Episode Transcript
The Finance Ghost: Welcome to this episode of The Finance Ghost plugged in with Capitec. I always enjoy it when I get to speak to the entrepreneurs and families who sit behind household names, and this is a household name.
In fact, this is a business that I have used many times. My kids love it. I love it. My wife loves it. Chances are pretty good that you love it too, and that is Gelato Mania.
Who better to speak to today than Kosta Kappatos? He is the... Well, actually, Kosta, you're just part of the founding family, really. I feel like you're just the get-everything-done officer, now.
I wanted to say a fancy title and this and that, but I'm probably right in guessing that actually, having grown up in this thing, you just get involved. That's your job – to just get involved. Am I right?
Kosta Kappatos: [laughing] I guess, like anyone else who’s got a family business or who started from very humble beginnings – you're the IT department, the finance department…
The Finance Ghost: [laughing] Exactly.
Kosta Kappatos: …the Customer Complaints, HR… Every department kind of put into one. The title’s kind of there for when people say, “Oh, what do you do?” But it's so much more than that.
The Finance Ghost: No, absolutely. So, tell us the title, Kosta. We may as well start there, then everyone knows.
Kosta Kappatos: The actual title is Financial Director.
The Finance Ghost: There we go. And Chief Tasting Officer, I hope. There have to be perks to this, right?
Kosta Kappatos: That's one. There are definitely a couple of perks to what we do.
The Finance Ghost: Love it. So, you've been involved in this thing, well, I guess from the start. You'll tell us now about your parents starting this business, and I'm obviously keen to hear about that journey along the way, but you've certainly grown up with it.
And you've decided to be part of the family business, which I think is wonderful. I'm sure your folks are thrilled – because actually, that's quite rare. People think that's kind of the default, but it's actually not, so that is really lovely to hear.
Just walk us through the most rewarding part of this journey. Is it the free ice cream, or has it been something else?
Kosta Kappatos: Look, the ice cream does help along the way, but I wouldn't say that it's the most rewarding. We started 20 years ago, exactly, this year. We started back in 2006.
At the time, we had just immigrated back to South Africa from Greece (we were living there for a couple of years) and my parents had started a coffee shop. They started getting ice cream supplied by one of the local suppliers, and it just wasn't up to scratch.
So, my dad booked a flight to Italy. Where better to learn to make gelato? He went to Italy, learnt how to make gelato. I think he spent about two weeks there, learnt, then came back to South Africa and we started making ice cream in the basement of a shopping centre in the Northern Suburbs in Cape Town, called Willowbridge. That's really where we started.
Fast-forward 20 years, and we've got 16 stores across two provinces.
Definitely, the most rewarding part of the journey is looking back at all those old photos. Looking back at where we've come from and actually being amazed at where we are today. We had six, seven staff to start, and now we've got over 150 staff in our company.
The looking back is definitely the most rewarding part.
The Finance Ghost: I love that. I'm never going to look at Willowbridge the same again…
Kosta Kappatos: [laughing]
The Finance Ghost: …I had no idea that that was really the genesis of this journey, but I love that. I'm guessing that today you are not manufacturing the ice cream in a broom cupboard somewhere at the bottom of Willowbridge, are you?
Kosta Kappatos: No. Look, making gelato the way we make it, we hold ourselves to very high standards. So, we've got a factory in both Cape Town and Johannesburg. We've kitted it out in a way that allows us to produce the highest quality gelato. It's not in a broom closet anymore. We've got proper facilities in both provinces.
The Finance Ghost: Fantastic. Now, obviously, a journey like this, like all businesses, cannot possibly just be Pino Pinguino and the sunshine. We'd all love it to be, but unfortunately, it's not.
Even something as wonderful as this has got some tough stuff along the way. The product might be ice cream and you might be in the business of making people happy, but I know from my experience, from speaking to other entrepreneurs - anyone listening to this who's been involved will know - that even when the product going out the door is a wonderful thing, life is not easy.
As a business owner, perhaps you can give us an idea, especially as you've grown up with this business, what has been the journey, in terms of the difficult memories?
