Am I really going to do this?

Tracy Kim Horn
Sep 7, 2018 · 3 min read

Over the last five years, my hard drive had become a cemetery for unrealized business plans. A paleo fast casual restaurant, a neighborhood diner specializing in breakfast, a gastro pub featuring New England’s best, a third wave coffee shop with a Waldorf-inspired playspace for young children, a CrossFit gym, an upscale suburban food hall… I’ve gotten to varying stages of the planning process for these and many other brick and mortar businesses in my community, so when I first had the idea of starting a modern soft serve truck, you would have been forgiven for thinking that this idea would start in Microsoft PowerPoint and end in Excel.

I’ve met with landlords and real estate agents, run logo contests and bought domain names that have long expired. None of these tasks had ever gotten me to the point of no return and yet… something felt different this time. I loved the name Parfait, with the holding company being called Parfait Please LLC. The business itself didn’t “check all the boxes” of my professional aspirations, but it was a manageable first step in the right direction. It seemed both like more than I could handle at the moment, and not nearly enough.

I began to make the conscious decision to skip out on my beloved CrossFit workouts at the gym. One night I skipped out on self care time for hours in the library surrounded by technical books about ice cream. I began to make time to read business-related books at home. I finally took the ServSafe food safety course. I followed up with people each time they offered to introduce me to someone who could help me with this plan.

I began my sentences with, “I’m starting a new ice cream truck,” instead of my old construct, “I’m thinking of starting a new ice cream truck.”

And here I am now — four months later, and I am, indeed, starting a new ice cream truck. So why is this idea different from all other ideas? I don’t know, really. I guess this “manageable first step” really was mangeable — maybe even a little too manageable — otherwise I wouldn’t have set up a company that now owns an almost-finished ice cream truck, rents space in a shared kitchen with a freezer already over 1/3 full of paletas, and two freezers in my own house overflowing with samples to share with family, friends, and neighbors.

Of course about two weeks after buying the used mail truck, I realized that the true MVP (minimum viable product in Silicon Valley language) of this business idea would have been an ice pop push cart, not a custom-built ice cream truck with a filtered water bottle filler bolted onto the back. What can I say — I’m a sucker for feature creep and given I‘ve spent enough time modeling out the build-out of a brick and mortar space, tricking out an old stepvan felt like a rounding error in comparison.

When you ask a welder, “can you stick a water fountain on the back of my truck,” he builds you this cool box

So I guess the answer is yes — I am really doing this. And I have to say — I’ve gotten pretty good at starting a new ice cream truck… the question now is — once it arrives, will I have any idea what to do with it? Stay tuned…

In the meantime, I’ll be cleaning up some notes I’ve taken along the way about this start-up life and posting them here. If there’s anything in particular you want to hear about it, drop me a line. If the truck hasn’t arrived yet and I have some time to write, I’ll do my best to respond.

Written by

when a French-trained pastry chef turns paleo and doesn’t want her kids to miss out on the magic of the ice cream truck — she builds her own: parfaitplease.com

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