209: How Amy’s Ice Creams Became Austin’s Most Beloved Brand with Amy Simmons

Amy Simmons is the founder of Amy’s Ice Creams—a beloved Austin institution with 19 locations built over 41 years—not through franchising or rapid expansion, but through deep community roots, creative culture, and an unshakeable commitment to people first.

In this conversation, Amy shares how she grew the company without franchising, avoided national rollout, and even allowed each store to operate with its own personality. We get into the role theatrical customer service plays in the brand, how open-book management teaches financial literacy and strengthens decision-making, and why staying regional became a strategic advantage.

We also talk about real estate, vertical integration, and how hyper-local partnerships helped turn Amy’s into a fixture of Austin rather than just another ice cream shop.

If you’re interested in the kind of business that grows deeper instead of wider, Amy’s story offers a very different—and very successful—approach to scale.

Mic Drop Moments

• “I wasn’t trying to grow for the sake of growth. I was trying to build something meaningful.” – Amy Simmons

• “We are only successful if our people are successful.” – Amy Simmons

• “Pain’s always an opportunity for improvement.” – Amy Simmons

• “Culture left the building when this company sold… and that was the momentum that made me realize I could do it better.” – Amy Simmons

• 01:10 Why Makes Amy’s Ice Cream Different
• 02:54 Small Community Gifts That Drive Big Returns
• 04:01 Why 350 Rotating Flavors Actually Work
• 08:39 Prioritizing Customer Feedback Over Sales Data
• 11:32 The Secret Behind Amy’s #1 Top-Selling Flavor
• 13:52 Managing Supply Chain Shortages Without Losing Quality
• 15:14 The One Flavor Austin Refused to Let Her Remove
• 16:05 Hiring With Creativity: The Paper Bag Application
• 19:14 How Amy Identifies the Right People for Her Culture
• 21:15 The Experience Matters More Than the Ice Cream
• 21:47 How Showmanship Became an Amy’s Trademark
• 24:44 The System Behind Amy’s Creative Culture
• 27:55 The Power of Open Financials in a Small Business
• 33:53 The ROI of Teaching Money Skills to Employees
• 36:27 Why Amy Refused to Franchise or Expand Globally
• 46:35 Growing Deeper, Not Wider: Amy’s Approach to Expansion
• 52:59 How Your Business Can Increase Real Estate Value
• 57:22 The Moat That Protects Amy’s From National Chains
• 58:43 Advice for Entrepreneurs Facing Imposter Syndrome
• 1:00:00 Amy’s Take on Austin’s Growing Pains

Brad Weimert: You started an ice cream store in 1984. You now have 19 locations, mostly in Austin, as well as a bunch of other things. You have become this staple in the Austin community, and you are really evidence that you can scale locally and keep things weird. Amy Simmons, welcome to Beyond a Million. 

Amy Simmons: Thank you for having me.

Brad Weimert: For sure. I’m excited to meet you because Randy Cohen speaks very highly of you, who has also been on the show.

Amy Simmons: Gotta love Randy.

Brad Weimert: He’s a wild man. For starters, what did you do differently with Amy’s Ice Cream that the national chains still don’t get? 

Amy Simmons: Yeah, I think part of it is that I wasn’t born to be a businessperson. My undergraduate degree, biology, psychology, I was going to go to med school. I worked in an ice cream store when I was in college for cash and just fell in love with it. And I can’t even call them the ice cream sirens. They’re just pulling you in. But I got an opportunity to go to Manhattan and open a store for this company, and then down to Miami, and then they sold the company. We’re really unaware of culture back then. That was probably 1982, but culture left the building when this company sold it. The day that company sold, the culture left the building. And so, it was kind of momentum that I want to keep doing what I love. I can do it better.

So, what’s different is just that I wasn’t coming from the business world, “Oh, I need to make a profit.” I came from this passion for getting to work with the people in that environment, and really, the role that ice cream stores play in people’s lives, I think almost everybody I’ve met has got an ice cream story, something in their life associated with ice cream, and to be a part of those moments in people’s lives. And so, it was kind of momentum. I was 23 when I opened Amy’s, raised $100,000, so I had shareholders. My frontal lobe was not formed. It did not occur to me that this would be my life. But it turned out to be the best thing that could ever happen to me.

Brad Weimert: So, you invest heavily in the community in a thousand different ways, and some of those are collaborations or sponsorships or literal real estate investments. When you’re looking at a partnership with the community for the sake of business promotion, what is the smallest thing you’ve done for the community that has yielded the biggest result financially for Amy’s Ice Cream?

Amy Simmons: I think one thing is that any nonprofit or education group that contacts us will give four gift certificates, so anybody. So, I should find out the number, so I have some actual data, but we just give out thousands of them. And so, that’s just a broad impact. And I say, luckily, we weren’t a bank, because you can’t give everybody a roll of coins. It’s easy to give them ice cream, and then, really, the people that they interact with in the shops are going to bring them back. It’s more than just the product.

Brad Weimert: I love that. So, small investments in nonprofits, broadly.

Amy Simmons: Yes.

Brad Weimert: Awesome. Okay. So, I want to talk about your product, because, fundamentally, ice cream is a simple product, but your business is anything but simple. I grew up going to Baskin-Robbins in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who had 31 flavors that were the same all the time. I had Daiquiri Ice because that’s what I liked. You have eight staple flavors, but you have 350 rotating. Why do you have so many? And how do you think about rotating those products in and out?

Amy Simmons: We are constantly coming up with new flavors. So, new flavors come from our employees, from our customers, from our vendors. If you write us and say, “Hey, can you make this?” We’ll do it. We love that’s the fun part, and ice cream is really easy to work with. We were the first beer flavor in the country. We made Guinness in 1984. It was a joke. We’re at a college town, but it turned out to be really popular. And now, actually, with a lot of the local brewers, we make just promotional flavors for them to get their name out. We’ve done pub crawls where we just do kind of a tasting board of different local beer brewers. So, there’s so much more to making a flavor. It’s the story behind it.

