The Ledger
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Tony Lamb: Kona Ice franchisees reach a sweet spot with just a few units
“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?”
Lamb: Most People Make Great Small Business Owners Rather Than Entrepreneurs
“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.”
Lamb: Traditional block ice shavers would have killed Kona Ice's scalability
“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…”
Lamb: Traveling Tom's Coffee unit economics could soon surpass Kona Ice
“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.”
Lamb: Flat franchise economics prevent top franchisees from controlling the company
“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…”
Lamb: Kona Ice operates 1,850 shaved ice trucks and 150 coffee trucks
“We have 1850 Kona trucks. Along with about 700 ancillary pieces of equipment, but about a 150 coffee trucks, too.”
Lamb: Mister Softee squeezed franchisees on truck sales and marked-up supplies
“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.”
Lamb: Every prospective Kona Ice franchisee must interview directly with him
“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.”
Lamb: Paid off $400,000 credit line for Kona Ice in 2008
“I paid the equity line off this in 2008. So I had ran it all the way up to about 400.”
Lamb: In-house financing set Kona Ice apart during 2008 crisis
“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.”
Guy Raz: Kona Ice reached 1,500 trucks and $375M in 2023 sales
“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.”
Lamb: Kona Ice sold 276 trucks in 2023, yielding $5M-$7M in royalties
“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”
Lamb: Traveling Tom's Coffee franchise sales grew from 20 to 90 trucks
“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…”
Lamb: The first Flavor Wave prototype folded out dangerously like a sickle
“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.”