It’s wonderful to look back and think back to making the stuff at Willowbridge – I really do love that, but there has to be some tough stuff that happened along the way. Some big challenges, some moments where maybe the family thought this thing wasn't going to make it.
Kosta Kappatos: Yeah. And I think every business will have it, right? When you do start off so small, it almost feels like everything can completely derail the train. Like, even the smallest little issue, when you're so small, can just cause everything to collapse.
Some of the key standouts… It's not just one thing. I can sit here and tell you about Covid – and Covid was incredibly tough. I don't want to sound like a broken record. I think every business was rocked with that. You make a product, you can send a product out the door, but then it's all the small things around you that you almost don't pick up.
When I first joined, I did not know that you have to pay licences to play music in your store. And even that's just a small headache to get your head around.
What was definitely one of the standout tough things when we were in our fledgling years was the importing of the products from Italy. You're looking at three, four months for anything to get here from Italy on a ship. Flying is just too expensive, when you’ve first started out.
And you then have to order the right products, but you still want to offer 24 flavours, and you're running out. You don't have enough money when you're so young to actually go out and buy a whole bunch of stock. That was quite a challenging balancing act.
You mentioned this idea of wearing lots of hats. The one person who did that more than I am doing it right now was my dad. Hermanus was one of our very first stores, and I remember so many Saturday and Sunday mornings, delivering ice cream to Hermanus with my dad, who also had to do everything else.
We've come a long way. There've been a lot of speed bumps along the way that we've had to navigate.
The Finance Ghost: Yeah, it's great. Growing up with a business is quite a special experience. I come from a family where my parents had a crack at entrepreneurship. It definitely didn't turn out even 0.1% as well as Gelato Mania, but I do have a lot of fond memories of my dad picking me up in the afternoon in high school.
I'd go with him to deliver these whacking great loudspeakers and help him carry, then I'd flick through the invoices in the car on the way home, and we were bombing around in this delivery van.
It was great. I wouldn't change those memories for the world. It was fantastic. And it probably had a big influence on me in terms of what I've chosen to do with my life. It certainly didn't put me off entrepreneurship (even though it probably should have [laughing]).
But it didn't put you off either. I mean, you haven't exactly gone the whole Sandton, suit-and-tie, investment banking route. You've chosen to get stuck into the business, right? So, obviously there are reasons beyond just the family and love. You've chosen to do this with your life. There must be a reason.
Kosta Kappatos: Yeah. You're 16, 17, you want to get your first job. My dad always had a knack for being able to direct us in what we should do but always giving us the decision.
So, instead of, “Cool, I want to go get a job. What are the other jobs paying?” My dad would always make sure that he would pay the best out of everyone, so that we would then work in the business.
I just look back at that and I'm like, “It's such a clever way.” Because he's not telling you, “You have to work in the business.” He's making you make the decision for yourself, in a way that ends up benefiting you in the long run – and benefiting everyone else. It was such an incredible way of looking at it.
You've touched on the whole Sandton suit-and-tie. There was a momentary point where it was like, “Okay, do I go ahead and do that?” And it was really like, “What really makes me happy?” And at the end of the day, it's actually business.
Some of my best memories are behind the gelato fridge, whether it was at Camps Bay or at the Waterfront, serving customers and interacting with people. And I didn't know if I could do that to the full extent, being somewhere high up in a skyscraper in Sandton.
The Finance Ghost: Yeah. I often fantasise about the pizza restaurant that I dream of owning one day. I don't know if it's a Mediterranean-background thing. You are as Greek as the day is long; I'm only half Italian. Maybe it's just a Med thing - you just desperately want to open a food restaurant.
I don't know if there's a hive mind controlling us from the Med and being like, “Go, do food. Do your thing. This is what you were born to do.” It does seem to exist, right?
Kosta Kappatos: It does! You mentioned the hive mind. I think it's more that food is central to pretty much every Mediterranean country. There's so much love that gets transmitted through food.
