Kona Ice

“Back in the day, they would sell a truck for a 150,000 dollars, make a lot of money on their trucks, but then the royalty was 3000 dollars a year, and you had to buy all the cones and the cups and stuff from them, and they were marked up pretty substantially.”

“If I would have had to rely on, I think it's a swan that, that does the big block of vice that, like you're saying, a vice that forces it into an open razor blade that spins on an axis and shaves it off. It produces a very fluffy product. I don't think I would…”

“I have talked to every single person that owns a Kona franchise. They cannot get into the Kona franchise business to this day, unless we have a conversation.”

“The very first flavor wave would fold out from the truck. Ok, so you picture this thing folding out from the truck, and it's made out of aluminum. So, in essence, Guy, there was a two-foot aluminum-edged sickle, as I like to say, driving through neighborhoods.”

“I paid the equity line off this in 2008. So I had ran it all the way up to about 400.”

“I don't think I would have said that a year ago, maybe not even six months ago, but some of the results that our coffee people are having are pretty spectacular.”

“That was probably, if there's anything that just set us apart in the early days, is the fact that we had financing and nobody else did.”

“I mean, you've got 1500 trucks just in Kona Ice three hundred and seventy five million dollars in, in system wide sales in 2023.”

“This year we sold 276 trucks, basically. So that's the lion's share of the revenues that come into the, but we're at the point now you're making, you know, I don't know, five, six, seven million in royalty”

“So I got this subdivision In Northern Kentucky to an easy thousand dollars a night.”

“October of twenty-twenty, we wrote a prototype of a very elaborate coffee truck that hit the streets, and just a couple of them, and they started doing really well. We put them in a couple other franchisees' hands. The following year, in twenty-twenty-one, I t…”

“I was talking to an executive at a big franchise system, and you know, they've got probably 20 franchisees that pretty much run the company. You know, whatever those people say goes, because they're the ones generating a lion's share of the profits for the com…”

“There is a sweet spot In Kona ice with a couple franchises and maybe an ancillary or two, and you can make plenty of money. You can really have a great life, but everyone kind of gets into this and they're like, Hey, how do I conquer the world?”

“Not everybody's an entrepreneur and, but there's a lot of people that can be good small business owners, and that's what we try to curate, is, is follow the recipe, be a good small business owner, make a great living, enjoy your life.”

“We have 1850 Kona trucks. Along with about 700 ancillary pieces of equipment, but about a 150 coffee trucks, too.”