One of my favorite flavors was a little girl who went through a tour at Amy’s, and she asked us if we would make milk after you have cereal. And that’s her favorite. She loved to drink the milk. And so, we took Captain Crunch, all the nasty cereals, Captain Crunch and Froot Loops and Lucky Charms, and steeped it in the ice cream, and then sifted it out. And what was left was, I think they call it Saturday Morning.

Brad Weimert: That’s what I was going to call it.

Amy Simmons: Yeah, there you go. So, I mean, what a great idea. And it comes from this little girl who’s touring.

Brad Weimert: So, is that it? Somebody suggests something, you give it a shot. Because I guess as you’re talking through this, it’s like, “Oh, okay, the cost of implementing a new flavor is actually probably very low.” You take a base, you mix some stuff in it, and you see if it works.

Amy Simmons: And rarely does it not work, although, back in the day, Austin used to have Spamarama, and so I made…

Brad Weimert: Gross.

Amy Simmons: It was gross. I made a Spam ice cream. It did not work.

Brad Weimert: Is that the worst flavor that you’ve ever made?

Amy Simmons: Yeah, I think I’ve experimented a lot. I love jalapenos, and I’ve experimented a lot with spices that I like but other people don’t like.

Brad Weimert: I think about this because now you have, I mean, a lot of locations. Is there any structured approach to rotating certain flavors in or out? Do you look at sales numbers behind this? What are the metrics you track?

Amy Simmons: Yes. So, we started having the eight standard flavors, and I’d like to rotate all of them, but people flip out. So, I think we just took out white chocolate, which had been there for 35 years, and had just an uproar. But it’s different in every location. We very strategically remained a regional ice cream company. My experience, I’ve been fortunate. I’m also from Ann Arbor, Michigan, as we’ve talked about, but I went to school in Boston, and then I lived in Manhattan, and then I lived down in Coconut Grove, Florida. So, very different cultures in those different areas. Then, obviously, last 41 years in Austin, and I love the regionality of our country. And when I see the strip being all the same spots in every single city, okay, we’ve got a Gap or a Starbucks, there’s a reason for that, but let’s not let it cannibalize the regionality.

And so, we decided, we really decided to stay regional to make a bigger impact on our community. It fed kind of my personal needs more, and also just have that deepened relationship. So, I love other ice cream companies in different areas of the country. I have a lot of ice cream peers. I think I didn’t answer your question.

Brad Weimert: Well, you know what’s funny is I’ve got a whole different line of questions around the why of local versus franchising or taking on money, or like the business economics of it are super interesting to me. And there are a bunch of comparisons nationwide or globally that would be great comparisons. But before we get there, like you just told me, that basically you have very limited standardization from one location to the next.

Amy Simmons: Correct.

Brad Weimert: You have your eight standards, but everything else is different everywhere else. I would imagine that would infuriate certain customers.

Amy Simmons: Except that they can email us and we’ll get any flavor out to a store. It takes us two days.

Brad Weimert: Well, that’s interesting.

Amy Simmons: Yeah. We probably need to advertise that more, but the employees that are in each store will cater a ton to the customers. They might have it in the back, but yeah, it’s hard. Like, your favorite flavor isn’t there. Dirt Cake, Texas Dirt Cake. Oh, man, but you can call and we’re trying to get better of letting people know when flavors are there.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, that makes sense. I think you should.

Amy Simmons: Yeah, area of improvement. Got it.

Brad Weimert: So, you can track the metrics of what’s selling, what’s not selling. Are there indicators? And I think that this is applicable to basically every business like you can look at the metrics, but do you see things that trump the metrics, like social posts or people’s feedback in stores? What do you look at that is a higher indicator of what you should be doing than the numbers from the cash register?

Amy Simmons: It’s customer feedback, for sure, and also community feedback. We just did a co-promotion with a band called Rainbow Kitten Surprise that I’ve loved for a long time, and they were here for ACL, and so we did a flavor for them, Rainbow Kitchen Surprise. And it got so much attention online, and people were flipping out about it. I flipped out about it like I actually got to go to their green room in San Antonio when they were playing. And that’s the first time I tasted like, “Hey, this is really good.” But so, a lot of times it’s how much we’re talking about it, how much traction it gets online. It’s all over the place. People like trying new things. And because we do the crush-ins, so we pick a base flavor, and then you can add/combine things, sometimes it’s combinations of things.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I mean, I guess there are some businesses where the lift to introduce a new product feature, et cetera, is really high, right? And then, apparently, you have ice cream, where you can test things out.

Amy Simmons: Well, flavors are very easy, but adding things in addition to flavors, like we do holiday items, and we’re using things that we use every day. So, we use Callebaut chocolate to make our chocolate. So, we make a peppermint bark. That’s insane. White Chocolate is Callebaut white chocolate, and chocolate’s Callebaut Belgian chocolate, and then peppermint. So, that’s kind of hard to get people used to. We started making what we call big kids’ smores, Biscoff cookies, because I fell in love with them on Delta Airline.

Brad Weimert: Nice.

Amy Simmons: And we make our own marshmallow with Mexican vanilla, which is 30% of our sales is that one flavor.

Brad Weimert: Wow.

Amy Simmons: Yeah, that’s a weird one.

Brad Weimert: Okay. Well, we can’t leave Mexican vanilla. So, you say it’s a weird one, and it’s your staple. It’s 30%. First of all, people are boring for ordering vanilla and chocolate all the time. But what’s unique about…

Amy Simmons: They’re purists, Brad. They’re not boring.

Brad Weimert: I’m a purist, I say. Well, what’s different about Mexican vanilla? Because that’s 30% of your sales, but it also is this staple of Amy’s that people actually talk about. And people don’t talk about vanilla because it’s vanilla.

Amy Simmons: Yeah, even though vanilla is way more expensive. I mean, Madagascar vanilla, if you’re really using the great and there’s been a big shortage, but if you’re using the great source, it’s super expensive. When we started, I didn’t want to be snotty about anything. I just wanted to kind of go with taste. And there was a guy out in New Orleans, Warren Leruth, who had a restaurant called LeRuth’s restaurant. He’s one of the great chefs of New Orleans, and he had won best ice cream in the country, and one of the ones he won with was his Mexican Vanilla. So, I called him up, and he gave me, he started to produce it for me, and that’s where we got that.

