The year was 1988. I was in Florida at the time, working for Multi-Vest Options in Ft. Lauderdale, shortly after graduating from Florida State. The phone rang and my older brother John said…..”Neil, I bought an ice cream delivery truck and just shipped it to St. Thomas. I need help. I’ll pay you $250 a week and give you a share of the business.”

At the time, I was clearing about $175 a week, so it didn’t take long for me to quickly blurt out, “I’m in!” A little history…. We grew up in Puerto Rico. Our father moved there from Chicago in the sixties and started a successful direct marketing business. John did a few years in different stateside colleges but did not graduate. Instead, he took flying lessons and got his pilot’s license. He started a distribution business where he would fly fresh produce from Puerto Rico to the US Virgin Islands, The British Virgin Islands and further down the Lesser Antilles. My brother was obsessed with perfection and delivering the perfect product. I remember helping him one summer while I was still in college. We were sorting through cases of apples preparing to fly them to St. Lucia. John made me go through each and every apple in each and every case and remove the bad ones and replace them with good ones. I asked him why he was so worried about an apple having a bruise, especially if it was in the middle of the case. Who would know? He said that the best way to grow your business is to deliver a better than expected product and delight your customer each and every time. “Over deliver Neil, and they will keep calling you back”

All I could think of at the time was, my back hurts….when do we pack up and hit the beach? Needless to say, word got around fast and more and more customers wanted to buy product from that guy that flies in from Puerto Rico. The business flourished. But John only had one plane, and he could only carry so much produce. He started looking for a higher profit product. No, not “that”– although drugs were exactly what was going through each and every customs agent John had to face. They found it hard to believe that John was actually trying to build a business around flying produce. As crazy as it seems, he was doing exactly that.

Enter ice cream, a much more profitable product than produce!

John noticed that the ice cream on the supermarket shelves and ice cream parlors in these islands was almost always re-frozen. Horrible quality, at a high price. People accepted it and figured that this was the way ice cream was. Icy, grainy, sandy. He saw an opportunity and ran with it. He developed a system of double corrugated cardboard boxes lined with polystyrene (like the inside of your basic foam cooler). While inside the walk in freezer of the ice cream distributor in Puerto Rico, John packed and sealed the boxes to ensure that the tubs and pints remained rock solid. The flight was about an hour long, and John could get about 5 hours out of these boxes before the ice cream began to suffer. The 5 hours would give just enough time to get to the last account and deliver perfect product. Once done in the walk in freezer, he would pack the boxes in his van, head for the airport and take off for that day’s island. Upon landing, he would quickly rent a pick up truck, clear customs, load up the boxes and head out to sell his accounts, who had pre-ordered the product. I’m not making this up…..although it seems hard to believe that anyone would try to build a business around this concept. Once John tired of the constant every day rush to avoid “meltdown” he realized that he needed to buy a truck. That is when I got the call and moved to St. Thomas, the island with the most promise.

John continued to fly the product in, but we decided to concentrate on building the business on St. Thomas. The picture at the start of this post is of the two of us, John by the plane and me loading Haagen-Dazs bars into the truck. John would fly back to PR, and I would calmly go out and make deliveries. About a year later, my brother Michael joined the business. We bought another truck and Michael moved to St. Croix, to develop that market. I remember how John would always set goals and break-even points around the number of boxes we could sell in a given week. He would say things like, “when we get to 90 boxes a week, we’ll be making some decent money…..so we need to open some more accounts to get there”. All I can remember was thinking, boxes? Boxes? We need to start thinking in dollars and another way to grow this business. It didn’t take long for John to start thinking in the same terms. At this point, we were starting to move enough product to start buying it in Florida and shipping frozen containers down to the islands.

We built walk in freezers on both St. Thomas and St. Croix. Our suppliers (Haagen-Dazs and Dreyer’s/Edy’s) were very happy with our performance and John was given the rights to distribute the Dreyer’s/Edy’s line for “the big island” – Puerto Rico. He later added Ben & Jerry’s to the mix. By 1998, we had built a business with over 15 route trucks in Puerto Rico, St. Thomas and St. Croix. John and Michael are still actively managing the business today. In 2001, I started to get “island fever” and decided to move my family (wife Amy and two girls, Chelsea and Coco) to North Carolina where I began to develop TurnKeyParlor.com.

