Kelly's Homemade Ice Cream

Hi, my name is Scott. My name is Kelly and I'm Kelly's homemade ice cream here in Orleans, Florida. Kelly's homemade ice cream was made in 2014 with an ice cream truck. And now today we have five sweet sauce and three counters. Here in the north of Florida, we make all of our ice cream here in-house. Roasted seasonal flavors and featured flavors everywhere. What makes our ice cream unique is that we have seasonal and featured flavors. These high quality ingredients. Jerry from Florida, roasted the flavors. Being part of the community is really important. It helps us grow and is being involved in the local schools and giving that. We originally seeked out assistance from SBDC because our business started to grow and we needed mentorship. Kelly is an RN by trade. I was an accountant but we never started a run of business. So we needed help. The advisory board council is the service we've used the most from the SBDC. It's a group of advisors that have a lot of different industry experience. They've just been great mentors, places we can bounce ideas off of, consultants. They challenge us a lot and it's been a sure way of helping. We've approached our advisory board council meetings the way we would approach any board meetings. We prepare a presentation of where we've been, where we are at now, where we're going in the future. We bring up our biggest issues for the board to get feedback and counseling on that. And then we open it up for questions because that's where we get a lot of challenges from the board. They're asking questions that we didn'think about and we leave having a lot of new knowledge and things to watch out for, things to think about. It's very helpful. When we started working with the SBDC, we had three locations and now we have eight. They helped us grow, came off ideas, we have challenges that arise. Yeah, our revenues have grown over 100% and staff has more than doubled. So our short term goals are we've got two more locations opening shortly. Our first one outside of the Greater Orlando area will be opening. We also are partnering with Fox Out of Coffee, a company that started here with our park. And our plan is to grow with them, with our Kelly's counter-account set, inside some of their locations. Yeah, I was saying to somebody that started their own business, they need the SBDC advisory board of all their potentials, ask questions, email, engage, prepare for meetings. Use them to your full potential. Yeah, I think it's really helped us step back from the business and work on the business, not just in the business. It gives us the time to get outside of putting on fires and think about the future and work through all that stuff. It's great to have other people respected on it as well. Yeah, it's a good time to invest.