The Ice Cream Cottage Story - Part Three

Part Two here

We met again with the developer on February 2, 2023 with more questions and got more answers.  The developer actually went to the same Catholic high school where Phil teaches.  He told us that his older cousin was a coach there and used to drive him to school each morning, early enough for him to get a workout in and attend morning Mass.  We took this as a good sign :)  We met for lunch on February 13, 2023 with the developer and the owner of the properties and my parents, whom we had now brought into the tight circle of trust as we needed their advice desperately.  The owner and developer definitely thought we would be the perfect family to open the ice cream shop.  We were flattered but understood that they wanted to secure us in that spot in order to have something to tell the potential buyers of the available restaurants.  Once they had a new ice cream shop run by a family with years of experience, they could attract restaurateurs (why is there no 'n' in that word?) more easily.  Getting that first spot filled was crucial to them and a dream come true for us.  Leaving that lunch we felt very certain that we wanted to move ahead, but there were still so many unknowns.  Let's just say I now have the utmost respect for anyone who's started their own business!

First up was figuring out how to get the finances to start the business, remodel the building, buy equipment, etc.  We were blessed to get loans from a couple family members and one friend (who is more like family).  They were all very generous and loaned us the money without any interest payable or a due date.  Once we secured those funds, we had to settle on a lease with the owner of the building.  This is where weeks went by and legal fees started adding up as we wanted to agree to a fair deal.  We were the understudies in the agreements because we had never done this before and we were trying to determine the fine line between negotiating for what we wanted but not asking for too much that might cause us to lose the place.  Who's responsibility was it to fix up the place, get the utilities up to code, paint, repair the roof, etc.  What was a fair price on the building when it had only been an unsuccessful ice cream shop in the past?  What if we wanted to pull out in two years but had poured in money to the building?    

The owner had bought all of the properties and needed to wait two years to sell them in order to get a tax break.  We agreed to lease with the option to buy in two years.  One of the biggest disagreements we had was that we were originally told that each building had it's own deed and could be bought separately. We later found out from the town that was not the case, and that the ice cream shop was on the same property and deed as one of the restaurants.  Since we had agreed to lease the shop for two years and then have the option to buy...but what were we actually buying?  We finally agreed that they would pursue with the town to get it separately deeded but if that was not possible, then we would buy it as a commercial condo.  We hired a lawyer to work with their lawyer and eventually after much fretting and many near calling-it-offs, we finally signed the lease on March 20, 2023.

Signing a lease at the end of March and wanting to open at the beginning of May leaves not a lot of time to do a quite a bit of work.  We hadn't spent the weeks of negotiations doing nothing, of course!  We had been busy researching equipment and setting up an LLC and picking a name and designing a logo and setting up a website and social media and getting an EIN and a business license and taking a serve safe course, creating a menu and opening a bank account, etc.  So once that lease was signed we hit the ground running!  We called the shop The Ice Cream Cottage because it's just a wee little shop between two bigger restaurants, it's open seasonally and it's by the water, like a summer cottage.  We did toy with the idea of calling it Maggie's, since we have a Maggie and the restaurant next door was named Margaret's:

Our young Maggie at the old Margaret's Restaurant next door.

A young Colleen Margaret at the old Maggie's.  Confused yet?

We ultimately decided against naming it Maggie's because we weren't making our own ice cream and the original Maggie's was actually Maggie's Homemade Ice Cream and I didn't want to taint the name in any way.  Maybe one day we can make our own and call it Maggie's.  

The old Maggie's business card

I have always loved a navy/white/pink theme because it's classy and nautical and fun, perfect for a summer ice cream cottage, so those became our colors.  I ordered navy t-shirts and hats, picked out the navy paint color for the trim, white vinyl for the front of the shop, and used pink accents on the signs.  My dad, a former builder, created a sketch for The Cottage:

He's Irish so he doesn't know how to spell Flavors ;)

I had personally given up Instagram and Facebook years ago, so getting back on for the business was a little daunting but I picked it up again pretty quickly, or so I thought.  Since we weren't announcing the new business publicly until the lease was signed, I set the accounts to private so nobody would see them, or so I thought.  A few days later, I get a text from a former coworker of mine saying he's so excited to hear about the new business.  My heart dropped as I wondered how he found out, and he told me he saw my Instagram account.  Apparently I had set it up as a personal account and set it to private, but then I switched it to a business account later and didn't realize that automatically made it public.  He got a notification that it was an account he might like and saw that it was our family opening it and reached out with congrats.  He teaches and coaches some of my kids, so I asked him to please not say anything to anyone yet as we were going back and forth with the lease and wanted to make sure it was definitely happening before we announced.  He promised he wouldn't tell a soul, or so he thought.  

A few days later, Andrew came home from school and said "Coach asked me if I knew about the ice cream thing yet and I was confused.  What ice cream thing?  Are you bringing ice cream to the sports banquet or something?"  Oh boy.  Time to spill the beans.  We called our three high-schoolers into our bedroom, shut the door, and told them about the new shop.  They were excited!  Maggie started putting together all the dots of why we had been going out so much recently (for meetings and showings) and they had a million questions for us.  It felt really good to finally be able to include them on it. 

Once we officially signed the lease, we told the rest of the kids what we were planning on doing, as well as our families.  Our oldest three boys plus four cousins had already worked in an ice cream shop and Maggie was planning on joining them this summer, so it had already been a family joke that we needed to open up our own shop with all of these family scoopers.  Speaking of that ice cream shop where the boys worked, we reached out to that owner a couple of weeks before we signed the lease to give her the heads up that we were most likely opening our own shop and the kids wouldn't return to her this summer.  She was very understanding and offered us any help and advice that we needed.  We told her that Eamon could continue working for both shops, and the cousins would continue working for her as well.  We didn't want her to feel like we were stealing half of her employees, even though we would have loved to hire family!

Some of my family at the ice cream shop my boys worked at.

We also knew we had to call the owner of the ice cream shack where Phil had worked last summer, because we weren't going to buy her shop now that we were buying this one.  We were really nervous to tell her because even though she hadn't reached out to let us know of any decision, we felt a bit obligated to buy it once she was ready to sell.  Wouldn't you know, a few days after we signed the lease, she reached out to us and asked us to meet her at her home.  Awkward.  We went over, prepared to tell her that we were opening our own shop this summer and could no longer buy her shack...but before we could even say that, she totally shocked us with her story...  

Part Four here