Betsy’s Ice Cream owners humbled by success
The newest member of the Miller family, their eight-month-old son Landon, has already had the ice-cream experience at Betsy’s.
Ryan Miller, owner of Betsy’s Ice Cream in Mt. Lebanon, has created the homemade shop into a mainstay in part by diversifying the revenue streams.
Ryan Miller wasn’t anticipating opening up an ice cream shop in one of the balmiest months of 2012. March was supposed to be a good time to slowly transition into a new space and casually get employees trained.
He surely wasn’t expecting the announcement of a competitor across the street a month prior, nor the other handful of others that popped up in the first few years of opening Betsy’s Ice Cream, his homemade shop at 664 Washington Road in the heart of Mt. Lebanon’s uptown district.
That all wasn’t part of his 32-page business plan, which according to wife Betsy, made sure to cross off all the T’s and dot all the I’s for the custom-blended, hormone-free and all-natural base ice cream shop open from March to December.
“It was months of looking at locations to try and find the right spot, doing as many demographic studies as we could and trying to figure out if it was worth it,” Ryan said. “It wasn’t something we came into on a whim. I did a lot of planning for it.”
The carefully constructed business plan was to ensure the ice cream shop, where chalkboard-style tables harken back to Betsy’s profession as a teacher, would remain viable on Washington Road.
“Not everybody does the planning that I have and that’s why you see a lot of turnover,” Ryan said of businesses he has seen come and go. “I think our planning saved us a lot of stress in the long run.”
For Ryan, a Charleroi native, it wasn’t only about surviving after moving back to the Pittsburgh area after spending time in the corporate world in Washington, D.C. It was about thriving and creating something that would allow him and his family, now with the addition of an eight-month-old son named Landon, to put down roots.
“I was working for a couple of big companies and got to the point where I was either going to have to spend a fortune to earn my MBA or go spend a fortune doing something else,” Ryan said. “I was born and raised in the Pittsburgh area. I went to Pitt. I had a good job down in Washington, D.C., a job that I liked. I was just getting to that point of my life – in my late 20s – of looking for a place to settle down. The reality of it down there was spending a half-a-million dollars to get a small townhouse with a 30 minute commute to the office. I just really wanted to get back to Pittsburgh. I missed being home.”
The model of any run-of-the-mill ice cream shop didn’t suffice the Miller’s, who expanded the walkable ice cream shop for those in Mt. Lebanon into one with capabilities of online ordering, wholesale purchases, a CSA program and catering to fit any occasion.
The expectation is that those additional and diverse forms of revenue will surpass what is made in the store within two years.
“We have made it easy for a family of four to be able to come up once or twice a week,” Betsy, who is also a first-grade teacher at Propel, a charter school in Pittsburgh. “Ryan wanted to keep it a local mom and pop place. That’s exactly what it is. I used to be able to help out a lot more than I can now. I think we support the local businesses up here and they do the same. It’s like being a true neighbor.”
Betsy’s Ice Cream is looking to continue varying its options by expanding the CSA program with other local hotspots to create offer more of a combination package. Those different packages, throughout the 12 months of the year, would all add to their program that started a few years after opening the shop.
Making it extra rewarding for Ryan are the moments he gets to relive his past of working in restaurants throughout high school and college by helping on the cash register, greeting customers and scooping ice cream when it gets bombarded like that month of March five years ago.
“This is a great little business community if you have the right product and are the right fit,” he said. “It’s amazing. I don’t think there is a better feeling. It’s given me a lot of confidence in what we are doing. It hasn’t always been easy. I’m thankful we had those pressures in the beginning, because if we hadn’t we could have become complacent by just simply having our store.”