When people say to me, what do you do? I say, “I make people happy.” Because at the end of the day, you're selling something that does make people happy. Kudos to all the Meds out there who are running restaurants and ultimately making people happy.
The Finance Ghost: It's a tough gig, hey? Regardless of where you're from in this world, it is not an easy way to make money. But you’ve certainly made it work.
One of the things that you touched on there was supply chain. So, importing stuff from Italy. I’m starting to get a better understanding, now, of why Gelato Mania stuff is so yummy and, in many cases, is better than some of the so-called “gelato” I've had in Italy.
I think the word “gelato” gets abused, because quality varies dramatically. That's actually what I wanted to ask you - there’s a difference between the different kinds of ice cream, and obviously, in your business, there's a big commitment to quality. I mean, you run the manufacturing side like a bakery. I know you get very early starts every day.
Just talk to us about the quality that you've baked into this business and how it differs, then, from ice cream of varying quality that you can get all over the place?
Kosta Kappatos: When we first started in South Africa, gelato wasn't really a thing. You'd maybe heard about it in a movie – the Americans saying “gelato” or something like that – but we didn't really know.
We had to try to find a way to explain to people that not all gelato is the same. What has happened is that there's this distinction between what gelato is and what we know as “ice cream”.
Ice cream – you've got a higher fat percentage. Fat isn't necessarily bad, you do need fat, but you've got a higher fat percentage. The product can be frozen at, let's say, –5 °C, –6 °C.
More often than not, ice cream is made in bulk quantities. Gelato, on the other hand, is using higher quality ingredients. You still need fat, as I mentioned, but here you'll replace it with good fats, so it's not necessarily going to be animal fats or things like that. You find alternatives to make the product much better.
And then one of the key hallmarks with gelato is that it's made in smaller batches. Gelato you eat at roughly –14 °C. At –5 °C, gelato is like a milkshake, so it's one of the key differentiators to ice cream.
What we found, when we first started – people didn't understand what is ice cream, and what is gelato. What has subsequently happened is gelato is growing in the country, which is absolutely amazing.
But, just like not all boerewors is the same, not all gelato is the same. So, you get really, really good boerewors. You get really, really bad boerewors. You can make small batches, you can still make gelato, but your ingredients might not necessarily be the highest quality. We focus on the highest quality, constantly.
The Finance Ghost: Thank you. I was sitting here, listening to you talking about the different temperatures and, you know, at this temperature it's a milkshake, basically, and at that temperature it's solid. It must be quite difficult to be around this stuff all the time.
I've met your family recently, at a Capitec-sponsored event, and none of you look like you spend too much time digging in the ice cream tub. Do you just eventually generate the sort of self-control required to spend this much time around gelato?
[laughing] Obviously, it's a business at the end of the day. You've tasted the flavours. But the temptation feels enormous. Every time you're going to a store or to just check that it tastes good and that it’s fresh – how on earth do you have the self-control here?
Kosta Kappatos: The funny thing, and everyone thinks that I'm talking hogwash when I say this, but gelato, made well, is not necessarily unhealthy. Now, I'm not going out there and saying that it's healthy – by no means. But, knowing what goes into the product.
Yes, there's sugar, but I eat a lot of ice cream. Whenever I go to a store to make sure what's happening, I'm eating the ice cream coming out of the things here to make sure that it is what it needs to be.
We actually eat a lot of ice cream. Look, it could be our good genes.
The Finance Ghost: I was about to say! It's like when you go to Italy (this is the half of the genetic pool that I did not get), and you're like, “Wow, all these people are so beautiful and in such great shape – how do they do it?” And then they're chowing their third plate of pasta and I don't know what it is. It's remarkable.
I didn't get those genes, unfortunately. Maybe you did. So just, disclaimer for everyone else out there: just tone it down on the ice cream [laughing]. Because Kosta and his team there, they can have the gelato, but the rest of us have to be a little bit careful, hey? As delicious as it is.
Kosta Kappatos: That is the case, but I think that if you are going to have something… I know what goes into the product. People might not know me from a bar of soap, but the proof is in the pudding. We're making you happy.