And not being from Texas originally, I didn’t go down to Mexico and taste it there, but Texas has a real history of cooking with it. Use it in cookies. Oh, best cookies. And people, they’re like, “I don’t know why this is so much better than any other cookie.” So, it’s just people fell in love with it. I have a buddy who has an ice cream store in Boston called Toscanini’s, which is really, really good, perhaps better than Amy’s. So, I shared it with him. He’s like, “No, nobody in Boston wanted Mexican vanilla.” So, I think a lot of it really has to do with something about the culture here having been exposed to it.

Brad Weimert: Oh, that’s interesting. What do you do with supply chain issues? So, you said the vanilla is very difficult to get. If it’s 30% of your revenue, you’ve got 19 stores, how do you handle a shortage of it?

Amy Simmons: I think pain is always an opportunity for improvement or kind of questioning decisions you’ve made long ago. And so, we just started trying to source from any other place that we could find it. And again, we blind taste test things so you don’t get snotty, because maybe Callebaut from Belgium sounds better, but maybe Hershey’s is better in flavor in the cream. So, when we started having a hard time getting Madagascar vanilla beans, we just started testing any kind of vanilla and using our palates to decide, not the kind of, “This is a very elite, nice vanilla.”

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I love that. I mean, I think there are comparisons to that all over the place, the notion of blind testing. But look, brand sells, and people get completely blinded by it.

Amy Simmons: True story.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, it’s hard to undo, too. I like the idea of a blind test, because that’s the equalizer. Okay. Before we move off product, because I’ve got a bunch of questions that are, I think, stupid, that people don’t care about, but the one that Austin cares about are products that you kill, and then they can’t get anymore. What is the product that you took off the table that infuriated Austin residents the most?

Amy Simmons: Well, we’d never completely take something off the table. If somebody wanted it, we would make it for them. But I think white chocolate off the standard board was the most dramatic recently.

Brad Weimert: Yep. Okay. And so, if people want it?

Amy Simmons: Well, we rotate it. We still rotate it, but it doesn’t rotate as often as maybe some people might want it to. But you can email us. You can email me, [email protected] or [email protected]. We will make any flavor for you.

Brad Weimert: Love it. Okay. So, I said the product is simple, but the business is not at all. And the product turns out isn’t that simple either, but the business is super unique, and your hiring, and the showmanship in the business is sort of folklore in Austin. A lot of people have lots of thoughts on it. The first thing that pops up in my head are paper bag applications. Tell me what those are and how those came to be.

Amy Simmons: So, instead of getting a formal application…

Brad Weimert: When you want to work at Amy’s.

Amy Simmons: Right, when you want to work at Amy’s, originally, I actually made my own, which is kind of tongue in cheek, because just the idea of handing somebody some form and then filling it out. When you’re looking for a job, you just go down the street and throw in applications at every store down the street. I wanted people who particularly saw something about Amy’s that appealed to them and their personality and their character, and how they wanted to express themselves. And so, we had a woman who, instead of filling out my homemade application, she got a helium balloon and a paper bag and filled the paper bag. She made a hot air balloon out of it and sent it into the store.

And in the basket was a picture of her and her dog, one of her Girl Scout badges she was particularly proud of. And so, that’s really where the idea came from. And unfortunately, I can’t give her credit because I don’t remember, but it was so much fun, and I knew she wanted to work at Amy’s because she spent so much time being creative.

Brad Weimert: And so, she did that unprompted.

Amy Simmons: Completely unprompted, where she got hired, even though I don’t remember her name. So, that really started it. And if you don’t care about working at Amy’s, you’re going to go down the street and sandwich shop, ice cream store, whatever, then you’re going to throw that paper bag in the trash. It’s too much work. But we have gotten some of the most incredible applications.

Brad Weimert: So, what is the prompt? So, this woman randomly sends this thing through the door when she’s trying to get a job, and originally, you just had a handwritten application. Right now, what is the application process to work at Amy’s?

Amy Simmons: So, it’s still the paper bag, and we say, “Just be as creative as possible, or whatever you want to do to express yourself.” I don’t know where they are on this, but we obviously have to make it much more digital, because we’re in a digital age. So, I think they’ve come a long way, like we’ve had people write songs as their application and send that in digitally, but I think we could do a better job.

Brad Weimert: So, the general idea is you just want to get to know who people are.

Amy Simmons: Yeah, and if they do something like that, then they probably really want to work for Amy’s. And it’s kind of emotional, just cognitive dissonance that you put that energy into trying to get a job. When you get the job, the job’s worth more to you, so you’re already vested in the organization being successful.

Brad Weimert: Well, I love that. So, when I’m hiring people, and at this point, I’ve done, I don’t know, a thousands of interviews, et cetera, what are the things that you’re looking for, and how does the paper bag application match to what you’re looking for other than somebody that really wants to work there and be committed to the job?

Amy Simmons: Well, anecdotal stories. This one woman, she’s so uncomfortable with the white paper bag that she made little boxes and said, “Have I ever been convicted of a felony? Nope.” So, that person, I mean, I’m not making fun of her, but that person needed a lot more order than we were going to provide for her. So, we have a lot of freedom, and some people thrive in that environment. Some people don’t. So, that’s part of the paper bag that we’ll tell you. But ultimately, people get hired for their kindness. Our mission statement is to make people’s day, and we had a quick conversation about this earlier, but I almost never talk about the ice cream, even though it is really, really good ice cream.

I talk about the people and the experience you’re going to have, and the fact that we’ve had customers come in who are just diagnosed with cancer, and the role that our employees played in that moment, in that human moment. So, we’re really looking for people who, like our managers, will ask them, “Tell me a story of a way a business really made a difference in your life. Tell me a story about your worst boss.” And some people just dog that person. Some people say it was a terrible situation, but at least they let me know that that wasn’t for me. It was time to move on, and I could go, and it helped me understand what I needed somewhere else. So, it’s positivity, problem solving, but compassion, empathy.

