The Secret

Soft-serve ice cream is simple. Chocolate, vanilla, chocolate-dipped, sprinkles. Like I said, simple. No secrets.

Last weekend my wife and I were biking on a rail trail in the Delaware River Valley. It was hot, so we stopped at a little Mom and Pop soft-serve stand. I mean, why work off the calories if you can’t put a few back on?

They had 21 flavors of soft-serve. Twenty. One. Every flavor you usually find at a regular scoop ice cream parlor, rum raisin, pistachio, rocky road, they had it, but in soft-serve. I’d never heard of such a thing. 

So I got butter pecan and it was…amazing. What kind of soft-serve innovation voodoo magic have these people stumbled upon? Why does the entire world not know about this?

I’ll tell you why. They don’t tell anyone. Oh sure, everyone for 25 miles around knows about them. In a world of failing small town main street businesses, this little soft-serve stand is rock solid. Why? Because they have a complete lock on the market. No competition. Anywhere.

A wildly successfully business isn’t always about scale or marketing. It’s about having a secret. Inside every business there is at least one secret that is magic.

Let’s uncover yours.