I still talk with my brothers on a regular basis and frequently bore others with our constant ice cream business conversations. So, the moral is….I’m really not sure……. No, all kidding aside, the moral is….. work hard, “over deliver” on your promises and good things will come your way. The goal at TurnkeyParlor.com is to offer the “best apples” possible to my customers on a daily basis. So far, this approach has helped me build a really solid, rapidly growing business. TurnKeyParlor.com is visited by thousands of prospects a month, many who turn into long term customers. If you have a story you would like to tell, or would like to comment on my story, please do so. Thanks for reading this post.

Neil Williams, President of Keyword Farms LLC

www.TurnKeyParlor.com

877-817-5716

equipment@turnkeyparlor.com

How many frozen yogurt machines do you really need for a self serve store to be successful? Is there a “right” number of machines? Many people struggle with this question.

The number of machines you use in a self serve yogurt store can vary from 3 to 10. The bigger franchise stores like Yogurt Land, Menchie’s and Orange Leaf seem to like the 7 to 8 machine offering. The real question is – will more machines really make you more profitable? I don’t think so.

I can see many reasons why limiting the number of machines to 5 or less will in the end be the most profitable strategy. Other equipment dealers will hate me for saying this, but I really believe it. Sure, I would love to sell you 8 machines instead of 5. But I would prefer that you have a more profitable business, and open three stores that have 3 to 6 machines each. We both end up making more money this way. As an independent, the number of machines you go with will be determined in part by the following factors:

1. Size of location: Obviously, you can’t pack 10 machines into a 750 sq ft. space. The machines need about 12″ to 18” between them, and total space becomes a factor considering you need topping counters, register space, back room coolers, sinks, etc.
2. Start up Money: If you don’t have enough $, you aren’t going with a high machine number. You might be forced to stick to 3-6 machines in order to keep your total investment under control.
3. Competition: Who are you competing against? How many machines do they have? Again, just because you are competing against a nearby store that has 8 machines, do you really need to match the number of flavors they offer? A less expensive option is to offer more toppings than your competitor with more machines. 

The question is…………is it really better to go with more machines? There is a certain “WOW Factor” when a customer walks into a store that has 8 machine and 16 flavors of frozen yogurt. And if you have a super high volume location, more machines might be the best, most profitable choice. But going with 3-6 machines can also be wise for many reasons. This number helps minimize your investment, control your utilities cost and run a leaner store. And because this business model is still relatively young, there still isn’t enough data out there to tell me that having that 16 vs. 10 flavors means incremental sales that make up for the added overhead and investment.

Competition is heating up these days. I would rather be the guy with the manageable debt load and lower overhead than the guy that lets his fruit toppings go bad because he’s so worried about losing a nickel to pay his bills. When its all said and done, the lean will survive while the weeding out is happening. Here is another reason you may want to consider limiting your number of yogurt machines. If you line up more than 6 machines, you will need to spend more on air conditioning to ensure the machines don’t overheat. Or you will need to go with a glycol system, which adds about $15k to your investment.

6 or less machines, you can get away with air cooled machines. What is the difference? Air cooled machines are fully self-contained. You don’t hook anything up to them, aside from the power cord. But they create more heat inside your back room. Water cooled machines are cooled by water – or a glycol system. They won’t make your store warmer, but they will cost you $ in water. Air cooled machines cool themselves by blowing hot air out and away from the machines. This means more heat in your store. When 6 machines or less are blowing hot air into your location, the heat is manageable. You can either have your contractor put in an extractor fan, which helps pull the hot air up and outside your store, or you can buy a higher powered air conditioner and over power the hot air. Best bet is to CLEARLY discuss this with your A/C contractor prior to construction. A lot of times a split system A/C is the best idea – so that you don’t freeze the people inside your store while trying to keep the back room at a reasonable temperature. But once you go past 6 machines, going air cooled is a tough call. At the 6 machine or more mark, you still might be able to go air cooled if you have enough space, but it is a little more challeging. So, you’re looking at plumbing 7 or more machines to city water, which means a substantial water bill.

If you want to avoid a high monthly water bill, you have a glycol system installed. This is sort of like the radiator in your car and the glycol is the coolant that runs through it to keep the engine from overheating. This isn’t cheap. It can run about $15k or more depending on installation costs and what system you buy. Stores with 7 or more machines almost always go for the glycol system and the high initial investment. We periodically have used chillers in our inventory, so check with us if you think this might be the route you want to take. In summary, the number of machines you decide to go with will depend on many factors and less machines doesn’t necessarily mean a less profitable store.

Thanks for Reading!

