The Ice Cream Cottage Story - Part One

I think y'all know that I grew up in a family that owned Maggie's Homemade Ice Cream shops on Cape Cod.  When my parents decided to sell the business, they were in their late sixties and all six of their children were married, had young families, and were growing their careers.  Nobody was able to take over the business, though Phil and I wanted to.  At the time, he was (still is!) a high school teacher with summers off but we had two babies and a third on the way, no money to invest and the timing just wasn't right.  We always looked back and wished we could have figured something out back then, and dreamed of having our own little shop in the future.

Fast forward about fifteen years and we were swimming along in life with seven kids and a dog.  I was working full time as an accountant and Phil had earned another Master's degree, this one in Educational Leadership.  We felt ready to take the next step of him pursuing administrator roles, which would mean that he would be working all year round and no longer able to care for our kids in the summer plus work part-time odd jobs.  But the kids were older and able to babysit and the littles could attend camps.  Phil started his search to become a Catholic high school administrator and had some interviews and was offered some positions, but with each job offer at a school outside our diocese came the choice of losing our current tuition plan for our kids.  As you can imagine, the tuition benefit for seven kids isn't something you just give up to make a little more money doing a much larger job at a school further away.  We kept praying and felt that maybe it wasn't the right plan for our family at the moment.  Maybe it would be in future years when we didn't have as many kids that were elementary and high school aged. 

{Let's flashback a few years here, before the pandemic happened, when I asked Phil to call the owners of a small ice cream shop in our town that seemed permanently closed.  We have lived in this town for 18 years and we never once saw it opened.  He called the owner, told her that we were interested in the shop and found out that her husband had an accident a few years earlier which resulted in brain injury which was not allowing him to work fully.  They owned the ice cream shop and the two restaurants on either side.  She was understandably overwhelmed by all of this and said that she just couldn't make any decisions at the time about the future of the ice cream shop.  We totally understood.}

Back to the current time of praying and discerning our future goals, and we decided to meet with a financial advisor.  I had seen an ad that our library was having free financial consultations and since I had just changed my job, I had questions about what to do with my retirement funds.  Phil and I met with the financial advisor and discussed our financial situation.  He was mostly just complimentary on how we handled things, which was nice for this accountant to hear :)  At some point I stated that I wasn't happy in my position and that I couldn't wait to retire or at least reduce my work to part-time.  He asked me what kind of job I would want to do if I could choose anything.  I replied without hesitation, "I want to open an ice cream shop."  Phil looked at me, shocked as we hadn't really discussed actually making this happen.  It was always just a dream, like some would say that they hope to live on a big self-sufficient farm one day but never go through the steps of buying said farm.  We didn't have savings in the bank to open a business, nor were we able to give up our current incomes to gamble on a business.

But being the man who tries to make all of our dreams come true, Phil got stuck on the ice cream shop idea and it became a fun thing to discuss.  A few weeks after the financial consultation, Phil was teaching his high school students and one of them mentioned that her mom owned an ice cream shack.  Phil jokingly said "Well if she ever wants to sell it, let me know."  The student came up to him after school and said that she thought her mom might actually be interested in selling the shack soon and gave him her contact info.  Phil reached out, and we met with the owner and learned all about her business, which she had started mostly to give her five kids a summer job.  Those kids were all growing up and moving on (the youngest was about to graduate high school) and she was happy to find a family to potentially sell it to in a couple years.

Phil started working at the ice cream shack last summer, to understand the business and see if it would be a good fit for us.  The owner was in no rush to sell and we were in no rush to buy so it was just feeling things out for the summer.  The shack had a lot of perks (low rent, take out only, loyal customers) but it was about 20 minutes from our house and that fact just kept nagging at me.  It was just a bit too far for my liking, as I imagined running some gallons of milk out to them on a busy night and it would have been almost an hour commute to drive, shop for the milk, drop off and drive home.  Phil kept reminding me that I had lived about 20 minutes away from my family's ice cream shops and it had worked out.  

The Shack

After the summer ended, we agreed to meet with the owner at some point to discuss future plans and then didn't hear from her for months.  But I'm not blaming her at all.  We didn't reach out either, because we were really unsure of what to do.  Phil wanted to buy it because he would be fulfilling the ice cream shop dream, but I didn't think the location was the best and we hadn't discussed a price and I had no idea what we were willing to pay or what she was hoping to get.  As the months went on and the discussion was nonexistent, it felt like maybe this wasn't meant to be or at least not meant to be for this coming summer...

Part Two here