THE ICEMAN COMETH

Steven got laid off from an insurance giant and reinvented himself as the King of Pops in the frozen-treat business

OVER THE YEARS, I’ve met a number of people who’ve made dramatic changes in the middle of their careers, and I’ve wanted to bring that experience to life for you.

There was the financial analyst who worked on Wall Street for twenty years, lost his job in the Great Recession, then went back to school and emerged as a pharmacy technician. There was the fellow who managed restaurants for fifteen years, reached his stress limit, then decided he wanted to drive a taxi.

But the person whose story I’m choosing to tell you about now is Steven Carse, who got laid off in 2009 from the notoriously troubled insurance giant AIG and ended up founding King of Pops, one of a handful of companies across the United States that sells high-quality frozen ice pops.

That’s right. He went from insurance to ice pops, about as radical a career change as you can make.

And he told me about it after he got back from “ice cream school” in Pennsylvania.

Steven, still just twenty-nine, actually got the idea for King of Pops in 2005, two years before he started at AIG. He was with his two older brothers, Nick and Ashley, at a beach in Puerto Escondido, Mexico. They were eating paletas, which are ice pops, common in Latin America, that are usually made from fresh fruit.

“We had been discussing how amazing these paletas were, and how much fun it would be to have a place back home, and at this moment—for the first time—it seemed like something that could really happen.”

Steven said it actually took some time on that monthlong 2005 trip to fall in love with the Latin treat.

“While there are a lot of amazing paleta producers in Latin America, there are a lot that seem to freeze sugar and water,” he said. “We did our best to find the artisan variety. I had some of the best and worst desserts of my life on that trip.”

In 2005, Steven was just about to finish college and head to Idaho to work at a small newspaper. After another year, he came back home, to Atlanta, to take a higher paying job at AIG.

When he got laid off from the $50,000-a-year insurance job, Steven realized it was time to start his business.

“I felt like it was now or never. I had nothing holding me back, very little obligation. The time was just right.”

The first task was figuring out how to make great-tasting ice pops.

“It was more or less trial and error,” he said. “I spent the winter forcing medicine cups full of frozen fruit down my friends’ throats. I also sent out a bunch of letters to people around the country asking if I could come work for free. People’s Pops in New York was nice enough to let me come and check out their operation. More than anything I saw the amount of energy operating a small business takes, but also the amount of enthusiasm a loyal excited customer base can bring.”

So what’s the difference between King of Pops’ gourmet pops and the ones you can buy in the supermarket?

“There is really no comparison,” Steven said. “I just finished the Ice Cream School at Penn State. Most of the classes were about how to make those products that you see in the store. The ones that are $2.50 for twelve—ours are $2.50 for one.”

The difference starts with the ingredients. Steven says King of Pops uses fresh, organic, local fruit.

“Next, we try to be creative. We make straightforward flavors like Strawberry Lemonade, but we also have a lot of fun incorporating flavors people might not expect—like Tangerine Basil.”

The company’s best-sellers are Chocolate Sea Salt, Banana Puddin, Key Lime Pie, Raspberry Lime, Grapefruit Mint, Fresh Georgia Peach, the previously mentioned Tangerine Basil, and Coconut Lemongrass.

“Our product is our primary concern, and we spend a lot of money to make sure it is good. The big brands are more concerned with operating at the lowest cost they can. They are concerned with distribution, and have to pack their product full of artificial ingredients so it can go across the country, sit on a shelf for a year, and still taste like they want.”

Steven’s first day in business was April 1, 2010. After running into some roadblocks opening a small storefront location on an Atlanta street corner, he asked the property owners if he could set up a cart on their property.

He sold about twenty ice pops on the first day.

“It is all relative. I was pretty excited from the response. I was living on my brother’s couch. He wasn’t charging me, and I had a little bit of rent at a shared kitchen to cover. . . . My cart wasn’t branded yet, and I really had no idea what I was doing. A lot of people agonize over the perfect grand opening. I wasn’t ready, but I was just ready to get started.”

He realized he had a hit when he set up shop at a local festival called May Day.

Steven’s brother Ashley was in town, and he and brother Nick, who had been helping from the beginning, were working at the original cart location.

Steven sold all the ice pops he had brought to the festival and went to celebrate with a beer.

“It had already been my best day yet. And I felt like all was right with the world. On my way home I called to see how my brothers were doing. They said they had run out very quickly. They had brought some of the masses back to our kitchen to give them whatever spares we could find laying around. From then on I think we were making pops until two a.m. nearly every weekday.”

Steven says those sessions are about what you’d expect, with one stainless-steel table, a blender, and some food containers, with the new team learning as they went and “balancing our perfectionist tendencies with a need to have product for the next day.”