Brad Weimert: I love that. Well, I think also the experience that’s provided shades your perception of the product, right? So, you say the product is really good, even if it was mediocre. If you have a great experience, you leave thinking that the product was good. Because I think humanity has a hard time separating what they liked about it, right? It was just the whole thing was great. I’m going to go back there.

Amy Simmons: Yeah, and I don’t know that they should separate.

Brad Weimert: Yet, the product is very good. So, for whatever reason, what’s in my head was none of this leading up to this. It was just that Amy’s has great ice cream, and that was my takeaway from being in Austin the last 10 years. And as I dug into it, I looked at all of the different elements that you deliberately put in place, and one of them is sort of this theater that happens when you order ice cream there. When people talk about the theatrical flair in Amy’s, what are a couple of things that are encouraged for the staff to be doing at every exchange or during a shift, for example?

Amy Simmons: To be themselves and have fun. We had a peer company. It was called The Fudgery, and they had all these songs that they had to memorize. And when they made fudge, it was a show. And so, when people got hired, they were trained to do this show. Amy’s has never been like that. It’s always been it started with this guy, Ira Major, years and years and years ago. And he would turn the music off, and he would get everybody in line to do the hokey pokey, and then he would say, “Hey, I’m going to ask you to do something, and if you follow my directions, then I’ll buy your ice cream for you.” And I remember a fairly conservative French professor that he had on his back, his back with break dancing, but with a cardboard box spinning in the middle of the store on his back. To get a free ice cream?

I mean, it’s a couple of bucks, but I have had to draw the line. I’ve had to reel them back in. But all the tricks that they do, and every year we do a trick contest, that’s Amy’s Trick Olympics. It’s a benefit for CASA, and that’s all run by the employees, and it’s all their ideas. I can’t do a trick for anything. They do theme nights where, like, one day I walked in and there’s a mom and two daughters, and they were leaving. I’m like, “Why are they leaving? They didn’t have ice cream.” They said, “Oh, it’s pajama night. And we told them, if they go home, put their pajamas on, they’ll get 20% discount.” So, it’s like for 20% the mom and the daughters went home to get their jammies on.

So, we let people let their freak fly. And frankly, I really think Austin’s grown so much in the 41 years I’ve been in business, but it’s we grew up together, so we’re very similar. I mean, the weird is it’s kind weird. It’s just caring about people and being different and being human and real.

Brad Weimert: Well, I love that idea, and I love that fundamentally. I also, as a pragmatic operator, have to know when you’re managing that type of thing, what parameters do you put in place? Do you have hard nos and hard yeses? What is the line for what employees can do to have fun during work?

Amy Simmons: Yep. Well, like many companies, we had virtually no rules.

Brad Weimert: Initially.

Amy Simmons: Right. And all rules came from some violation that caused a problem.

Brad Weimert: Sure.

Amy Simmons: So, really, the employees, though, have written the rule books over the years. I mean, they have a spreadsheet of what things can’t be done, why, and what are the consequences, and they built it because we’re all reasonable. We don’t want too much oversight, we don’t want our parents to be helicopter parents or bosses, but we also understand that there needs to be some parameters for us to be safe and happy and to be respectful of all individuals. The trick, I drove by the quad store, and there were people, three, on top of one another’s shoulders throwing ice cream across the street. I was like, “What? No. Danger. Danger, Will Robinson. Someone’s going down.” So, there are a couple of things I’ve put my foot down about, but typically it’s self policed.

Brad Weimert: Wild. Okay. So, also makes sense, but you’ve been around 41 years. As I think we’ve all seen with the US government in our law books, at some point, we need to regulate what has been written down in the no-no list.

Amy Simmons: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: Does management or executive at some point look at that and revise that list? Does somebody sign off on what you can and can’t do inside of an Amy’s store if you’re an employee?

Amy Simmons: Oh, yes. I make it sound like it’s a free-for-all.

Brad Weimert: Yes, you do.

Amy Simmons: But, no, we are responsible adults. We understand there’s a government. Safety first.

Brad Weimert: Well, okay, so to that end, you’ve got this people-forward experience. And back to the management side of this, and sort of the pragmatic way to operate a business like this, how do you measure success for those independent experiences, for the theatrical side of Amy’s, et cetera?

Amy Simmons: Employee satisfaction, employee turnover, customer satisfaction, storytelling. It’s less data-driven than it is really kind of stories put together.

Brad Weimert: Well, I mean, I am always looking at trying to get to the metrics, and I think that the broad metrics, which are customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, turnover, et cetera, are still metrics. They just take longer to get to. And you are going to have some messiness along the way to get there. But I suppose, if the goal is to have fun and keep employees happy, and you’re not afraid to make mistakes.

Amy Simmons: Well, and ultimately, your financial statements are your scorecard, and we practice the great game of business, so our employees know the scorecard. I mean, if customer comes back, they’re happy.

Brad Weimert: Well, let’s talk about that, the great game of business. So, this is the concept of having open financials that are accessible to everybody in the company and publicly as well, or just inside the company? 

Amy Simmons: Yeah. Sure.

Brad Weimert: Accessible to everybody. So, the first time that I heard about this was Ari and Paul, who run Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, who you knew well.

Amy Simmons: Yes.

Brad Weimert: I worked for Zingerman’s when I was 14.

Amy Simmons: Lucky.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I don’t know. I was filling two-ounce cups with blue cheese dressing in the basement, which was rather disgusting. But love Zingerman’s to death, and they were the first time I heard of anybody doing this. So, tell me the fundamentals of having an open financial book policy like that, and what are the good points and what are the bad points of it?

