searfoss: I wrote my first KidVenture book after years of making up stories to teach my kids about business and economics. Whenever they'd ask how something works or why things were a certain way, I would say, "Let's pretend you have a business that sells..." and off we'd go. What would start as a simple hypothetical to explain a concept would become an adventure spanning several days as my kids would come back with new questions which would spawn more plot twists. Rather than give them quick answers, I tried to create cliffhangers to get them to really think through an idea and make the experience as interactive as possible.
I try to bring that same spirit of fun, curiosity and challenge to each KidVenture book. That’s why every chapter ends with a dilemma and a set of questions. KidVenture books are fun for kids to read alone, and even more fun to read together and discuss. There are plenty of books where kids learn about being doctors and astronauts and firefighters. There are hardly any where they learn what it’s like to run small business. KidVenture is different. The companies the kids start are modest and simple, but the themes are serious and important.
I’m an entrepreneur who has started a half dozen or so businesses and have had my share of failures. My dad was an entrepreneur and as a kid I used to love asking him about his business and learning the ins and outs of what to do and not do. Mistakes make the best stories — and the best lessons. I wanted to write a business book that was realistic, where you get to see the characters stumble and wander and reset, the way entrepreneurs do in real life. Unlike most books and movies where business is portrayed as easy, where all you need is one good idea and the desire to be successful, the characters in KidVenture find that every day brings new problems to solve.
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