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When life gave him lemons, he made snowballs
http://www.the-nextlevel.com/board/a...1&d=1187275720
When life gave Jim Nicholson lemons, he made snowballs.
It all began as an act of desperation. At 24, he was bankrupt with three failed sandwich shops, two babies to feed and $50 to his name. So, hammering together a few pieces of lumber, he built his first cart that summer in 1988 and sold flavored ice on the streets of Fayetteville, N.C.
For a while, it put food on the table. But soon summer ended, and things fell apart.
His wife filed for divorce, and Nicholson gave her all he had left, persuading her to leave their two sons with him. He drove up to his grandmother's house in Greensboro, N.C., to figure out some way to survive.
Through bluster and persistence, he persuaded the owner of a mall to lease him space for a year-round indoor snowball stand. He left out the fact that he was broke. Instead, he wrote the owner a $1,000 check for the space and delivered it at 5 p.m. Friday, just after the banks closed.
That weekend, Nicholson sold $1,200 in snowballs and rushed all of it to the bank before his check could bounce.
Thus began a two-decade career that would catapult Nicholson into the highest echelons of the snowball world. He made a small fortune, moved to the Washington area and became the region's snowball king with a stand in nearly every major mall.
But, as Nicholson would discover, wealth and success -- like ice in the summer heat -- can disappear in an instant.
A few months after moving his growing snowball business to the Washington area, he had met a woman selling watches in the kiosk next to his at White Marsh Mall, just outside Baltimore. She became his second wife, his business partner and mother of his third child, a girl.
Together they built a company called Deep South Snowshakes, with stands in 14 malls by 1996. They sold nine as franchises and kept five.
The secret to their success, Nicholson said, was the quality of the ice. Instead of using crushed ice, he used shaved ice, which absorbs flavoring instead of letting it run straight to the bottom. He bought special icemaking machines to give his snowballs a fluffy quality and used syrups he developed at his house in Columbia.
And he entertained as he sold, punctuating conversations with jokes, wild gestures and the occasional magic trick. "You have to lure people in, make sure they walk away smiling," he said.
It was during one of his freewheeling conversations in 1995 that one customer asked Nicholson to throw some ice, fresh-squeezed lemon juice and fresh strawberries into his blender. Nicholson suddenly saw a new future: dozens of smoothie stands across the country. He would challenge big chains such as Smoothie King by emphasizing taste, health and fresh ingredients.
But before he could get the venture off the ground, his second marriage failed.
A long and painful fight in court swallowed everything he and his ex-wife had created over the years. They lost every stand they owned as well as control of the franchising.
The divorce left him $200,000 in debt, he said.
"Those first few weeks, I couldn't go a day without crying," he said.
His lawyers tried to persuade him to file for bankruptcy, but he couldn't take that sense of failure again.
Instead, he managed to buy back one of his old stands at the Annapolis mall and worked it day and night for 10 years. Using the money he made, he reopened a second stand at the Mall in Columbia.
Some of his old snowball franchises were still running, and he made money by selling them syrups and supplies. Over a decade, he paid off his debts and started dreaming of expansion again.
"I was taught that life is not about how you fall down but how you get back up," he said. "And you have to get back up swinging."
There were other setbacks, including a third divorce in 2003. But finally, two years ago, as his two boys were graduating from high school, Nicholson made his move. He sold his two stands to raise capital and opened seven smoothie stands in Hampton Roads and in North Carolina.
He calls his new venture Big Island Smoothie and has imbued the stands with his frenetic personality: neon colors, funky names and an arsenal of one-liners his employees use to draw customers.
Instead of waxing poetic about ice quality, he now talks passionately about blending speed, fruit ripeness and vitamin content. His goal is to refine his business model farther south before opening Big Island Smoothies in the Washington area.
With the money from his new business, he recently bought a new house in Arnold and moved in with his three children last month.
And now, with the new hope and success his business has brought, he has started thinking about a new challenge. He's thinking about love again.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...073001713.html
http://www.the-nextlevel.com/board/a...1&d=1187275720
http://www.the-nextlevel.com/board/a...3&d=1056296234
http://www.the-nextlevel.com/board/a...1&d=1187275995
http://www.the-nextlevel.com/board/a...4&d=1048447399
