Merry Christmas & Happy Hanukkah & Happy Holidays

It is Christmas Eve Eve and Joe, myself and the kids have been blessed with a successful first 3 weeks at the Ice Cream Shop! As I reflect on the last year of our lives, I now know that we should never take advantage of anything or anyone and we should be grateful for each day that is given to us that we are able to get up out of bed and start our day.

We started out our 2011 with a huge trip to Pasadena, California for the Tournament of Roses Parade with the Albertville High School Aggie Band on January 1st and had no idea what the days ahead had in store for us.

In the days leading up to our shop opening, Joe had his 15 seconds of fame from the front page of the Advertiser Gleam story about the shop to a one minute and ten seconds on a local news channel about our shop as a "Bright Spot in our Economy". Even since that day, we have grown and changed as a family and Joe as a person.

Joe received a unexpected text message from someone who saw him on the news, congratulated him for opening the shop and knew that it would be successful. He assumed it was someone from his previous employer but since he deleted all his contacts from there in his phone, he wasn't sure who it was. I, on the other hand, knew that I could scroll back and decipher who the message came from. Once I realized that the message came from his former boss, I approached Joe with proud compassion. "Joe, that text that you got...it was from Shean."

Joe looked almost shocked and some disbelief. Since that day in May on the walking trail that he told me that he no longer worked for the giant retail monster, Wal-Mart, Joe had feelings of failure and resentment...I could sense it in our marriage and our everyday lives. He focused on the things he had control over like the kids over the summer, our trip to Massachusetts, the groceries and laundry. He was such an amazing Mr. Mom over the summer that I hated to lose that! This new business adventure gave him something that he had never had before and something that we could do together!

On opening day, we all were up early and were excited and nervous. We needed some balloons filled to go on our guest tables outside and I told Joe that I would run up to Wal-Mart and get them filled. He declined and said, "No, it's time for me to go up there and do this."

He left with 2 bags of blue and green balloons. He came back with his pride.

He felt like he could walk into that store and feel proud of who he was and what journey we were about to embark on and came back to his business a changed person. We have worked hard to get where we are and we will never take advantage that he or I had jobs that you could lose in a day. We are not guaranteed anything in life; our jobs, our homes, our friends, our lives....there are people in our lives that affect us every day and challenge us to remember why it is we do what we do. Don't forget to be thankful for your job and the material things but, until you are faced with what you don't have often enough, you forget what it's like to be desperate and a failure and it forces you to remember to be thankful for the people around you and the love you have for your spouse, your parents, your children, your family.

Happy Holidays and we hope for you to see that being grateful for each day is a blessing.

Passion

The one thing I have learned in my life is to be passionate about what I do. If you do not wake up in the morning excited to start your day, looking forward to being productive in your job, accomplishing your goals and interacting with your co-workers then you are not passionate about it. Passion makes people do well in life. Passion leads to good child-rearing. Passion is using everything in your soul to accomplish something. Dictionary.com defines passion as:

·  Strong and barely controllable emotion.

·  A state or outburst of such emotion.

It's all about emotion and the drive you put behind that passion to develop something great. It's the most amazing thing to wake every morning and have so many ideas and be so excited about something so small. Who knew that the largest retail giant in the world would push my husband to be so passionate about something other than retail and help him decide that being your own boss was much better than being someone else’s. Who knew that something so small would invoke such passion in our children and make them just as excited as we are? Who knew that when we realized that we would only have one paycheck that it would all be ok and even brought our whole world back into perspective? We are so passionate about making our customers happy with the product that we have that we have worked almost 7 days a week for the last 2 months to assure that we can give you the best experience possible.

I am passionate about being a great mom, wife, nurse.

Joe is passionate about being a great dad and husband.

We are passionate about ice cream.

Holiday Spirit!

Lake Guntersville Ice Cream Shop is well on its way to getting ready for our customers!  I wish we had a 100 flavor dipping cabinet to serve everyone's favorites.  We are hoping for a big opening day in hopes that everyone can come out and try our ice cream. Creamy, smooth, rich delicious super-premium ice cream....!  The holiday's are around the corner and we want to be a part of your dessert plans by offering ice cream pies for your family, work or church gatherings. Cookie or graham cracker crusts with fresh ice cream, ho-made whipped cream and chocolate or caramel drizzled on top, yum!

Soon, we will add cakes to our menu which will be 2 layers of cake with creamy ice cream in the middle and butter cream frosting! We cannot wait!!  See you Saturday, December 3rd!

Joe, Kathleen, JD, Austin, Bronson and Madison

Hard work is, well....Hard!

I never imagined how much work went into starting a business.  From the first conversation my family had in the car from our trip to Massachusetts in July to now there has been reading, researching, traveling, tasting, more researching, talking, meeting, faxing, planning than I ever thought possible! Joe has been the best business partner I know, as well as a great best friend...we tend to disagree a lot while making decisions but know that in the end we will have made the best decisions through that process for our business to be successful!

