My family owned Garside's, which has made its own ice cream on Ferry Road since 1956, for decades. I developed the recipes, trained the employees, managed operations, set the prices and did just about everything else, including mowing the lawn.
When customer traffic began declining, I wanted to understand why. So I made the business the subject of my master's research: customer surveys, interviews, focus groups, vendor pricing, historical sales and weather data. The findings challenged some obvious explanations and exposed problems we could actually fix.
The resulting plan focused on consistency, product variety, customer retention and training. One immediate change, renegotiating our dairy pricing, cut a key ingredient from $26 to $16 a bag and saved more than $7,000 a season. It was a practical lesson in separating what a business can control from what it can't.
I didn't just sling ice cream. But I absolutely slung ice cream.
The early years were growth. When my family bought the stand, the summer I finished high school, it had a loyal following, thirteen flavors and unpredictable hours. We set regular hours, upgraded the cream and expanded the flavors; revenue rose 800% over the next two seasons. I wrote about a hundred recipes, starting with Mint Chocolate Chip the first summer, and thirteen flavors became forty. Much of it I did on weekends from Boston. We sold the stand in 2018.
The decline came much later. The stand records every order, every day, in a notebook, and by the 2000s decades of those records showed customer traffic falling. The market around us was changing, too: tourism along the Maine coast had softened, the country was counting cholesterol, and fast-food chains were selling inexpensive sundaes.
To understand what was driving the decline and where we could make a difference, I made Garside's the subject of my master's capstone: two surveys, 314 respondents; fourteen customer interviews and focus groups; a vendor-pricing review; state weather data; and a season observing the business at the serving windows. A third survey followed in 2017.
- The historical data didn't support weather as the principal explanation: four of the best ice cream summers in the record produced no bump. Customers didn't point to the economy either: 87% said it hadn't changed how often they came.
- Customers didn't point to the product: 95% rated Garside's equal to or better than Häagen-Dazs and Ben & Jerry's, and 58% said better.
- The research pointed to four likely causes. Three belonged to the market: Maine's tourism slump after 2001, a public eating less ice cream for its arteries, and a cheaper sundae at the drive-through. The fourth was ours: hours trimmed at both ends, and running out of basics like sugar cones. Once a customer is lost, getting them back is the hard part.
- So the plan worked on what we controlled: consistency and promotion. Fifteen points, most of them cheap: new flavors every week (62% asked for them), a flavor contest (winner: Mosquito Ripple), weekday specials, gift certificates, the old hours restored, and a rewritten training manual.
- The first move paid before the paper was finished. We asked the dairy for volume pricing. The base mix went from $26 a bag to $16 overnight, saving over $7,000 a season.
The Scoop
Employee manual · 10 pages · PDF · 0.9 MB
A good operating plan isn't worth much if the next employee doesn't know how to carry it out. Point five of the plan: I rewrote our employee manual to make procedures, expectations and customer-service standards clear from day one, from opening and closing checklists to the "arc" scooping technique and what to do about a Grumpster. It became the foundation for each season's training. Training meant showing them the work, letting them practice, and checking that they could carry it out. This is the 2015 edition.
