How The Ice Cream Hut grew website traffic 30x and saved $50k and by building its internal company portal on Hercules

The Ice Cream Hut is an ice cream franchise based in Brevard County, Florida. It makes over 60 flavors of hard ice cream, sorbet, alcohol-infused, non-dairy, and no-sugar-added scoops. Founder Ron Ramsey runs three corporate stores and two franchises, with four more locations going live in the coming months across Orlando and Georgia.

Ron has rebuilt his entire company's operations on Hercules. He built one portal that runs his invoicing, inventory, HR, recipes, franchise onboarding, and a live flavor feed for customers. Hercules has saved him $50,000 on hiring an outsourced software development team, replaced his subscriptions to QuickBooks and Google Drive, saved him 10 to 15 hours a week, and grew his website traffic 30x. Ron has never coded before.

We rebuilt our entire internal software system on Hercules: from our marketing website to invoicing, to our internal portal for franchise owners, everything is now under one roof.

Saving $50k and 100 hours a month by building an internal company operating portal

Before Hercules, Ron ran the franchise on a stack of disconnected tools. He used QuickBooks for invoicing, Google Drive for recipes and HR documents, and a custom inventory app built by an offshore contractor years earlier that worked poorly, and 15+ other software tools for everything else. He spent eight years and thousands of dollars trying to unify his internal software into one app. The app developers he worked with could not deliver his vision. He also wanted to rebuild his company's core marketing website. The lowest quote he received was $50,000 and even that did not include many of the features he actually wanted.

Today, Ron's entire business runs through an internal portal he built on Hercules. The portal contains a variety of modules including

1. invoicing for his franchises and corporate stores
2. inventory management that automatically emails vendors the weekly orders (using Hercules Email) and tracks PAR levels for reorders in real time
3. Recipe management for 60+ different flavors
4. HR handbooks, dress codes
5. Franchise guidelines
6. production manuals,
7. territory maps all live behind role-based logins
8. employee scheduling (which syncs with his existing provider, ConnectTeam)

Ron estimates the portal personally saves him 10 to 15 hours a week and saves each store manager several hours a week on inventory. Ron is using this extra time to launch more franchises. Ron also estimates he saved over $10k a year by dropping his QuickBooks, Drive, and other subscriptions.

It was going to cost me $50,000 to build a generic website with no additional add-ons. I paid much less for Hercules and got a much better result. Now everything is in one spot, and I got rid of QuickBooks, Drive, and 15 different links.

Growing website traffic 30x by bringing the whole brand onto one site

The Ice Cream Hut's SEO was not optimal. Each store had its own website with its own brand and domain. All backlinks were tied to one individual store, not the overall company. Further, the customers who did find him had no single place to check the menu, get directions, or see if a store was open. Most customers would just call the store to ask, disrupting managers and hourly workers.

Ron rebuilt his company's website on Hercules and has 30xed what it was before his traffic. He now has one single site which has the menu, directions, opening hours for each individual store. The one unified marketing site is better for SEO, makes it easier for customers to engage with the brand, and makes it easier to sell to prospective franchisees.

The traffic to that website is probably times 30 from what we were doing before. It is an all-in-one site now, so customers can get every piece of information they need before they even arrive at the store.

Cutting customer phone calls with a live, twice-daily flavor feed

Staff spent hours every week on the phone telling customers which flavors were up that day. The Ice Cream Hut's flavors change daily, and people kept calling the stores to ask what was in the case. Ron carries over 60 flavors but each store only can only serve ~40 at a time. What's more, managers had no quantitative data on which flavors were most popular. They would set the daily flavor based on instinct.

Ron built a live flavor feed, called "Now Scooping," into his Hercules site. Twice a day, at noon and 5pm, a store manager opens the portal on a tablet and taps which flavors are up. The site updates instantly. It also automatically posts the updates to the store's Facebook page, UberEats, and Doordash, all through the integrations Ron built with Hercules App Connectors. The self-serve flavor tracker saves store staff hours a week from fielding calls and has created a new marketing channel followed by his regular customers.

The real-time flavor tracker is amazing. We make an update and it's live. There is no lag, no time delay. We don't even have to republish the website, it just goes live. It's already saving a lot of phone calls.

Why Hercules

Ron chose Hercules because it allowed him to build his dream website and internal portal without hiring a 3rd-party software development agency. He knows his business. He knew exactly what software he needed. However, before Hercules, he couldn't code it himself. Not only that, the $50,000 he was quoted to build it was for a very basic website. Ron built the site and system himself, faster than he would have with other developers for a fraction of the quote.

I like to be up at the top of the tech world with how we operate. A lot of people look at us and say, okay, they have their stuff together. That is how we want to run it, and it has worked out great.

What's next

Ron is already building his second business on Hercules. Island Arctic Alchemy is a manufacturing company that will produce and supply every product The Ice Cream Hut sells. Hercules will run the whole supply chain, from each store's order to the truck that delivers it. Stores will order through the app, which checks each order against manufacturing inventory, then routes it for production, invoices it with payment terms, and tracks it from ready-to-manufacture through shipping. The system also sends statements and late fees automatically. With both businesses connected on Hercules, Ron will be able to run his stores and his supply chain from the same place. With new franchises opening soon in Orlando and Georgia, he sees a clear path to millions of dollars in franchising over the next 5 years. As Ron puts it: "I put a vision together, took everything we were outsourcing to different software vendors, and put it all into one platform."