Steven gives a lot of credit to his girlfriend, Gabriella Oviedo, whom he met at his first location and started dating. She was working at a nearby barbeque restaurant, and after her own long shifts at work, she would come in and help him finish up and clean the kitchen.

“She basically kept me sane that first year,” Steven says.

Today, King of Pops sells a couple thousand pops from its carts on a summer Saturday. On a dreary Monday, he says, it might be one hundred.

“The process is the same, just scaled up. We have a bigger freezing machine, more tables, more knives, more blenders.”

The company sold 600,000 pops last year, a remarkable total for a young company.

It has four locations every day, plus dozens of street food, farmers market, and weekly event locations.

“We have sixteen carts in Atlanta, so we have the ability to go to a bunch of places.”

Geographic expansion has already begun. The company opened in Athens, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina, two years ago. In 2013, it planned to open in Richmond, Virginia, Charlotte, North Carolina, and Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Like many of the people you’ll meet in this book, Steven had good role models growing up.

He was born in Austin, Minnesota, to Jim Carse, now sixty-four, and Lib Carse, sixty-two, both from southwest Nebraska. Jim was raised on a farm and later worked for Hormel, a job that sent him around the country. Steven moved to Omaha, Nebraska, as a child, and ended up in Atlanta by kindergarten.

Lib’s father was the town lawyer of Benkelman, Nebraska.

“I think my mom has always been great at budgeting. I can remember when I was eleven or twelve, my mom had us write a proposal for our monthly allowance. We had to take everything into consideration, school lunch, haircuts, and fun stuff too, like movies, baseball cards, etcetera. I remember after that day I shaved my head because I used my money to buy a pair of shears and kept collecting my $11.99 per month that I had budgeted for haircuts.”

He says his father is an amazing salesman. “Everyone likes him, and he works very hard. It was a good combination.”

As for Steven, he’s happier today, after his dramatic career switch, than when he worked for AIG. But there is a cost.

“I’m a lot busier,” he said. “I could check out when I finished work at AIG. My mind rarely stops thinking about business now.”

Steven has a fascinating story. What can you learn from it?

Anticipate double duty when changing careers.

• When Steven transitioned from AIG to launching King of Pops, he didn’t have any financial obligations holding him back. Nor did he have much experience in doing what he wanted to do!
• If you’re eyeing a career change and have an entrepreneurial bent like Steven, I want you to smooth the transition by starting to work in your new field part-time while keeping your current steady job.
• Money magazine reports that 70 percent of men and 50 percent of women maintain full-time jobs while starting a new business. That’s the smart way to do it. Of course, that means that you’re working your tail off both day and night. But it also lowers the risk should your new career change or business venture fail.

Seek out continual re-education and training.

• Steven spoke with me as he was returning from Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences and its famed Ice Cream Short Course—a program dating back to 1892 believed to be the first continuing education course in the United States.
• The King of Pops was seeking to learn more about ice cream production techniques as he continues his rise to the top of the frozen confections world. (Being a lifelong ice cream lover, that’s some curriculum I’d like to sink my teeth into too!)
• But here’s the message: You can never stop learning, particularly if you’re a career changer. Technology changes so fast that what you’re doing today in any given field could be obsolete in five years or less. Don’t go through life with blinders on. Look for the wider changes in an industry and figure out how to adapt. Be ready to reinvent yourself for success.

Get upskilled.

• An estimated three million jobs go unfilled every month because employers can’t find people with the right skills. That’s led some employers to partner with philanthropies, governments, and community colleges to educate existing employees so they can fill those openings. That kind of promoting within is now being called “upskilling.”
• Imagine going from moving furniture as a hospital maintenance worker to a highly paid nursing position in the same hospital. That’s what happened to a man named Roddale Smith I read about in Business Week. His employer funded his nursing school education at night while he continued doing maintenance work by day at a Cincinnati hospital. Now he’s graduated and doubled his pay as a skilled nurse.
• If you’re stuck in low-wage work, there could be an opportunity for you to get some free training and move to a highly paid career, particularly in the manufacturing fields. The key is to find an employer willing to upskill you. A good starting point is the National Fund for Workforce Solutions website (nfwsolutions.org) and their list of regional collaboratives in twenty-four states.

Take time away to germinate ideas.

• Inspiration for a career change or a new business can strike in the unlikeliest of places. For Steven, his life-altering moment came on the sandy beaches of Puerto Escondido as he enjoyed paletas with his brothers. Who knows where the inspiration to change careers or launch a new business will start for you?
• You never know what else is out there unless you challenge the way you see yourself and reinvent yourself in a new mold. You don’t have to be stuck in a rut. If you pursue what you love, the money you need to survive will generally follow.