If you’re passionate about ice cream and other sweet treats, opening an ice cream shop is a great way to share your passion. Your ice cream shop can become a one-stop shop for all things sweet from ice cream to gelato to milkshakes to frozen yogurt to floats.
There’s no denying that Americans love ice cream. Like a lot. The average American eats ice cream 28.5 times in a year and in any given two-week period, according to research by NPD Group, 40% of Americans will eat ice cream.
In fact, it’s estimated that 90% of American households regularly indulge in sweet treats like ice cream, so if you open up an ice cream shop, chances are very good that you’re going to be successful. If you’re seriously considering about opening a shop, it can have many benefits including:
- You have the potential to make a lot of money if you’ve got a good business plan and great products to offer people.
- You’ll have creative freedom to design the shop just how you want it. Since you’re the boss, you pick the ice cream flavors, you pick what kinds of things you’re going to sell, you pick the color of the spoons and the bowls and you pick the color of paint for the shops walls. You have control over everything.
- With a great product and welcoming atmosphere, your ice cream shop can become the new hangout spot in town. Everyone—from families stopping for a bite to teenagers to grandparents treating their grandchildren—will be drawn to your place and it will become one of the most popular spots in town, especially during the summer.
- Ultimately you get to share your passion for ice cream and sweet treats with people in your community. You can get creative and try new items on the menu, you can go for classic or crazy décor and you can interact with people who love ice cream as much as you do.
Opening an ice cream shop can be a great business venture. But what exactly does it take to be successful? Wherever you’re opening your establishment, you need to recognize your biggest business concerns:
- Competition
- Supply costs
- Scheduling
- Reliability of employees
- Business growth
By mastering those objectives, you can turn a budding ice cream business into the talk of the town. If you’re going to open an ice cream shop, here’s how you can master the concerns listed above:
- Invest in the experience: If you’re in a big city, you know that people can get ice cream from a lot of places. Figure out what you can offer the average customer that they can’t get at other places. Whatever it is you offer, maximize it so that people will come to your shop for ice cream.
- Use technology: Any business worth its salt these days uses technology every day. A point of sale (POS) system will help you keep track of your inventory and the orders taken among other things.
- Market: You can easily get word of your business and its deals and specials out quickly to customers by automating messages on different social media platforms.
- Use automatic reordering: By getting your inventory under control, you’ll know how much material you use in a given time and can reorder supplies much faster. That means you need to take stock of everything from the cups to the paper straws to the ice cream making materials. By getting all that in order, you’ll able to make smarter business decisions with your money.
- Be flexible with employees: When it comes to your employees, make things easy for them by streamlining scheduling and allowing them to swap shifts easily if they need to. You can also create a training program to make things easier that has clear objectives and allows them to learn and job shadow.
When it comes to opening an ice cream shop or any successful business, the sky is the limit. A strong business plan, loads of passion for what you do and heaps of creativity can help you turn your ice cream shop into the best place in town.