If you could see my house right now, you would have an idea we were about to start something BIG.  We have all the recycled chairs, the large spoon (many of you saw during Halloween), boxes of this and that, cash registers, apron material, paper, vinyl and many other necessities needed for our shop that fill up our home!  Now mind you, we will be doing more to our shop inside and out after we open but for right now, we are mostly concerned with getting the best product out there for you!  Decorations and a lighted sign may have to wait a few months.

Some wonder why it is that we are opening in the dead of winter. What better time to teach my family how to make and scoop ice cream? We will have a few months until it gets warm and perfect all our ordering and making of ice cream.  I also am a fan of ice cream year round unlike a lot of ice cream shops in my old home of Massachusetts that were only open from the spring til fall. I never understood the rationale of closing during winter!

We have a lot of flavors and ideas for the coming months and I think we will start with some ice cream pies that you can special order for your Christmas get togethers.  We will pre-make some of these for opening day and think we will have these:

Grasshopper Pie-Graham Cracker Crust, Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream with Whipped Cream and Chocolate sauce drizzle
Coffee Toffee with Caramel Pie-Cookie Crust, Coffee Toffee Ice Cream with Whipped Cream and Caramel drizzle

Wish me and my family luck over the next 3.9 weeks....we are going to learn the words 'hard work'!!

p.s. Madison wanted me to mention her specifically in this blog post..and how much money she can make by WORKING at the shop ;) Love ya Madi!

Getting Closer!

Joe and I have been really busy with lots of things that will be important in our long term success of the shop. One of the first things we did was write a 20 page business plan.  We found that a business plan has helped us keep on track and we spent a ton of time deciding what we wanted before diving in head first.

Our building owner has been working hard to help us make sure that we have everything we need to be able to be successful in this location. So far the building has been gutted and a new roof placed since the Tornado of April 27th ripped it off. Also, they have added air-conditioning and heat....which I guess you don't need as a cleaners?! They also are re-surfacing the building, putting on a beautiful awning and putting up drywall, pulling all new electrical outlets, building public restrooms, putting up walls in our backroom and replacing the floor. All this even before we can get in there and paint and get set up! I am super-excited because we have gotten to choose all of our colors and since we had a perfect logo designed by Danielle Robertson of Boutique Graphique (http://boutiquegraphique.com) we continued with her chosen color scheme and are very pleased with how it will look!!

We are all set on our equipment and are leasing an 'Emery Thompson' ice cream machine or 'batch freezer'. Mr. Thompson, who now runs Emery Thompson, is the grandson of the inventor of the modern day ice cream batch freezer and is an amazingly helpful salesman! Why would you choose anyone else besides him, his family invented it! We are so pleased with his guidance and help to assure that we succeed in our shop.

We are currently looking for local artists to display their artwork for sale on our walls. If you know a budding artist, let them know I am looking for something to hang and sell for them!! We hope to be able to start working in the shop within the next 2 weeks and are aiming for an early December opening date. We are looking forward to it and are interested in trying lots of flavors, just not all at once!

See you soon!!

Dreams become reality

On Monday, October 3rd we became official Lessee's to the building for our Ice Cream Shop!! This was a nerve-racking, exciting day for both of us. I met the owner of the building for the first time and was ready for a stuffy  old businessman who only cared about making a buck. I was impressed because this guy was as excited as we were to have a 'mom & pop' operation in his building and is helping us get it set up the way we need to in order to open.  Since then, we have ordered our Emery Thompson Ice cream machine from Steve Thompson, the grandson to the inventor of the modern day ice cream machine.  The guy himself will talk to you and give you advice on what to do and assure that your ice cream is the best around!  We also have lined up our other equipment needed for the shop and have made a list of items that we still need.  We would love to do everything that everyone suggests right off the bat but will have to take it one step at a time in order to be successful.  Again, thanks to all of you for your support!!

Leap of Faith

So, tomorrow we will be taking a leap of faith and signing a lease on a building for our ice cream shop. This decision has been fairly easy for us, although slightly scary; because we both know we are doing the right thing. The most exciting part is that we are both very happy and excited about it all!


Who knew 11 years ago that we would ever be opening an ice cream shop, not us!  We have had SUCH overwhelming support from everyone around us and we are excited that a business that isn't even open yet has 200+ followers on our Facebook page...this alone has helped us have faith in what we are doing is the right thing.



 After we sign the lease tomorrow, we will get a set of keys but will still have to wait for the roof to be finished, the drywall to be put up, the building to be surfaced and painted and the awning to be installed. When all of that is compete we will work on our signs, windows, painting the inside, putting our fixtures in, shipping our equipment, decorating with our repurposed items, testing equipment, Board of Health inspection, and planning our opening.



 Joe will be working (actually he already has been) 7 days a week to open as quickly as possible and I will be helping when I get off work and on the weekends. Again, we want to thank everyone who has helped us believe in ourselves and take this leap of faith to bring you the best ice cream around!

Who Knew?

