House

Earlier last week, I was having a conversation with a friend who was stressed about money. They had bills due and hadn’t worked in months. The math wasn’t mathing on how they were going to make ends meet, and they were stressed. Then they remembered something a pastor they respected had shared in one of his messages: “Think about what’s in your house.” He shared this guidance for situations where it feels like you don’t have the resources to solve your own problems. The idea behind the advice is that you always have something—there is always something you possess, whether internal or external, that if leveraged well can get you where you need to go.

Image: the hero image of our Goldbelly page. When we shot this video several years ago, we also did a cooking demo of how we make the ice cream hot chocolate. That video never got published to our Goldbelly page because we didn’t have a great way of adding it to our catalog as a standalone item.

I always say, play your full hand of cards. We’re all born with a hand of cards. Some of us have great cards that we don’t know how to play well, and some of us have not-so-great cards but a vision that doesn’t align with what we were dealt, so creativity is needed if we want to win the round. Most of us have a mix—some great cards and some not-so-great cards. In this case, it’s common to focus on the great cards and not think about how best to leverage the not-so-great ones toward our victory. Playing your whole hand is the moment where we play our hand well—how we turn our 3 of clubs into a King of Spades.

I live by the principle of playing my hand well. I may not always have the best cards, but if I can understand who I’m playing with and what they have, I may actually be able to use my low cards for a victorious win.

Around the time I was having this conversation with my friend about their lack of income and list of bills, I was spiraling a bit about the snowmageddon coming to the city. It was unexpected, and as a business that only closes three days a year—and had also decided to close this coming Tuesday for a staff holiday/new year’s party—the idea of an unexpected closure made me sweat.

That’s when I thought about what’s in our house.

We sell hot chocolate that we make with our vanilla ice cream during the winter to combat the revenue slump when it’s cold. We’ve been selling this since 2018, and somewhere around then—maybe a year or two later—we started selling at-home kits. They didn’t really take off when we first launched them. Our hot chocolate hadn’t gone viral yet, and we were at capacity with other aspects of the business. We didn’t have the bandwidth to devote more resources toward selling them, so they got discontinued.

But earlier this week, the light bulb went off. We have hot chocolate in our house, the prototype for relaunching our DIY hot chocolate kits, and an engaged audience on Instagram and TikTok.

So Nick and I went to work. He prepped the materials. I added the SKU to our delivery apps, made a video that I posted on TikTok and IG, and then emailed and texted our list. We announced the kits on Saturday night and started selling them from the store after the post went out.

Images: visual steps on how to make our hot chocolate at home...each kit comes with a pint of vanilla ice cream

Then, on Sunday morning, we closed the stores in Hamilton Heights and East Harlem but kept the Central Harlem store open for a few hours and ended up being busier than normal on a Sunday early afternoon. The hot chocolate kits sold out, and we now have data based on sales and customer engagement on social that confirms now is a great time to bring this SKU back to market.

I'm not saying anything new here, but this experience was a great reminder that when things feel tight, we always have the answers—we have the cards. Maybe it's an intangible like a way of understanding or connecting with people, a technical skill, a material asset, or even extra time. We all have at least one thing! We just have to look around our house to find it and use it to solve our problems.

We’ve got this!

Hope you had a cozy snow day.

Petrushka

Your Local Ice Cream Lady & Life/Business Coach

P.S. We have two fun events coming up this February—Ice Cream for Breakfast on Feb 7th at the Lenox Ave Store & in StuyTown, and our 2nd Annual Galentine’s Day Stuff Your Stanley on Feb 13th. You can also get a BOGO of one of last season’s flavors when you make any single scoop purchase this month at any of the stores.