Amy Simmons: I really can’t come up with any bad points. Ultimately, I’m trying to look forward to my deathbed, and what am I going to be proud of, and what’s been really meaningful to me. And over 41 years, the impact on more often young people than middle-aged or older people of working in the Amy’s environment has been, I think, we have a little bit of a confidence crisis in young people, and they develop so much working for Amy’s. And I got the great game from Ari, then met Jack Stack in Springfield, Missouri, and just fell in love with that whole program. But teaching financials is a way of helping young people becoming financially literate, and they’re not necessarily getting that from their parents. They’re definitely not getting it in school.

We take their personal financial statements and parallel it with the business financial statements, and so that they can understand how they can build wealth. And so, that’s super, super meaningful, and then societally, and I think John Mackey certainly has done in his book, Conscious Capitalism, is talking about the same thing is that sometimes we demonize business because the motive is money, and because there are Enrons and there are some evil people in business. But the reality is business is a very, very strong part of our community, and it’s very, very important. It’s where we work, it’s where we spend a lot of our time, it’s where we build relationships.

And so, the impact of people understanding how businesses function, and the fact that we talk a lot about having four stakeholders. So, the employees, we want to pay them as much as possible. We want them to have a great work environment, flexible schedules, whatever they need. Customers, we want them to have a really fairly priced product, great quality product, great environment. Shareholders, if I’m 41, your company, my shareholders are still in, many of them, probably half of them. We’ve bought out about half of them, and they’re still ecstatic about being involved in the company. But if they don’t make a return, then they’re not investing in the next small business that asks them to invest.

And then, of course, our suppliers, because if you try and negotiate down your costs so that your suppliers can’t survive, then you’re out of luck. You’re not going to get the highest quality dairy in the future. So, it’s every question that we go over in the company, and employees do this also, “I want to raise.” “Okay, let’s look at the four stakeholders. Let’s look at our financials. Let’s find out where we can get that raise. I want you to have a raise.” It’s not the traditional model of, “No, we’re not making any money.” And frankly, this year, anybody will tell you in food service, has been a rough, rough year, very odd. Oddest year of my 41 years.

Brad Weimert: Well, I operate from the place of all parties should be winning or you’re not doing it right.

Amy Simmons: Yeah, exactly.

Brad Weimert: I also don’t operate from the place of that being an altruistic motive. I don’t think that I’m doing it because I actually want everybody to win. I think that I’m doing it because it is the best way to run a business where if you do it right, it’s the least friction, which means that I win the most, right? It’s the nicest, funnest, most pleasant way to do business. I win the most if everybody else is winning because it just keeps moving by itself.

Amy Simmons: Yep, that’s a healthy economy.

Brad Weimert: It is, it is. That also is coming fundamentally from the place that I don’t believe in altruism. I think that at the end of the day, you can be doing the nicest thing in the world to somebody, but you’re still making yourself feel good.

Amy Simmons: My mother was a PhD psychologist. She got her PhD from Bryn Mawr. And her dissertation was in achievement motivation versus power motivation, but she also did a sub-study on altruism.

Brad Weimert: Oh, nice.

Amy Simmons: And she also does not, well, she thinks that the only form of altruism is a mother.

Brad Weimert: Ah, oh, that’s interesting.

Amy Simmons: And it’s biological.

Brad Weimert: Oh, see.

Amy Simmons: But it’s even not altruism because you’re trying to spread your genetics.

Brad Weimert: Right. There’s a different…

Amy Simmons: It’s selfish.

Brad Weimert: Exactly. We’ve got a different level there. It is kind of selfish to perpetuate your mini-me into the world.

Amy Simmons: Yeah, exactly. Good reference.

Brad Weimert: Okay, so open financials. Actually, before I ask you that, for clarity, the open financials element, I guess I didn’t think about it that way when I first, I looked at it from the perspective of how does it help the business grow and/or hurt the business. But you gave me a different frame just now, which is if you share your financials and use it as an opportunity to help your staff understand financial literacy. There’s a whole different element there. How much time and energy goes into that specific thing, like deliberately trying to help the staff learn financial literacy through that?

Amy Simmons: I think we went overboard. So, about seven years ago, Alan Hixon came into Amy’s and he’s our CEO. And so, I stepped back a little bit. Prior to that, I think I went overboard on the Great Game of Business. I think I lived, ate, breathed Great Game of Business. So, we’re still doing it, but not to the extent that we were when I was head over heels in love with it. So, a lot of times, I mean, it’s a big part of training, and it is good for the business because our employees build our budget for the next year. And so, they come for their department and build the budget and our marketing budget for Phil’s was $40,000 greater than last year. And you use the Great Game of Business to say, okay, show me that return. That’s great. We can come up with that money, but where’s the return? I mean, and the answer actually was $40,000 in gross income and here’s where it’s going to come from. And so, you use that training for that person to understand that gross income is not net income. So, if net income is 10%, then that means that you’ve got to get out of that $40,000 spend, you’ve got to get $400,000 to come back with that $40,000.

Brad Weimert: Yep, those are a little bit different.

Amy Simmons: Yeah, a little bit. But it’s a joy. That’s not an argument with an employee. It’s a joy to teach and grow and to see people’s lights turn on.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I love that. And so, I didn’t think about that either. So, part of it is giving the employees financial literacy for themselves, but also giving them financial literacy so they make good decisions for the business.

Amy Simmons: Exactly.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. It goes back to no real altruism.

Amy Simmons: Yep. See, I want to be happy on my deathbed.

Brad Weimert: Exactly.

Amy Simmons: I’m just padding my resume.

Brad Weimert: So, let’s talk about the business itself. You have 19 locations, you hyper-localized. You created enough independent ice cream stores in Austin where I would have to think that most people looking through the journey would be like, “Amy, stop it. You can’t keep putting more ice cream stores in one city. Why don’t you expand out and/or franchise?”  So, let’s start with just, why not franchise?

Amy Simmons: Look of horror, because franchising is a legal model and all the power is in the franchisee. And franchisees sometimes are naive or ignorant. And so, what happens is that we may understand our business model and say, we shouldn’t offer doughnuts in the morning, because it really kind of clouds what we’re doing, what we’re known for. We’re the doughnut place and the ice cream place. Ice cream, we are the experts at ice cream. And so, just historically, I’ve seen it. They start taking liberties and they dilute the image of the company. And you have very little control as a franchisor of policing that. Also, financially, typically, you sell a franchise for $25,000 a unit, $25,000 to $50,000 a unit, and then charge them an ongoing percentage, like 5%.

