Marc Compeau is the Reh Family Professor of Entrepreneurship Practice at the Reh School of Business at Clarkson University, where he has spent twenty-five years teaching the next generation of entrepreneurs by the only method he trusts: making them do the work. His classroom is built around real ventures, real customers, and real money, and his teaching has been recognized with national awards and a long catalog of graduates now running businesses of their own.

He has spent more than two decades on the operating side as well. He built and sold a video rental business before the country stopped renting videos, and from 2014 through 2026 he owned and operated Jake’s on the Water, a year-round waterfront restaurant on the water in a college town that came out of the pandemic stronger than it went in. His teaching draws as much on cash registers and closing-time receipts as on any textbook.

He is the author of Generation Advantage: How to Attract, Lead, and Inspire Traditionalists, Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z and Never Waste a Good Crisis: A Working Operator’s Guide to Disruption. The Lemonade Stand is, he says, the book behind both of those — the fundamentals layer the other two are built on top of.

He lives in northern New York with his wife Chris and a yellow lab named Jake — the namesake of the restaurant, who has retained his position through the change in ownership. The book is for his grandchildren, Charlee and Jaxson, who in 2026 are still too small to read it. By the time they need it, he wants it to have been waiting.