Imagine spending ten years building a business.
Starting small, then rising so fast
it feels like the only direction is up.
Then at your highest,
everything comes crashing down.
That's what happened to married couple Brian
Smith and Jackie Cuscuna of Brooklyn, New York
and their ice cream company, Ample Hills Creamery.
At its height in 2019,
Ample Hills was bringing in over
$10 million a year in sales
and was valued at $40 million.
It was praised by celebrities
like Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg.
Then in March of 2020,
Brian and Jackie filed for bankruptcy.
We filed Chapter 11
because there wasn't really any other option
at that point.
There was no way to
shrink our way or contract our way out of this problem.
But even after their precipitous rise and fall,
Brian and Jackie decided to try again.
We weren't
ready to just walk away from the ice cream world.
Here's how Brian Smith
and Jackie Cuscuna built and lost a $40 million
ice cream business and how they started over.
Before they became professional
ice cream makers,
Jackie was a high school teacher
and Brian was a screenwriter.
But Brian had another passion: making ice cream.
The real impetus was just that joy
that it brings when you make ice cream
and you share it with people.
In 2010,
Brian decided to make a major career shift
and start an ice cream shop.
This idea of creating an ice cream shop
that didn't exist at the time
in our neighborhood was really very appealing
and exciting for me, and I think that's
what led me to encourage Brian to continue
working towards creating this shop.
Brian and Jackie named their new business Ample Hills,
after a line from Walt Whitman's poem,
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”
Brian began with a simple ice cream cart in Brooklyn's
Prospect Park in the summer of 2010.
But he wasn't selling standard ice cream
flavors like chocolate and vanilla.
His recipes incorporated foods
like cookies, breakfast cereals, even potato chips.
It was like really trying to make something
with high quality,
but something that would speak to
the seven year old inside of the 47 year old.
The following year,
Brian and Jackie poured their life
savings--$225,000--into opening Apple Hills’
first brick-and-mortar shop in Brooklyn.
There were lines that went down the street.
The entire summer,
we were just trying
to keep up with ice cream production.
Actually had to close after the first four days
because we ran out of ice cream.
The shop featured ice cream flavors
with quirky names like Salted Crack’d Caramel,
the Munchies, and O Captain, My Captain.
In 2014,
Brian and Jackie opened a larger
second shop in Brooklyn with a 2,000
square foot kitchen for ice cream production.
It allowed us to start shipping the ice cream
across the country.
That was really the thing that sort of took it
from a normal growth pattern that we were experiencing
by adding a shop every year or two to explosive growth.
The catalyst for that growth was an online
order from Bob Iger, CEO of Disney.
And so we sent him a copy of our cookbook,
which had just come out and we sent him our ice cream.
And maybe four or five days after he got his ice cream,
he sent me an email saying, “Hi, I'm Bob Iger.
If there's anything at all I can do to help,
let me know.
Maybe Ample Hills at Disney, question mark?
Bob.” I mean, we just couldn't
believe it for the longest time.
Iger became a mentor to Brian and Jackie,
and soon they were working on plans
to build a small shop at Disney World.
But in order to keep up
with the growing popularity of their brand,
they would need more capital quickly.
They decided to seek out venture capital funding,
raising $4 million for Ample Hills in their 2015
seed round.
Over the next four years,
they would raise more than $19 million.
At the same time, their total number of shops grew to 13,
including one in Los Angeles and two in Florida.
They also leased a 15,000 square foot factory
in Brooklyn for $25,000
a month to meet production demand.
It was overwhelming.
It was exhilarating, but it was really fulfilling,
I mean, creatively.
But the cracks in Ample Hills were beginning to show.
Its shops in L.A. and Aventura, Florida
were underperforming,
and there was a general lack of knowledge on Ample
Hills’ board of directors
about the food and beverage industry.
But the biggest problem that Brian and Jackie faced
was the factory they opened in 2018.
The estimates that we came up with were
we needed to have
15 shops open in order to have the factory work
from an overhead point of view.
Brian and Jackie budgeted $4 million to secure
and build out a huge factory
space in Brooklyn's Red Hook neighborhood.
But the project ended up costing $6.7 million.
That's a mistake and that's a problem.
But that's survivable.
The problem that wasn't is the overhead to run
the factory ended up really being about 25 to 30 shops.
