This 15-year-old ‘queen bee’ is CEO of an Austin beverage company

Mikaila Ulmer is founder of Me & the Bees Lemonade. She’s also a 15-year-old high school student.

“I started my company when I was 4 years old, here in Austin, Texas,” she says.

Me & the Bees started as a lemonade stand. Now, Ulmer is the CEO – or “Queen Bee,” as she puts it – of a 10-year-old beverage company.

She’s tinkering with the recipe so that there’s less sugar, but she can’t get rid of it completely, or the drink would be unaffordable to many.

“We use honey, which is a pretty expensive sweetener. [But] if we did 100% honey, it would be pretty expensive, and I want my lemonade to be accessible to multiple people, to everybody,” Ulmer says.

Me & the Bees donates about 10% of profits to organizations that are helping save honeybee populations.

Ulmer credits her parents for helping her make her business idea a reality.

“Instead of saying, ‘OK, why don’t you wait till you’re 18, or until you’ve done the lemonade stand for a couple years?’ They said, ‘OK, let’s figure out how to do it. Let’s go to the library and check out some books so you can learn,’” Ulmer says.

She says the books she read inspired her to work toward her dreams right away, instead of waiting until she “grows up.”

“It kind of, I think, set the mentality of ‘I can do anything,’” Ulmer says.

Written by Caroline Covington.