Why

Why this is the best business

First of all – think about yourself! Are you going to put your time and effort into something that you’d be dreading to do day after day until you retire? I think not, we all like doing things that we love. And if you will love making gelato so will your customers buying it, and even more so if it tastes the best! Australians already are third-highest consumers of ice cream in the world, topped only by the Americans and surprisingly New Zealanders. We can improve the standing by making more and better gelato than ever, and you can contribute to that. Flavours that have not been invented yet can be designed by you!

Job Satisfaction Like Nowhere Else !

An ice cream shop, especially one where the product is made fresh by hand every day, is the best and most enjoyable place to work! If there ever was a place you do not want to retire from this is the one. This is a dream I had when I was young studying at university back in Europe. But it seemed ridiculous at the time to me and everyone else. Why? I never looked at the business side of it. It was clearly something not for me, I studied Computer Science, finished with a PhD and was expected to build a successful career in IT. Which is exactly what happened, until 20 years later when I decided to revisit my childhood dream and look at this business again.

What about you?

Do not make the same mistake, do not wait another 20 years. But I am not telling you to run for your life without reason. You need to make money and lots of it! This will happen in your gelato shop. Have a look at the profit margin chart again and think how it compares to anything else you know.

Yes, it is the same chart as the one you’ve seen before. Let me explain it in more detail. Your profit margin is the percentage of money you take as profit from each sale. In any retail situation this is very important. Figures of around 50% are considered good. Your figures are WAY ABOVE THAT! Of course, you might say what about my pay? Well, the figures in this chart exclude the salary cost, and of course if you pay someone to sell your product while you’re playing golf then the margins are lower. As a guide I have calculated a break-even point, meaning level of pay you need to stay under to still make a profit. For Gelato the level is $37.50 per hour and for sorbet it is $39 per hour. And these are conservative estimates. In reality you can comfortably train young staff to sell gelato and sorbet very efficiently at much much lower pay and make bigger profit margin! Or of course retain the whole profit yourself… but let’s face it paying someone else is often a better way to go, you might want to run the store as investment and not spend all your time there. In that case at $10 per hour you still make some 44% of sales as profit. Not bad investment, it surely beats keeping your money under the mattress…

Leave competition behind!

Before I finish making it all look glamorous let me take the biggest worry off your mind. What happens to the stuff that you do not sell? That was the question on my mind when I was about to start this business. I had images of me and my family eating all the ice cream at the end of the day. Because an important selling point of this product is that you make it fresh every day, right? I recently visited a gelato store on NSW central coast that someone recommended. I have never been there, and it did look appealing. They must have been doing rather well by the looks of it, but once I got inside and looked into the display case I realised it was a product made from pre-mixed powder distributed by one of the major ingredient suppliers. This is fine, and there might be a good case for using these types of ingredients. However, there are two downsides – your product will not be winning any awards, the customers will soon figure that out, and secondly – you will have no idea what to do with the product that is not sold. Well – GOOD NEWS, this does not happen in my store. Because you know exactly what is in your product you can reuse it. An enormous advantage which means you will leave the competition behind ! Yet, at the same this does not mean compromising quality, or cutting corners in terms of food safety, not at all – it is simply FULL CONTROL over your product. A large multinational company will never give you full control over the product, if they did they would not be able to extract full profits from your work, right? So in short – you basically have nearly NO WASTE, no product thrown out or poured down the drain. But if you have family don’t let them go disappointed either – the small amount of gelato and sorbet that occasionally is left in the case can be taken home at the end of the day 🙂

Some people told me this sounds too good to be true. Yes, it does. I had the same doubts, and now that I have been in the business for 3 years I can safely offer you to come and have a look for yourself. If you are really interested in good food, passionate about becoming the best of the best, and willing to put an effort to achieve –  READ ON TO THE NEXT STEP!