We didn't have enough money
to magically grow 15 more shops.
There was no way to shrink our way or contract
our way out of this problem once we built it.
In 2017, the year before the factory opened,
Ample Hills was operating at a loss of $1.6 million.
But after the factory opened, losses skyrocket
to nearly $7 million by 2019.
In July of that year, Ample Hills’ financial director
told Brian and Jackie
they didn't have enough money
to make it through the winter.
And that was a big “What?
Are you kidding me?
I don't understand that.”
We immediately started
calling our investors and said, you know,
“We need to raise
some more money.” And their answer was, “No.
I mean, we've-- we've raised enough money.”
Brian and Jackie scrambled to cut costs,
decreasing salaries, including their own
and letting go of staff.
But by January 2020,
it became clear that the only feasible option
was to file for bankruptcy.
We wanted to file for Chapter 11
to find somebody that could come in and buy the company
and that we could work with and guide
through a restructuring process.
Eventually, one buyer stepped forward.
Schmitt Industries, a machine parts company
based out of Portland, Oregon,
purchased Ample Hills for $1 million.
We've talked about roles for Jackie and I,
but they were pretty adamant that they felt like
we were expendable, that we were not necessary
players, and said so in very specific words.
That year, Brian and Jackie also declared
personal bankruptcy and left the company
they had spent ten years building.
It was a really hard time.
I think through it all, though, like we--
we were never angry at each other.
I mostly felt like I had let her down
because I was the CEO.
I mean, we made decisions together.
But, you know, I made--
I made the big ones
about the factory and all of those things.
But even after the pain of losing their business,
Brian continued making ice cream.
The pandemic sort of gave me this opportunity
in a weird way, to, like, sit there at home
and actually combine milk and cream
and sugar and flavors and make ice cream again.
And I found that I still really loved it
and that I could do it well.
Jackie started taking a
business course through the Brooklyn
Chamber of Commerce,
and she made an important connection there.
It was about business
owners who needed to pivot and do something different,
and it was through them that I ended up
being introduced to a business advisor
who ultimately became our investor.
That investor,
Norm Brodsky had built
and lost his own business before bouncing back.
He invested $450,000 toward Brian and Jackie's
new ice cream shop, The Social,
which they opened in July 2021.
I felt like by the time we opened The Social
that we had a pretty good
handle on what it was that needed to be done.
I felt like we were
in a much more experienced place
to open this new business than we were
in the beginning with the old business.
Instead of focusing on brand growth.
Brian and Jackie focused on The Social’s profitability.
Brodsky helped them bring on two other investors
who had experience in the food and beverage industry.
And the story didn't end there.
Near the end of 2022,
Brian and Jackie discovered that Schmitt
Industries was planning to liquidate Ample Hills.
We talked about this
with our investors and they apparently
had already been in some kind of conversation
with the CEO of Schmitt Industries.
Their investors
offered Schmidt $150,000 to buy back Ample Hills.
In May 2023, the bid was accepted.
I read the email to you
and I was like, “Wait, what?” I was just like,
I don't know. Almost started crying.
Jumping up and down.
It was like-- it was crazy.
In June 2023, Ample Hills officially reopened
under its original ownership.
In addition to The Social
Brian and Jackie now run four Ample Hills scoop shops
and their new smaller production facility.
Brian says that this past July,
National Ice Cream Month, they brought in between
$300,000 and $400,000 across their five shops.
In terms of growth,
I mean, we're going to approach it very slowly.
It's a very small, Ample Hills
now compared to what it was
even a year ago under Schmitt
and certainly small compared to what it was
when we were operating it a few years ago.
Based on their experience, Brian
and Jackie advise new business owners
to pursue their visions with passion,
but also with pragmatism.
You're creating a business,
you're not making a painting.
You're creating a business that therefore has to feed
other people
and other people have to like and enjoy it.
And I would also say you should talk to people
in similar businesses who you admire.
People are always willing to offer time and help
if you ask.
And I think it's-- it's
a part of learning and growing.
Failure is not something to be ashamed of.
I mean, businesses fail left and right.
People fail left and right, and then they-- you know,
what you have to be ashamed of
is not trying again or not learning
anything from the failures that you're making
and going out there and going forward again.