$25,000 per unit, you are spending way more teaching them, helping them, find a location, get it designed, even if you’re using the model of okay, buy a geographical area where you’re going to open 10 of them. Your oversight’s going to always cost more than that upfront franchise fee. And then 5% on a really successful restaurant like a Truluck’s, heck yeah. But we do a million in sales for a unit. So, that’s just not that much money to have the headache of a relationship. And our reputation is everything and how we do is everything. And we are one of the only locations in the airport that actually runs our own business. We would not do that deal if it was going to be staffed by a different company.

So, franchisees are like that. There’s so many models where franchising is the way to go, but it wasn’t for us. And then different regional areas, even though our stores are often very close proximity, they’ve never cannibalized another unit. We have never ever seen this store, it might go down in the very short run, but it almost builds both of the unit sales. Starbucks found the same thing, yeah.

Brad Weimert: Well, there’s a slightly different need for coffee than ice cream.

Amy Simmons: Right. Well, no need for ice cream.

Brad Weimert: Well, depends who you are, I suppose. Okay, so, wait, I didn’t realize this. One of the cool things about the Austin Airport, people have been bitching about it lately, which annoys me. They’re like, oh, it’s gotten congested. And I’m like, it’s one of the easiest airports in the country. I mean, I’m through security in eight minutes tops, like on a busy day.

Amy Simmons: Yeah. It’s a whole music program, I mean, come on.

Brad Weimert: It’s amazing. There are people playing. But what I was going to say is that you’ve got all these local representations. So, Amy’s is there, Stubb’s is there, I think. Is it Stubb’s, the barbecue spot that’s there?

Amy Simmons: Salt Lick is there.

Brad Weimert: Salt Lick is there. Stubb’s, God, they’d be so pissed at me. Salt Lick is there. JuiceLand is there.

Amy Simmons: I think Stubb’s has a presence.

Brad Weimert: Oh, well, I feel better now. There are probably 10 restaurants inside of the Austin Airport. Are you saying that the airport staff runs those, not the companies?

Amy Simmons: They’re run by…

Brad Weimert: Third-party service.

Amy Simmons: Yeah, third-party service. And they’re institutional services. The one that we are under was the best in the country, but it was the only private one. It just sold to a public company. So, large companies are harder to move than small companies.

Brad Weimert: Oh, yeah. I didn’t realize that. That’s super interesting to me. So, it stands to reason that you’re not going to get maybe the same quality control, certainly, the same level of service at the actual brand than what you see in the airport, except Amy’s.

Amy Simmons: I have to say they struggled with it for a little while. I think Maudie’s was in there early and that’s Joe Draker. And he got more complaints from that location than any other location that he has, so he pulled out. But I think they’re doing a lot better job now. The guy who ran Delaware North for years was really amazing and has worked hard on it. So, I think they’ve done a great job, but for us, we weren’t willing to take the risks from the beginning.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, that’s interesting. Okay, so backing out, no franchising, you gave me good reasons for that, hyper-localized. Then I back out and I look at somebody like Cold Stone who was created roughly in the same timeframe as you. They started in ‘88. You started in ‘84. They took on money and went full-blown global. What is a metric that Cold Stone is tracking and living too that you ignore on purpose or vice versa?

Amy Simmons: Well, so part of this is our egos as humans.

Brad Weimert: I believe that.

Amy Simmons: My family is very academic, very successful. I have three siblings. They all have MBAs. I have my MBA from UT because I had to just to keep up. But one of them has a law degree. So, there’s so much pressure. And I go back to school, I went to Tufts undergraduate. And you go back to school and people will say, “How many units do you have? What are your gross sales?” I mean, you run into all Randy’s friends, right? And you go billion dollars. Really? And then I feel so small and insignificant and you have to kind of wake yourself up and say, okay, what is important? What’s important to me? What’s the measure that’s important to me?

And Cold Stone is going gross sales/number of units. And if you’re a public company or you’ve got a high growth equity, you have to because you’ve got to fulfill that promise to the people who put the money up. For me…

Brad Weimert: It goes back to your shareholders.

Amy Simmons: I raised my money 41 years ago, made a very tiny promise. They’ve gotten a terrific return. So, there’s no question that they’ve gotten a fair return. And I have everything that I could possibly want. So, why? Why open more units except my ego? But I do. I have to realize that’s what’s going on and keep it in check.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Well, I think that, I love that answer. I think, more often than not, when you challenge entrepreneurs on business practices or metrics, they give you some bullsh*t answer that feeds their ego, that makes them feel better about mediocrity. And I think it’s beautiful to see people that seemingly have made concrete decisions to run the business, to create a human experience. And knowing that that’s the value on the wall inside of Amy’s, that drives everything else. And so, checking your ego seems to make a lot of sense from that perspective.

Amy Simmons: Yeah, I’ll have to bring my little gender bias in here. Our country, we have a lot of women in business. A lot of women are hitting really great C-Suite jobs now. I think, it’s always a bell curve. No all males aren’t the same, all females aren’t the same. But a lot of female characteristics are really positively impacting our entrepreneurial environment. I think servant leadership really is a more typical female leadership style. And now, it’s becoming super popular and successful.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. What do you think, to that end, what is something unique about being a female business owner that male entrepreneurs don’t experience the same way?

Amy Simmons: I think it’s the empathy. It’s the desire for the community to succeed together, and not the ego. And I don’t think it’s inherent in maleness. I think it’s something our society has unfortunately put in as a measure of success for males. And women haven’t had that pressure to the same extent. So, I think we can exhibit more seemingly altruistic…

Brad Weimert: Seemingly.

Amy Simmons: Yeah, seemingly.

Brad Weimert: Open financials, theatrical flare, paper bag application, if you could only keep one of those things inside of Amy’s, what’s the lead domino? What’s the most important thing?

