Selling ice-cream in winter

I don't know about you, but I've had some great moments sharing ice cream with friends during my university years.

Homemade matcha ice-cream was a thing one of my Japanese friends introduced into our hall of residence. It's done by mixing green matcha powder into semi-melted vanilla ice cream, and then refreezing it in the freezer.

There was one time maybe three or four years ago, at a somewhat reunion-ish pot-luck party, when I bought two boxes. One was my signature homemade spinach pasta which did pretty well.

The other box I casually took out only after everyone seemed to have gotten full from all the food we cooked. It was the matcha ice cream, and one of my best mates took a spoon to it immediately (yes we eat it straight from the box).

The others saw what was happening, and because humans have a second stomach for ice cream, the box was empty before I knew it... From memory, I think there were two other boxes of ice cream in the flat but no one really touched it.

Also when I was in Venice, Italy (as mentioned in a previous post), not a day went by when we didn't have ice-cream, or Gelato rather, at least twice a day. We would get two or three cones between the three of us, with two or three flavours per cone!

I actually tend to get sour, fruity flavours, but after tasting my friends' sweeter ones, I decided they clearly had more expertise (having travelled more of Italy perhaps) and left the decision to them towards the end of our trip. Oh, I actually met the two of them again for a night in Budapest, Hungary where I was travelling with my father, and we went to this famous Gelarto Rosa (flower ice cream) shop to relive that good ol' sensation~

Anyways, enough of my Gelato stories. Today I'm going to share a thought or two on an article I was reading, on why you ought to start an ice-cream business in winter!

There was a entrepreneur who started to sell ice-cream in the dead of winter. Many people laughed at her, saying that she couldn't have picked a worse time to start.

"Obviously ice-cream should be sold in summer!" they would say. But the entrepreneur didn't care. "I have my reasons", she said a matter-of-factly.

Half a year went by, and the hot summer was in full swing. The entrepreneur's business was blossoming along, and clearly in better shape than other competing shops nearby.

Those who laughed at her before were curious, "How is your business doing so well now?" She smiled and replied:

In winter, I was able to negotiate a better price for my stock since less people bought ice-cream.
I purposely set myself to tackle this challenging environment. In order to keep afloat, I had to be creative in finding ways to attract customers, up my service levels, and cut costs. Being able to survive winter means I can definitely survive summer, but not vice versa.
Sure, there are less customers in winter than in summer. But as I was just starting my business, that gave me plenty of time to iron out the rough edges associated with a startup like managing and training staff. By the time summer came, I was ready.

Every now and then, we hear stories about how the economy is doing bad.

The thing is, the economy operates in cycles. It does not keep on going up, just as there are upturns, there are also downturns.

For business owners, it's clearly better to sell your business at the peak when you're profitable. Conversely, if you're looking to purchase or start a business, do it when the economy isn't that great, when the price is much lower.

The same ode goes for buying shares - buy low, sell high. Yet it's crazy how many people do the opposite! Selling their business or shares when it's not doing so well, and purchasing a business or shares when things look great. This is really counter to what you should be doing!

Say you're nearing retirement and own a business which is worth $200,000 at its peak, with a net yearly profit of $80,000. But you find it hard to let go and want to keep on earning money for another year.

The next year, the economy crashes, and your business isn't doing so well. You feel like selling now, but your business is only worth half of what is was at $100,000 now. If you do the math, not only did you give up one year of retirement, you also lost $20,000 ($200k-$100k+$80k). Was it worth it?

Sure, we never know when the economy will peak and when it will fall. Timing the market is never a good idea. For an extreme case, just look at Bitcoin in 2017-2018.

Sure, sometimes you just can't control when you have to enter or exit a crazy market. Before going on my exchange in March, I was subjected to the summer rental market scramble. All the university students were looking for flats, and it was tough finding a reasonable short term place at a reasonable price.

Coming back in the middle of winter though, yes there's a slight rise in demand for the second semester students, but it is a lot more reasonable. Also you get to experience the true value of a flat during the viewing, there's no glorifying how sunny or warm the place is.

Yes I'm living in a cold-ish place now, but at least the price is good and it's within walking distance to my university! Besides, I know that things can only get better from here on (temperature-wise), that's the beauty of getting into the game in winter!

All these winter analogies reminds me of a similar group of computer scientists who toiled away at their labs doing AI research at a Canadian research instutite called CIFAR in the midst of the AI winter. You can read the full story here. Basically though, the three of them kept the torch burning and became known as the 'godfathers of AI' when the field boomed, winning the 2018 Turing Award for their work on deep neural networks.

I'm not saying you shouldn't be chasing fads. I understand that there are people out there who can't work out what to do in their life, and following the crowd is something next to instinct.

But for once maybe, realize that summer doesn't last forever. You can't go on mindlessly selling ice-cream forever (unless you're in the tropics maybe), especially if you don't have what it takes to operate an ice-cream business when the going gets tough.

Winter beckons, are you up for it?