The Finance Ghost: Absolutely. Look, my dad is diabetic. I must say, I appreciate the fact that you do actually have sugar-free options. Do you find that those are quite good sellers? I think there is demand among diabetics and more health-conscious people for the “healthier gelato”, if I can call it that.
Kosta Kappatos: No, there definitely is demand, and so our sugar-free options are great. What was really funny is that we have two flavours – we've got a hazelnut and a chocolate – which are the sugar-free ones. That’s because the hazelnuts and the chocolate are pure. It comes either from the cocoa seed or the hazelnuts, and so there's no added sugar in them, so you can make it sugar-free.
Anyone that has had our product or anyone that does have it will pick up that it doesn't taste that much different to the normal thing with sugar and with everything. Because we're using the pure nut.
There was such a great success for it. We tried to increase the number of flavours. There aren’t that many flavours which you can do sugar-free, but, for example, we brought in a vanilla and a pistachio – again, centred around nuts or a pod or a bean – and, Ghost, they never really sold! People just went for the hazelnut and chocolate.
Yes, we offer lots of flavours in our stores, but almost every one of those spots is prime real estate. If a flavour is not doing well enough, there's someone else knocking on the door who wants that spot.
The Finance Ghost: And that must be one of the most interesting things about the business, right? As you say, it is literally prime real estate. You've got a serving counter there; you have X number of flavours that can fit.
Every additional flavour is a supply chain and manufacturing consideration, and potential wastage, and how that impacts gross margin – we're starting to get into the juicy business stuff now.
And I'm guessing you do sometimes just have flavours that surprise you to the upside, and some that are long-term winners, others that are just a trend.
I mean, I feel like I see Dubai Chocolate everywhere I go now. For whatever reason, that's just become a thing. And then you've got, as I say, Pino Pinguino, which has been my cousin's favourite for longer than I can remember (I'll definitely get her to listen to this podcast) and it's one that I love, as well.
Do you find that there are just flavours which last forever and others which just come and go?
Kosta Kappatos: Definitely. And I describe flavours almost (and I'm going to make a really bad metaphor, but) like fashion. Flavours will go through a run where they are absolutely flying.
One of the flavours that does this quite a bit – I don't know why – is Snickers. Snickers is our peanut-butter-chocolate flavour. And sure, it will be on an absolute run. Flying. We can't make enough Snickers. And then, all of a sudden, it will hit a wall, and it will just stop.
And so, going back to that idea of “we've got so many flavours knocking”, we'll pull the flavour, we'll put a new flavour in. You reintroduce Snickers in a couple of months' time, and then it starts flying again. So, we don't often know why a flavour works and doesn't work.
There obviously are the ones that come and go. Most recently, the one I can remember is matcha. I think there's still a huge craze around matcha, but matcha seems to have taken a bit of a backseat. We've stopped making matcha.
Dubai, though, is still on a very, very hot run. It really just depends on what's happening and what people are feeling like. To what you mentioned about the Pino Pinguino – there are some of those flavours that have never left the fridge. Pino Pinguino is one of them.
The Finance Ghost: I know where to find you now, so if I ever go to a Gelato Mania and there's no Pino Pinguino, then you and I are going to have a talk, my friend. That is what's going to happen. Because that is the stuff. It is really, really good.
I also want to just get an understanding from your side. You're also a Chartered Accountant, like me, and real-world business is very different to the stuff we learned in our textbooks, that's for sure. I'm just curious about some of the, let's call them “shocks” on one hand, but also, perhaps, happy surprises you've had as you've moved into an operational role.
Maybe you've had a slight advantage in that you grew up with it, so you had a better idea of what to expect, but – for people listening to this who are looking at this and going, “Well, I've got a path ahead of me which is the big corporate world, and another path which is to get my hands really dirty in a proper operational business,” – what has been your experience with that?
