Ivanka Trump explains how running lemonade stands as a kid taught her the fundamentals of business

During the first season of "The Apprentice," Donald Trump reportedly suggested to the show's producer, Mark Burnett, that they have contestants run a lemonade stand on the streets of New York.

The goal, writes his daughter Ivanka Trump in her 2009 book, "The Trump Card," was to gauge the contestants' most basic business instincts. "It was a classic test of street smarts, business acumen, and shift-on-the-fly ingenuity, and it ended up being one of the most popular and memorable segments of the show," Ivanka writes.

Ivanka laments in her book that she and her brothers didn't have quite the same experience growing up that the contestants did.

During a recent interview with Ivanka, Business Insider asked the executive vice president of development and acquisitions for the Trump Organization and the head of the Ivanka Trump lifestyle brand what hobbies she had as a child that taught her about life and success.

"I had a whole lot of lemonade stands growing up, which were helpful in learning about business on the most fundamental level," she says.

But the Trump kids' lemonade stands weren't like most other kids' lemonade stands.

"First of all, my mother wasn't about to let us set up shop with a lemonade stand at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street - and to do so in the lobby of Trump Tower would have been just a little too precious, don't you think?" she writes.

So they made an arrangement to set up shop one summer at their house in Greenwich, Connecticut, and the kids agreed to keep track of the costs of the lemonade and reimburse "the house" for those expenses out of their proceeds.

"The only trouble with this arrangement was our location - not a typical Trump problem," she writes. "We were at the end of a cul-de-sac in an affluent community of spacious homes on sprawling properties. In every other respect, this was a prime spot, but it was a dead zone for aspiring lemonade magnates."

Ivanka writes that she and her brothers used their "wily charms and persuasive marketing skills" to get their bodyguard, their parents' driver, and some of the household staff to buy enough lemonade to cover their expenses. They "took pity on us and dug deep for their spare change," she writes.

"We made the best of a bad situation, I guess - a lesson we'd utilize again and again as we moved on in business," Ivanka writes.

If Ivanka's instagram account is any indication, it would appear she's trying to instill the entrepreneurial spirit in her own kids, too.