Frictionless by Christiane Lemieux

Author:Christiane Lemieux
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-06-23T00:00:00+00:00

Decadent and Healthy

justin woolverton, founder of halo top creamery

Most ice cream companies hide their calorie count in the small print. Justin Woolverton’s Halo Top took a different route: They put it right there, in large print, on the front of the pint. In doing so, they took away decision friction and put the pint in the hands of happy customers.

Just like David Greenberg of Updater, Justin Woolverton began his career by taking the safe (if still challenging) route of becoming a corporate lawyer. But Greenberg had found a measure of career satisfaction as a lawyer before heading out on his own to start Updater. Woolverton had no such luck. Four years into his law career at white-shoe firm Latham & Watkins, he realized that he’d made a huge mistake.

Just like medicine or finance, the legal profession tends to beat up on its new recruits, handing them all the grunt work in exchange for the promise of a better tomorrow, when, as a senior lawyer, one is able to push all the grunt work onto the latest young lawyers. “You think you can see a light at the end of the tunnel,” he says, “when things will get better.” But sometimes they don’t.

His breaking point came on a case that should have made him happy. He got to fly to Hong Kong. He got to stay in a nice hotel. He found himself in front of a tribunal. “It was all the stuff you dream about,” he says, “and then I realized that I still wasn’t having a good time—that if this was the light at the end of the tunnel, I shouldn’t have been in the tunnel in the first place.”

How did he decide to start an ice cream company? Did he do a TAM analysis? Did he sense a chance to go direct to consumer? Was he going to leverage efficiencies from the cloud? Nope. None of that. He decided the old-fashioned way: “I’d made that ice cream for myself and I loved it,” he says. “And I’m not that weird of a guy . . . I’m pretty much middle-of-the-road . . . so it just hit me that if I liked it so much, then there must be a market for it.” In other words, he realized he was average, and it was the secret to his success.

Put another way, he went with his gut. “I didn’t do some sort of MBA SWOT analysis or anything.” (SWOT, a core of most entrepreneurship courses, stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats.) Once he realized that the idea could be real, he did what any intelligent person does and researched how to make ice cream on the Internet. Did you know that there are some universities in Canada that offer ice cream science as a major? Well, Woolverton didn’t either, until he did, at which point he downloaded and absorbed all the free course materials they have online. A year or so of trial and error with a local ice cream maker followed, and then it was go-time.

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