Kosta Kappatos: If I had to put it into one sentence, it's kind of like, “Throw the theory book out of the window.” I don't think it's quite like that. I think that I'm sure you might have seen it, but we've both been blessed by having the CA background. What that certainly prepares you for, is change.
Moving from a purely academic background to an operational background, change is everywhere. When you read about theory or you read about this, even basic contract law, you don't really talk about what happens when the other guy doesn't do what he says he's going to do.
Things don't always work as they're meant to work and not every net present value (NPV) calculation that turns out positive is actually a good idea. You're trying to merge these two things together.
For anyone entering from an academic background, you almost have to park your theory, park what you've learned, and kind of say, “Okay, it's there. I can't use it as a crutch, but I can use it to help me.” That would probably be the best way to do it.
You're kind of saying, “I'm going in with a blank slate, but I've got this toolbox of tools that I can use. But it's not like I can solve everything because I learned it in a textbook somewhere.” Because you are going to get found out, if you do something like that.
What I will say is that not everyone does what they say they're going to do, whether that be staff or landlords or suppliers, all of these things. You don't really learn about that at varsity.
The Finance Ghost: No, you absolutely don't. You learn that you go and do these wonderful technical calculations and then you speak to people who have been doing this for a long time and you realise how decisions actually get made in the real world, and the extent to which forecasting on a spreadsheet is maybe an interesting exercise and definitely has a place, but that's not actually how small businesses are run in the real world. At least, in my experience. It really isn't.
Kosta Kappatos: The best example that I can actually give… We spend so much time learning about the discount rates. You spend three, four, five weeks trying to calculate the discount rate. And then you get into the operational world, you'll talk to the bank or whatever the case is, and they just slap 10% and they call it a day.
And [laughing] it's kind of like, “So what did I go and study all of that for? If we're just going to slap a basic number and move on?”
The Finance Ghost: In my corporate finance career, I'll never, ever forget – I prepared this whole model. It was for a big JSE-listed client (they're still listed today). I went in and presented it to the CFO. We show him this whole valuation and it's great and it's all wonderful, and he's like, “That's fine, but I pay 7x.”
What do you mean you pay 7x? He's like, “I pay a 7x P/E. That's what I pay. Whether you tell me it's 6x, or 8x, or 9x, or 5x, or 12x, or 14x, I've been doing this for, like, 30 years, and trust me when I tell you I pay 7x.”
I remember that day, just getting back into the car, I was like, “Okay, that was interesting.” I'm so grateful to have actually had that experience because it tells you so much about how decisions are made in the real world.
That's from someone who's paid 9x before and been burnt, and paid 5x before and also been burnt (because it was probably actually too cheap and not a good asset). 7x is what he pays. I respect that.
So, these are the kinds of rules of thumb that you develop over time. And that's the difference between experience and the textbook, right?
Kosta Kappatos: Absolutely. It's so funny. In business, a lot of the time you'll see really successful businessmen make decisions at the drop of a hat, and you look at that and you're like, “Wow, that was incredible.”
And it's almost that they have certain key tenets that they just stick to the whole time. One of them is, as you mentioned, what am I paying? What is the cash implication? Cash is always king in a business. A lot of the theory gets cut out in business decisions sometimes.
The Finance Ghost: Yeah, 100%. And of course, one of the things that you have had to deal with in this business is obviously seasonality. This is something I've always wondered about, and I'm sure anyone listening to this is also thinking about it.
You need to have a lease, you need to be there all year long, you need to have fresh gelato – because, if I treat myself to that Pino Pinguino in the middle of July, it has to be just as good as it tastes in December. And that's a hard thing to manage.
Without obviously giving away anything silly publicly (this is genuine trade-secret territory), just give us an idea of how you actually manage the business and deal with the seasonality?
Firstly, is the summer-versus-winter split as severe as I would imagine? And then secondly, how do you get through the cold and make it to summer?
Kosta Kappatos: I've almost got three ways that we look at that. So yes, there definitely are big swings in summer versus winter, also buoyed by the school holidays, which are a major impact for us. People are out and about.