Amy Simmons: They’re stemming from the same thing. It’s stemming from that creative freedom and recognition of individuals and their contributions. So, I think that’s the rudder that can’t change.

Brad Weimert: So, you’re refusing to give any of them up, is what you’re saying?

Amy Simmons: Yeah, I’m cheating.

Brad Weimert: I love it. I love it. So, I want to talk kind of about the real estate under the business because we were talking about that offline here. But before I do, you’ve got the stores, but you also over time have these other elements of business. You’ve got sort of a subscription. You’ve got retail stuff, you had catering. What’s the mix of revenue? So, how much is the stores themselves and how much comes from the other areas?

Amy Simmons: Catering is almost a store, but it’s a very profitable one. And then we do wholesale sales to restaurants. That’s almost a store. So, if we have 19 stores, it’s a 20 catering, it’d be a 20 of the sales. More because you kind of get bored and if you’re not growing, putting all your energies into high rapid growth, then what else can I do? How can I challenge myself? How can I do something new? So, we did start the bakery. We have Baked by Amy’s. It actually runs out of our production facility, but man, they make some of the most incredible cakes you’ve ever seen. She can make a macaroon like nobody’s business. We do all our shortbread cookies and all the holiday items that we come up with. So, it is a lot the Zingerman’s model of…

Brad Weimert: Vertically integrating.

Amy Simmons: Yeah. I mean, he has that one unit that did $4 million, just open another unit, but he didn’t want to. Yeah, he wanted to just do things better in a more interesting way. And I should say, both Erin and Paul. So, we did that. We opened Phil’s, not because we thought Phil’s was going to be a great business necessarily, but because Amy’s needed a little friend. When we opened on Burnett Road, it was super industrial and bought that building, used to be the Allendale Post Office, and the gas station was the Otis Hill Humble Station. And we were going to open an Amy’s there. Not because we thought it was a good markup, but because we did tours at the production and we wanted the kids to have great experiences, and so, we wanted that playscape and a model store there.

But it was so industrial over there. I mean, there was car lots and we just didn’t think it was going to make it. And so, tried to get any one of my friends to come in for the other half of the business. And nobody would. So, we opened Phil’s because one of our critical success factors for our locations are the synergy with other businesses, usually local businesses. And so, opened Phil’s, like I said, to be a little friend, and it’s done great. I mean, I think Amy’s opened first and when Phil’s opened, Amy’s sales increased by 25% because it’s a bigger experience. People can come, have a beer and a burger, and watch the kids play and have an ice cream for dessert.

Brad Weimert: So, my head went down two different paths there. The first was this vertical integration element, make your own shortbread, cakes, et cetera. And the Zingerman’s model, for those that don’t know, is Zingerman’s was this renowned deli. And then they were like, oh, we should probably do all of our own coffee. And then they were like, oh, we should probably bake all of our own bread. Oh, we should make all of our own cream and cheese. I mean, wild. And those are huge businesses independently now.

And when I think about that, I think about sort of, and you mentioned it, but the path of expertise or mastery in your own product set. And the way I frame that internally and in the company is stop chasing the shiny objects, stop doing new things, refine the client experience to improve the core client experience. And that’s what I heard when you initially said, we started baking things. And then you said, I just created another restaurant on the side because he needed a little friend. So, how do you think about sort of an allocation of your own time, and sh*t risk tolerance resources to go down this path of launching a burger joint to have a little friend for Amy’s versus staying focused on the core experience?

Amy Simmons: Well, I made a mistake. So, not Phil’s necessarily. Phil’s was very easy. But I opened a pizza restaurant in Smithville because we had a ranch in Smithville for a long time and it’s just an hour away, but it was very difficult to manage. And I was not good at anything. And we started doing something Zingerman’s also does, is we had an Amy’s EDU where we were training other businesses how to do the great game of business and we’re just losing focus. And so, actually, when Alan came in, he was much better than I. I mean, he showed me what I was doing wrong, which is, yeah, you’re feeding your creativity need, but it’s at the expense of the business, so let’s really focus.

And I also love, I had an early employee who started a bike shop called Ozone Bikes, and he was always like, “Should I open a second location?” I go, “Oh, maybe, but before you open a second location, make sure you’re getting everything you can get out of that first location because the second one’s going to be hard. You’re splitting your time. You can’t be everywhere all the time. And my guess is you can get 50% to 100% more in sales out of that same location if you were to focus on that.”

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Also, I think that principle should get used a lot more today because in a world of intense automation, digital stuff in particular, if you automate a mediocre practice, that’s not great.

Amy Simmons: No, and it’s not going to be able to evolve.

Brad Weimert: That’s a fair point too, yeah. You should really work on honing in the expertise and like you said, if you can get 50% or 100% more out of the business, then you can duplicate it, right? Then you can put the automation in place to do that. Yeah, I love that. Okay, so how do you think about real estate and buying the real estate underneath the business relative to locations? So, McDonald’s famously, Ray Croc famously said, “I’m not in the burger industry, I’m in the real estate space.” And I think that the flip side of that is location, location, location. For a retail establishment, it’s very hard to buy. Like, if you wanted to buy the real estate for the Amy’s property on Congress today, you couldn’t run Amy’s out of it.

Amy Simmons: Luckily, I bought it yesterday.

Brad Weimert: Exactly. But I mean, but really the numbers on it, I don’t think it would sustain putting an ice cream store in it. So, how do you think about buying the real estate? When do you buy it? When do you not buy it? How does it intersect with the actual operations of the Amy’s institution? Or is it totally separate?

Amy Simmons: No, it intersects a lot. And you’re doubling down on risk if you’re your own tenant, you can look at it either way. Either you’re reducing risk because it’s your basket and you’re in control. But if Amy’s went south, then you’re sitting on this real estate. But when there were opportunity points, I was able to buy. And you’re right, it was in down times. Also, our concept, luckily, like our second location was at The Arboretum and that was originally a Trammell Crow development. And our old mayor’s wife, Steve Adler, his wife is Diane Land, she was the manager of that property.

