Webinar #30 – Use the snowie.com website to help your business, Smart Snacks for Schools, and Cream Topping Blowing the doors off Sweetened Condensed Milk at Duck Commander

This weeks webinar is a bit of many little things that each deserve and announcement and discussion. We start out this webinar by discussing first Website Navigation, or how to better use our website for your Shaved Ice Business.

First, there is one area that I did not mention in the video, and that is that our website is completely Mobile, thus allowing you to quite easily order your restocking items right from your phone while you are taking inventory at your stand.

We also discussed that our site is completely searchable. If you are unable to search for a product and get directly to it, please let us know and we will make sure that we get that corrected. You should rarely have to navigate to any of our products, including our Shaved Ice Stands, Shaved Ice Trucks (Busses), Ice Shavers, Shaved Ice Flavors, Stand and Ice Shaver Parts, any of our Shaved Ice Equipment, etc.

One of the areas that Lyle wanted me to focus on was Flavors. When people are trying to locate the list of our top 50 flavors, they are a bit difficult to find. That is being changed as we speak. In the meantime, you need to select what kind of flavor you are looking for, whether it is concentrate, ready-to-use, natural, or otherwise. Once you are in there, pick the size of container you want. At this point you are able to then select the flavor that you want in that size and you are able to also see the list of flavors available as well as the flavor ranking from 1-50.

Another popular area on our site is the Earnings Potential page. Now, this page obviously cannot guarantee the money you are going to make in your shaved ice stand, but it uses the static number of your cost of goods sold, and your best estimation on what you will make each day, what you will pay in wages, rent, etc. From these guestimations, you can get a really good idea of what you can make either in a stationary location, at events, or traveling like an ice cream truck in the Snowie Bus.

On a side note, While going through the site, I came across financing which has had some major enhancements. To keep it brief here, I will just say that we are now able to finance the Bus to more people than ever before, and we are able to do it on a consumer level. What this means is that you used to have to go through the leasing companies which made it a stretch to get qualified, especially if you have not been in business for two or three years. You can still qualify, but you will pay a higher rate. Now, we have the option for you to put $10,000 – $30,000 down and finance that bus as if you were buying a car for your family. Super fast qualifying, and your rate is in the single digits. Quite amazing really.

Videos were another area where we have heard people ask where they can see them. We have a link at the top of the site that says “Media.” Under that link you have two options, Photo Gallery, which is a bit dated. You can find more current pictures under the product pages themselves, this is also changing. Then, of course, you have the option for Video Gallery. Here is where you can find any of the videos that we have done. You can use the top buttons to select whether you want to see videos on our Stands, Flavors, Ice Shavers, Shaved Ice Business practices, Making Ice, Shaving Ice, Flavoring Shaved Ice, Ice Shaver Maintenance, and on and on.

We are developing a list item for this page as well so that you can see each video as a title rather than having to scroll the icons. You can also filter the videos at the top of the page by clicking on Flavors, Ice Shavers, Snowie Bus, Building, Kiosks, Carts, etc.

We spoke briefly about Forums and using them as a Snowie owner. We are actually creating a vendor portal, where you will be able to discuss these items with other owners without the public eye being able to access them. Some time ago, we had to scrap our forum due to in appropriate content taking it over. It was a sacrifice, but a good one. We scraped that forum clean and started new. Please take the time to put your comments and questions in the forum, this truly makes an area where everyone can be edified and have their shaved ice business questions answered.

Lastly on the website items, we have locations. I am telling you right now, this can be huge for your shaved ice business. We are not a franchise so we do not own your information. That should make many of you sigh in relief. But there are a few drawbacks as well. One of them is that we cannot post your location for you on a map. You need to do that yourself. Our new system makes this very easy, make sure you post your location today, why not? I should clarify, however, that you must be branding your business under the Snowie name. If you are doing business under a different name, you will not get a location on our site and you will not be able to access the owners forum, or the vendor portal.

Now, the real meat of this Webinar is the discussion we had on the Smart Snacks for School compliance that you need to do in order to be able to serve shaved ice in schools, or any other product for that matter. We had some questions arise as people starting mixing this product in their sugar water. They had some separation where the powder would make it to the bottom of their jug after a light mix. We wanted to clarify in this webinar that you need to do one of two things. Either you need to mix this product much longer than you would your regular sugar water, or even better in my opinion, you will need to first mix the powder with a small pitcher of hot water. This will make it dissolve in the water quickly. After you dissolve into the pitcher, you can then add that to your sugar water, mix again, and rest assured that your vitamins are throughout the whole contents of the 5 gallons of sugar water.

We took a trip out to Duck Commander and it was awesome. They were all very cool to us and made us feel right at home. While we were there, something cool happened. They wanted to compare the Snowie Cream Topping with dairy products that they just purchased at the grocery store, like Sweetened Condensed Milk, etc. We had all of their staff come out and try these “Sno Caps” on their shaved ice. We put the Sweetened Condensed Milk on some and Snowie’s Cream Topping on the other and, literally 100% of them LOVED Snowie’s Cream Topping. I mean they were blown away by the difference and placed a large order for it on the spot.

The reason I bring this up is that I have always pitched our Cream Topping as a way to get the Health Department off your back. It is a non-dairy product, thus allowing you to keep it in your stand without having to be plumbed and keep a commercial fridge on site. You can literally keep this on ice, and it will be good for a week. I just make a quart at a time and you will always go through that and more in the course of a day. But by me being so caught up in that advantage, I completely disregarded how absolutely delicious this product was. It is truly amazing. If you have not done so, you truly need to add this to your menu, your customers will go nuts. Even give it out for free at first, they will never take it another way after that.

In the end, I discuss the future of our webinars. We are bringing them back to a regular schedule every other Thursday night at 5:00PM MST. We will also be adding many random webinars where we will do live broadcasts from live events. I am excited about this. It truly gives you the ability to ask questions in a real world scenario and get answers right then.

Thank you for reading and watching this Webinar on Snowie Shaved Ice, a true opportunity to start a shaved ice business for yourself without all the contracts and anxiety that come along with them. Give us a shot, we think our business concept will blow you away!

You can watch the video here:
https://snowie.com/?p=11820