One of the things that's actually been really great to see (with our move to Joburg in the last three years) has been that the bumper December period that you have in Cape Town doesn't actually get reflected in Johannesburg. Because the Joburgers are all down, sitting on Camps Bay and Clifton Fourth.
That's been quite interesting. Joburg is a bit more stable, as opposed to Cape Town's peaks and troughs.
And what I can say, having lived for 20 years in Cape Town (I may be a bit fledgling in saying it, but), the weather here in winter far surpasses that of Cape Town. Big swing, summer, winter, to answer your question.
So, the first thing is almost a diversification of locations of our stores. If I just look at Cape Town, we have quite a lot of stores that are outside, exposed to the elements. We're talking our Hermanus store, our Camps Bay store, our new Sea Point store on Regent Road.
In winter, you might have some days where you suddenly want two ice creams and that's it. But then in summer, everyone wants to be outside, Hermanus is pumping and all the rest.
Now, what we've tried to do to offset some of that is you, for example, have locations in shopping centres. When the weather is miserable in Cape Town, where do people go? They're not going to go to Camps Bay to walk along the promenade, but they might go to Canal Walk or they might go to the Waterfront.
And in a small way, you’re kind of balancing (inasmuch as you can) your fluctuations because of seasonality, due to your locations.
What's been difficult to try and manage – and especially if you've got such high peaks compared to your troughs – you can't, for example, spend a whole bunch of money on machinery and make sure you're good for summer, but then that machinery is sitting idle in winter. Trying to balance that has been quite tricky over the last couple of years.
We've tried to get it so that, yes, you've gone up in summer, but you're not leaving whole machines completely idle. It's a tricky thing, but it's just a bit of a balance. And what has been great, as I mentioned – the Johannesburg element to our business has also flattened those peaks and troughs a little bit.
The Finance Ghost: Yeah, that certainly makes a lot of sense. I can imagine that (again, just from a supply chain perspective) it must have been a big decision to go past your original Western Cape roots.
To actually go up north, which is a huge consumer market and, as you say, is actually kind of a steady one with (in some ways) a better winter. I think it depends on how much rain there is.
I did it the other way around. I grew up in Joburg; came down here. Any thoughts around that? What it was like to actually take the business national?
Kosta Kappatos: So, there are three siblings. It's myself, I'm the oldest. My sister's a year behind me, and I've got my brother, who's six years behind me (a bit of a laat lammetjie).
And, because my sister and I were always so close in terms of age, we were involved in the business pretty much at the same time. We would work during school holidays and everything. And we always said, “Okay, we want to take Gelato Mania to Johannesburg.” That was kind of our big goal.
And after finishing our studies and joining the business, we were like, “Cool, let's go to Johannesburg,” fully knowing that one of us was probably going to end up being here and living here; sacrificing the promenade, Lion's Head. And I think that it was a great time in our business.
Not to give too much of a shout out to our banks, but we were definitely helped in terms of this expansion. It wasn't done alone. You have a lot of partners in the business to make this happen and a lot of things that fell into place.
We also started small. When we moved up to Johannesburg, we got a really big store in Rosebank and we actually produced out of the store, which was a bit of a different modus operandi to what we were doing in Cape Town. But, because we couldn't set up a store and a factory, that was what we had to do.
Very quickly, probably within eight or nine months, we outgrew that factory and were then able to set up another factory here in Johannesburg to then supply our now seven stores.
To answer your question, how do you jump from different areas? You want to try and make those steps as small as possible, so that you can get them. Any hill can be surmounted when you make those steps small enough and have help along the way. That certainly helped for us.
It wasn't, “Oh, we need to set up a factory. Oh, we need to do this. Oh, we need to do that.” No, there are different ways to skin the cat to get to where we need to be, and I think that that's been a great move.
And all my friends will tell me that I'm absolutely bonkers for saying this, but I'm actually enjoying Johannesburg and everything that it has to offer.
The Finance Ghost: There is definitely upside to Joburg – and nowhere is all bad or good. There are downsides to Cape Town. I'm glad you are enjoying that side of things. It is a very high-energy place, that's for sure.
