<p class="g_eyebrow_text">BACKSTORY</p>

A Sweet Beginning

I have always loved ice cream and I learned that if you worked at Ben & Jerry’s you got a free ice cream with every shift so I got a job there as a teenager. The owners had compassion for the community, compassion for the team members that worked there, and they didn't have the invisible ceiling that so many places have. It had an amazing product, it had a social mission which gave me purpose, and then it had this economic opportunity. So those 3 things made me choose Ben and Jerry's.

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I felt so much purpose working at Ben & Jerry's and it was checking all those boxes, and I saw an opportunity, when I was graduating college, to purchase the shop I was working at. That was a unique opportunity to be able to become a franchisee at age 21. My partner and co-founder of Primo, Eric, and I had each saved up a couple thousand dollars, and the unit that we were buying was struggling a little. That allowed us to enter pretty reasonably just with saving, a small seller note and a working line of credit from our bank where we pledged some real estate that we had.

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<p class="g_eyebrow_text">CHALLENGE</p>

The Early Days

In the early days we were really old school with our growth. We'd invest in the business, spend several years recouping our investment and save money so we could buy another one. We would pursue seller financing because banking was always difficult for us in the franchise space being first generation entrepreneurs. For the first units there were small bank deals and a lot of pure grit, with a little seller financing and we had a personal relationship with the banker who helped us do our first line of credit. That opportunity was definitely bootstrapped.

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<p class="g_eyebrow_text">SOLUTION</p>

Finding the Right Partner

After meeting ApplePie we worked together to get the franchisor approved and once that happened it gave us the runway to really start growing. Our first deal with ApplePie we pursued was to purchase the Washington DC market, where there were three stores, two of which are top five in the system. It was an ambitious acquisition, but it felt like we had a real financing partner. It's been wonderful and it's definitely allowed us to scale our business. Having a unique and specialized partner like ApplePie that values what we do and brings custom made financing solutions for our business makes all the difference in the world.

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We worked with local banks, but it always felt like “no until proven yes” versus ApplePie’s solution-oriented approach where the answer is yes or why it doesn't work, or the timing early on where it didn't take 4 or 5 months to get to an answer. ApplePie has an optimistic, proactive approach to franchise deals that I just haven't seen anywhere else. ApplePie provides a financial partnership, but also a thought partnership and we have a relationship with a whole team who've seen franchisees scale before. And the cool thing is that the partnership we built has a solid foundation that we can continue to build on in the future. It's just a night and day difference that ultimately takes what used to be a closed door and turns them into opportunities and cash flow that I use to fuel my business forward.

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<p class="g_eyebrow_text">GROWTH</p>

The Path to Growth

We started to work with SBA around 2017 and purchased a couple units during that time, and that carried us up until 2020 when we were poised for growth. And we were actually looking for that partner that could grow with us, and the pandemic hit and changed a lot of things. But we embraced the saying of Winston Churchill during times of crisis: Bad companies are going to fail. Good companies worry about surviving, but great companies improve. And so we put it in overdrive during the pandemic, and we went from having a handful of locations to approaching double digits. It was a unique opportunity in our particular franchise that many of the operators were aging out. Ben & Jerry's started franchising in the 1980s, and many of the operators purchased their stores back in the eighties and nineties and had held them but it was time for them to retire, and the pandemic probably advanced those retirement ambitions a little bit. We just needed to figure out a way to acquire some of these amazing existing locations. ApplePie’s partnership was important because we could recapitalize some of our existing units to allow us to acquire existing units and build new units to where we are now with two dozen locations.

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What's Next

We’ve had an internal mantra of 25 by ‘25 that we've been driving towards, that in the year 2025 we'd have 25 units. It used to seem so far-fetched back in 2020 when we first set that 5 year goal, and at that time we didn't even have 10 units and it's the middle of a pandemic. And it's like, are we crazy, and now we're one unit away and it's right in sight. I think, after we hit that milestone, there's a transition to the right 25. You've got 2 good stores, or 2 great stores and one dud store, and perhaps it's time to transition that unit out so you can bring in a new unit and curate the right 25. We'll spend next year really focused on that and teeing up what’s next. What is the right unit count? How do we go deeper in some of our markets that we're in and continue to build an amazing regional franchise powerhouse. 

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A Magical Moment

One of my favorite memories and experiences that I just love is a really magical closing. We make a big deal at Primo celebrating our wins, small and big, but one that really stands out is when we purchased our units in the DC market.

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It was our first deal with ApplePie back in 2022 and it was a special acquisition, because it was almost like an inheritance, almost a succession. I was purchasing the business from Karen Morse who has been a mentor and role model of mine. She was known as the Ice Cream Queen and at one point she had 19 different franchises in the area.

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She chose me as the person that she wanted to have the first opportunity to buy her business. So just me and her engaging and doing the deal. It wasn't easy. She didn't cut me any favors, but it was just fun. I had ApplePie by my side where I could go into those conversations, you know David and Goliath. She was definitely Goliath in this piece but I could go into it kind of with that slingshot. There's no question, I've got the backing to do this. I have my commitment letter, and she just couldn't believe that I was able to pull it together. We showed up for closing in DC, all of my partners, my team members who had been with me over the years, and our parents and we just took that moment and embraced all the success in the journey that we'd had. We embraced taking on a new team and a really successful business, because Karen was the Ice Cream Queen, and these were her last three babies that were top top shelf. This was us buying something special and some really big shoes to fill. And there were staff members there that actually started with Ben and Jerry's before I did. So I'm taking on folks who have 20+ years of experience. And now they're joining the Primo family. and I just remember us signing the deal and going and getting ice cream together at the DC wharf. The new Primo team members, my current  team and family members coming together is a memory like none other.