An entrepreneur left art school to start an ice cream company, but didn't focus on customers until a coffee shop ran out of her favorite scone. That moment made her realize she was disappointing her own customers at Scream Ice Cream. She rebuilt the business around consistency and quality, which grew into a $150M company.
Chapters
Looking back now, what was the single decision or move that you felt separated you from the entrepreneurs that probably had a similar idea, but they didn't make it? One of the things that kind of made the biggest difference for me was I had left an— literally an art class, just got up and left, never went back to college because I wanted to go home and make ice cream. I was bored in this class, but I was still thinking like an artist instead of thinking about what's selling, what do people want? I was just making whatever I was interested in. So if you came into Scream Ice Cream and you got salty caramel one day, and you brought all your friends back the next day to have it, I might not have it. And I didn't realize that that was disappointing people. Eventually I closed Scream, and it wasn't until I was at this coffee shop— I really was there because there was this beautiful orange scone that I'd fallen in love with— and I got up to the front and the person was like, 'We're out of the scone, we don't have it today.' And I was like, 'What do you mean?' I didn't know what to order, I didn't really want anything else, and I left. And that moment changed everything because I realized what a disappointment I felt at that moment. This is exactly what I was doing to all of my customers at Scream. From that second on, I wrote a business plan and I put all all of the emphasis on our customers and the quality of what we were doing and the stories we were telling. And that made all of the difference. It was no longer about me thinking about me and my sort of thing that I wanted to tell the world, but instead it was more, I have a perspective that we can make better ice creams, that we can make them with beautiful ingredients from beautiful, amazing farms and other people. And we're going to tell those stories. We're going to listen very closely to what works, and if it works, it's going to stay. And if it doesn't, we're going to let it go. And that literally is what we do to this day. We've never run out of salty caramel.