Glad to hear that you are enjoying it up north and, I think, just particularly enjoying that you had that goal to say, “Well, let's take this thing national. Let's go.” Because it's hard. It's not an easy thing to do.
And, as you mentioned there, credit to Capitec, who no doubt has helped you along the way. I love how it always comes through so organically in these discussions. I never have to say to someone, “Oh, tell us about Capitec.” It's always like, “Actually, as part of the journey, this was really helpful, and it was them.” Always nice to see that.
As we bring it to a close, Kosta, last question from my side.
Walk us through the big dream. You've taken it from Cape Town to Joburg. Where does this thing go long term?
Do you think it'll be a family business forever? Are you waiting for someone to knock on your door and send you guys away with a big cheque to go and retire somewhere pretty? Tell us what the story is long term.
Kosta Kappatos: Before I answer your question, I've got a funny thing. I joke about it the whole time, but there are periods where it's 100% true.
There have been weeks and months where I've called my banker at Capitec more than I've called my mother, because of everything that it takes to continue building a business. So, there's definitely been a lot of help along the way.
But now, to get to your actual question, I think the big dream... I certainly am not wise enough to make it seem like these are my words, but I think that the journey is often more important than the destination. And we've seen that more and more.
We're not chasing any specific number of stores, we're not chasing a turnover figure, we're not chasing anything like that. We've been blessed with the ability – we've got hands, we've got feet, we've got minds – to put us in a position where we can impact not just our customers through great gelato, but also our staff and the environment around us.
The big dream is to continue building Gelato Mania sustainably, while being able to offer gelato to more people around the country. I don't know if fortunes lie further than the boundaries of our beautiful country. If they do, I hope we get there sustainably and not crashing and burning.
The other thing which has been super important for us is keeping it a family business. It's not easy running a family business. You've mentioned about your family and having seen what your childhood looked like as well. Family businesses are tough.
You can't sit around a lunch table or a dinner table and not talk about work. The notion of, “Oh, leave work at the door,” - it works in theory. In practice, it doesn't really work that way.
There's a lot of headbutting. We all are fiery, Greek. We will go to war to make sure our point is heard.
But at the end of the day, it is a very fulfilling job, and it's a very fulfilling thing knowing that you're working with family and working for family.
One of the things that my parents always like to remind us of is what a big privilege it is for them to be working with us every day.
I'm reminded of my own mortality quite a bit. I read a lot of philosophy.
Our formative years, our young years before we're 18, we spend a lot of our time with our parents. And the vast majority of people move away. They go overseas, and the time with your parents grows shorter and shorter.
Myself and my siblings have been blessed to be interacting with our parents on a daily basis. And yes, it comes with its struggles, but it is so rewarding. My sister's just had two beautiful kids. The next generation's here, and that's kind of why we're all doing it.
So, Ghost, we're not interested in franchising. We're not really looking for anyone to knock on our door.
Getting up in the morning and being able to provide more people with our product that we're super proud of, being able to create spaces that we're proud of – that's what kind of gets us up in the morning. And, yeah, it probably will be a family business forever.
The Finance Ghost: Yeah. People always say that the family you're born into makes a big difference in life. And of course, it's complete luck. It's completely beyond your control.
I've got to say that being born as the grandkids into this ice cream family feels like luck. That is quite the blessing for those little ones. They will appreciate this as they get older, but they'll certainly have the best ice cream at their birthday parties, and I love that.
Kosta, thank you so much for your time. You've gone over time, actually, but it's been such a great chat and I've really enjoyed it, so thank you so much. All the best, and I just can't wait to watch this family business go from strength to strength. I will certainly continue to buy my gelato from you (I mean, I would have already, but now even more so).
Good luck and thank you for sharing your insights so openly with us on the show.
Kosta Kappatos: It’s been great. Thanks, Ghost.
The Finance Ghost: Real stories and real people. Yours could be next. Plugged in with Capitec. Capitec is an authorised financial services provider. FSP 46969.