And they did a study about who was the biggest draw. And I think there was Scarboroughs, one of the very first creative theaters was in there. They did a study of what business was the biggest draw. We were 600 square feet. We got the biggest draw. So, we found out that we can pull, we can be a destination location, which really helps real estate. You can buy in an area, like explaining Burnett, when we went in there, it was very industrial. It’s not now.

Brad Weimert: Crazy.

Amy Simmons: Yeah. Lamar, South Lamar, 183 where iFLY is, we developed that property.

Brad Weimert: I love iFLY.

Amy Simmons: Yes. And that one is independent and…

Brad Weimert: Oh, is it really?

Amy Simmons: Oh, he’s an amazing operator.

Brad Weimert: Oh, that’s amazing. No, I’d love to meet him. iFLY is an indoor skydiving chamber. And from the outside, it looks sort of kitschy and like a carnival trick. When you actually learn what’s happening there, I mean, the entire world’s Air Forces train to skydive in those tunnels. Many of them actually, literally an iFLY because there aren’t that many tunnels in the world.

Amy Simmons: The founder, Alan Metni, had 50 unique patents on that process.

Brad Weimert: Oh, crazy.

Amy Simmons: Yeah. He’s brilliant.

Brad Weimert: Well, that explains it. Okay, no, that’s some serious sh*t. So, for people that didn’t catch this, when your business is the draw, it increases the value of real estate. The concept there is that you can buy something that is not in a really expensive area, and because your business pulls people to the area, it will actually literally improve or increase the value of the real estate.

Amy Simmons: Yeah. I coined the term Austinville’s and then we just add the zip code to it. So, we’re on South Lamar, just Amy’s and Phil’s in one building, but I also own this triangle that’s right next to it and our tenants are Papalote and ThunderCloud and Soup Peddler. And then we just got Monkey See Monkey Do! moved over from South Congress where it was priced out. And that synergy of all those local businesses in that one spot makes everybody more successful.

Brad Weimert: Oh, I love all that. What do you believe about brand moats now, that you didn’t in 1984 when you started?

Amy Simmons: Give me more. Give me more. Sorry.

Brad Weimert: What do you believe about the things that insulate or protect your unique brand from other people taking it over, right, or replicating it that you didn’t believe or didn’t know in 1984? And you sort of just alluded to it, right, the power of this local, but…

Amy Simmons: Yeah. Power of local, but people have got to care. Ben & Jerry’s came into Austin and they actually said that it was the only local company that they could not compete with. So, we just ramped it up. We just ramped up. It was so good for us because we realized what makes us better than them. They have a great product. Why would we be better than them? And it was really, it was the theatrics, it was the relationships with the customers. They pretty much just cookie cut their locations So, it’s the unique decor and the relationships with different artists in Austin. For the store design, sign design, and all those things, you have to make the customer aware of them and then find out if it’s important to them. But in Austin, it is. Austin is very, very supportive of locals.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Yeah, there’s no question about that. What advice do you have for new entrepreneurs today?

Amy Simmons: Whoa. Be yourself, for sure. I think, I loved when they coined the term– oh, now, what’s the term, Brad? Imposter syndrome, yeah. I loved when they coined that because so many people suffer from, and I certainly did. It’s like…

Brad Weimert: You’re like, wait, you mean entrepreneurship?

Amy Simmons: Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m not so special. It’s be yourself, be your unique self. Put that imprint on your business. And that’s what’s going to make you different and special. Don’t grow for the sake of growth. I mean, a lot of this, I’ve already said. These are my choices and not necessarily appropriate for all businesses, but really value and listen to. I mean, I’m a huge proponent of open book management and servant leadership. Really understand that you’re Atlas, you’re the support system for your business. You’re not the power that be the god in the business. You are only successful if your people are successful.

Brad Weimert: Austin has changed a tremendous amount in the last 41 years. In the last 10 years that I’ve been here, it’s changed. You hear both sides of that story about it being great or it being terrible, Austin is this or Austin is that. How do you feel about the change in Austin today?

Amy Simmons: I think, sometimes, it’s just momentum. I started going, it was just not the same. It’s not the same. And then I just really had to wake myself up and go on a fresh tour of Austin and I fell back in love with it. It’s definitely different. My biggest concern was affordability of living Central, especially for young people. Also, I used to have people who could pay their way through UT and work at Amy’s and live centrally. I mean, that’s really not the case. Education and housing has gotten disproportionately more expensive for them.

But, so what’s happening now for real estate? I just read it’s maybe the worst one in the country. Our real estate prices are going down. And I’m in a business group called Tugboat, and one of my peers is a contractor and he told me two years ago, 40,000 units were coming online in one month, 40,000 residential units. So, that’s the pressure that’s brought rental rates down and that so, even though when you own real estate, it’s a little painful, it’s really good, I think, for kind of re-establishing the balance of affordability in Austin.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I mean, I also think that those things are cyclical, right?

Amy Simmons: Yeah, yeah, definitely, cyclical.

Brad Weimert: It’s part of the game and I don’t look at those things as even a negative trend for the city of Austin.

Amy Simmons: No,

Brad Weimert: I think it’s probably just the opposite, really. That’s great. Is there anything that I didn’t ask you that I should have asked you?

Amy Simmons: New. Do I love dogs? Yes, I do.

Brad Weimert: That’s good. The professor’s right behind you. He did true to form scratch for two and a half minutes while you were talking.

Amy Simmons: I mean, did you snot how I…

Brad Weimert: I knew you were right in it. Yeah, you told me you would be too.

Amy Simmons: Yeah, you warned me.

Brad Weimert: Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Well, Amy Simmons, I am thrilled to be able to meet you.\

Amy Simmons: It was my pleasure. Great conversation.

Brad Weimert: I love it, man. Well, I hope that we have more in the future. I’m excited to meet the legend behind the institution that is Amy’s and the impact that it’s had in Austin.

Amy Simmons: Thank you.

Brad Weimert: Thank you.

[END]