Neil Williams – President of TurnKeyParlor

equipment@turnkeyparlor.com

If you read my blog post titled My Humble Beginnings in Paradise, you already know that I spent 10 years in the Virgin Islands building an ice cream distributorship with my older brother John and my younger brother Michael. Every year, as hurricane season approaches, I’m reminded of how Michael and I went through two of them that completely decimated our business. Hugo in 1989 and Marilyn in 1995.

At the end of this post, there is a video with some pretty intense footage from both hurricanes. Hugo hit the Virgin Islands with such force (category 5), that our house was without electricity for 4 months. Yup, 4 long months of filling our little generator with gas when we got home from sweating our @%* off at work. The generator would run out of gas at about 3am, the fans would shut off, the temperature would go from 78 to 90 and the mosquitoes would start biting. Ahh, life in paradise

We lost everything, except our ice cream truck and my pick up truck. As you’ll see in the video below, I had an old GMC Sierra, and it was crushed by a huge tree that came to rest on top of it. We weren’t able to leave our house for 4 days after the hurricane because the roads were all blocked by debris. Incredibly, after we cut the tree off the truck, it sprang up and ran (another thing you’ll see in the video)! Once we did, we headed to our “warehouse”, which wasn’t really a warehouse, but a big, old Flavorich side loader truck that warehoused our inventory. When we got there, it smelled like rotten ice cream and it was really, really disgusting. Sticky, melted ice cream dripping out of the door seals.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t afford to have someone else clean it, so I had to jump in the maggot infested compartments and power spray it clean. Another little “visual” that has managed to stick with me to this day. John, who was living in Puerto Rico at the time, flew his airplane to St. Thomas and rescued us. We spent a few days in PR getting fed and cleaned up before we headed back to rebuild. John told us he had to freeze our salaries. We had no insurance and took a big hit with our inventory loss. We had to go on an “expense only” allowance where we were reimbursed when we presented receipts. Which basically meant we got to eat food and pay the rent. That was it. This lasted for 3 months while we built the business back up.

We slept very little given the conditions, and it took a while for the island stores to get back up to speed. Those were tough days. We really wanted to quit…but hung in there. In 1995, our business was going great. We had built a walk-in freezer in St. Thomas, and had expanded to St. Croix, St. John and the big island of Puerto Rico. Our sales had increased 5 fold. Then the “little” hurricane called Marilyn decided to pay us a visit. By the time Marilyn hit in 1995, I was married to Amy and had a 5 year old baby girl named Chelsea. We lived on Mt. Top, which was about as high up on St. Thomas as you could get. Not a good place to be during a hurricane. We had taken in Amy’s dad, “the Bear” who had a brain injury and incapable of taking care of himself.

We also took in Thad, who was an 18 year old kid who needed help. He worked for us on the delivery truck. During the same week, Amy’s brother Josh was paying a visit. We had a full house of 6 plus the cats and dogs. Marylin was supposed to be a minor hurricane. But it turned out to be a monster. Much worse than Hugo, even though it was a category 3. Which was a joke, because I went through both of them, and Marilyn hit us squarely and brutally. We had been through many small hurricanes, so we were all excited in that weird way you get when you know a storm is approaching. Although I must say, having been through 2 major ones, I no longer get excited about any storm. We fell asleep around midnight, only to be awakened by vicious winds. Things started slamming up against the house making really loud noises. Josh grabbed a flashlight since it was pitch black inside the house, pointed it at the ceiling and I asked “is that sky”? Josh said “yes, that’s sky”!!

Realizing that the roof was ripping off (our landlord said it was supposed to withstand category 5 winds…ha) we rushed to the bathroom, which seemed to be the safest room. All 6 of us in a bathroom that was tiny – 6 feet by 3 feet at most. For 5 grueling hours, we wondered if we were going to survive. Again, the damage was so severe, it took 4 months to get electricity back to our home. Again, the generators, the mosquitoes, and this time around, grandpa bear asking every 5 minutes, “when is 60 minutes coming on the TV?”

Needless to say, there was no cable or TV for that matter… We were barely able to save our inventory. Having gone through Hugo, we were smart enough to buy an old, used generator on the cheap. It worked, but was leaking water and had to be refilled hourly. This was brutal…..pouring water in the radiator, diesel in the tank in 90 degree plus weather. We did have a freezer though, and it managed to hold, which was a plus in our life. No need to clean melted ice cream this time. I guess I wrote this post to let you know that even when things get really tough, they are temporary. You keep plowing through and good things will turn around. Today, the distribution business we built sells a combined $15 million a year with 20 routes. Watch the video below to see some pretty cool footage.