When we decided as a family that the ice cream business was for us we didn't realize that there would be such a positive response from everyone around us. Every day someone asks me where the shop is going to be located, when we are going to open and most importantly...are we going to have their favorite flavor?? It's such a great feeling imagining our shop up and running that we have put forth a ton of hours already trying to find the best deal on supplies and products that have the best quality.

We have accomplished many of the steps involved in the process of opening a new business except for negotiating a lease and a few other things. As we have searched (I think we have driven more around town in the last month than we ever have) for that perfect location, YOU have been at the forefront of our choice. Joe will be meeting with a building owner to discuss a lease on Thursday, so cross your fingers that we can negotiate what we need so that your anticipation of our location will be over!

With that being said, we had already decided to 'repurpose' as much as we can for the shop. This has led us on a journey to find exactly the right decor and we found that Joe and I both have to be really excited about the item before we purchase it! In our business plan, we described our shop in detail about the ambiance and feel and we are well on our way to the eclectic, recycled, repurposed style!! I have posted a few pictures on our Facebook page of our finds (spoon and chalkboard) but the rest will have to wait until we open.

More to come soon..... :)

Reflections for the future

As Joe and I reflect on our lives in the last 11 years together, we know that everything happens for a reason. I have become a firm believer. We had started the debt snowball a few years back because we had so much debt and were living payday to payday.We started listening to the Dave Ramsey show, worked really hard to pay off debt using the debt snowball (it really works!), have an emergency fund and learned that you must not live above your means! I never dreamed that we would be put in the position of one of us losing our job, but guess what? It did happen! This is how the American entrepreneur starts, first with hopeless despair after losing a job, then accepting it and then deciding if it is worth it to go to work for someone else or yourself!



I realize many of you may be disappointed when you get a hankering for ice cream because we have started advertising and not opened up yet but it has given us hope that this business will succeed!! We have worked very hard over the last 6 weeks, researching, writing and re-writing the business plan, looking at properties, finding distributors of products that will lessen our impact on the environment and getting our menu ideas down on paper. There is nothing more exciting than being pumped up about an idea and have 163 other people as excited as we are!!



So, please be patient...we will get there and it will be worth the wait!!

The Beginning

Well, a rainy Labor Day seemed like a great day to start blogging about our shop and it's roots. So, here it goes!!

This year has been a whopping wake up call for Joe and me.  We have been married for 10 years and have had children prior to our marriage and essentially are like the Brady bunch!  As a couple, we have 6 children together, Ashlee, who is the oldest who lives in Massachusetts, then Andy who lives in Colorado, Austin lives in Georgia with his mom, JD who lives with us and Bronson and Madison who we share custody of. We had been working on our plans for the summer to go to Joe's daughter’s wedding which was set for July 30th in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  The best part about planning this vacation was that I grew up in Massachusetts and have 3/4th of my family there.    We decided that since there would be at least 5 of us going from Alabama that we should drive up there and not try to pay the cost of flying.  We had tentatively planned this for about 10 days with 4 days total driving and so Bronson and Madison could get back in time for Aggie Band Camp. 

One Saturday morning in May, I was walking on the walking trail at the lake and had left my husband at home about to go to work.  I was listening to my music and caught a glimpse of someone walking toward me that I thought was Joe.  I took my ear buds out of my ears and strained to see this handsome guy walking slowly with his hands in his pockets toward me.  Panic and fear came over me after I realized it was him like a wave with thoughts of everything in our lives that could go wrong. As I increased my pace towards him, my mind raced.....who died? What’s happened? Why is he not at work?! As I reached him, I could see the defeat in his face. "I lost my job."

Fast-forward.  We decided that we could finagle Joe staying at home with the kids for the summer and look for a job and my gracious boss said I could take a few more days off to head to Massachusetts earlier so that we would have time to spend with my mother and my step-daughter and do some fun stuff.  We took two days to drive up (19 hour total drive!!) and spent the next two weeks enjoying the time with our families, which included a trip (actually 3-4 trips) to Kimball's Farm.

Kimball's Farm is the epicenter of ice cream to me.  They have been around since before I was born and give generous heaping scoops of ice cream that don't even fit on a cone...and it is SO good! Today it is like an amusement park with amazing food, and peole come from miles around just to taste the ice cream.  I worked at a smaller ice cream shop when I was 17-19 and basically grew up an ice cream lover...!!

As we traveled to Salem, Gloucester, Cape Cod and Boston...my children seemed to notice how many ice cream shops there are in Massachusetts.  Madison commented during one car ride, "Mom, there are as many ice cream shops here as there are Mexican restaurants at home!!  We need one at home, maybe that's what Joe can do for a job!"

Hence, the idea.  We discussed it at length on our long drive home and Joe has been working on our business plan and looking for suppliers, organic dairy farms, and places to open a shop since we got home.  We still have a lot of work to do before opening, but are committed to make this work.  Since we have told people that we were going to do this, the response has been completely overwhelmingly positive!!  We didn't realize that Southerners love ice cream just as much!

Thank you for your support and stay tuned for more information!!