Hannah's Ice Cream

Hannah’s Ice Cream is an ice cream business located on Elgin’s Beach main street at one of Lake Huron’s finest beaches. Before the original business owner and founder, Hannah, retired; this business was a thriving enterprise well admired by its local community. Equivalently important, it also established itself to become an icon in the town and its success was due to several factors. First factor: Hannah established an ethical workplace in which her employees were treated fairly and appropriately. To emphasize, her workers were paid more than minimum wage, they were provided with incentives, and they had the right voice their ideas on weekly improvement meetings. Additionally, most of her staff were teenagers and most of her customers were

teenagers. This is essential information because it illustrates the importance of the business’ ability to identify common customer expectations by listening to its staff members on improvement meetings owing to the fact that the staff members and customers alike are mostly of the same age group. Second factor: With ethical principles implemented and having its employees respect needs satisfied, the business had achieved high performance.

To be more exact, its employees were enthusiastic, motivated and friendly; ultimately, they provided excellent and satisfactory customer service to which all customers responded well. Eventually, 40 years after the store was founded, Hannah retired and sold the company to Ike Telloni, a former regional marketing director of Waterloo Ice Cream for Southern Ontario. Despite Hannah’s Ice Cream being a successful business for years, the once greatly viewed enterprise spiraled downhill due to the new management introduced by Ike. Overall, Ike management demonstrated the opposite factors of Hannah’s success.

As mentioned above, when Ike took over the business from Hannah, the trend drastically turned in the opposite direction. The reason for this, business wrecking trend is due to several factors of immense mistakes. In fact, one of the greatest mistake Ike have committed is him emphasizing a cold, short-tempered, and uncommunicative role without any realization, as well as inappropriate treating and insulting his employees. In other words, he established an authoritarian

working atmosphere and implementing “command-and-control” pyramid system in which his employees were not regarded as human assets. Most compelling evidence is how Ike handled certain situations when his employees made errors, including the smallest mistakes. He would loudly criticize and shout at them in a ridiculed manner in front of other associates and often in the presence of customers. Besides being loud, Ike even went further: he literally demoralized and insulted his employees. For instance, one day he lost this temper when one of the staff members made a small error, so he screamed at him and called him “stupid”; once again, in front of customers. Correspondingly, he rationalized this unethical behavior by convincing himself that it was appropriate because they were teenagers, and thus needed to be taught a lesson on how the business world functions. In reality, this is tremendously far from the truth. Instead, Ike has to face the following negative consequences for his actions: negative customer feedbacks, the destruction of business reputation, loss of customers and resignation of employees, and most importantly, the drastic decline of revenue by 17% and profit by 22%. To summarize, by Ike exhibiting appalling and improper treatment to his associates, he consequently led the business to a sudden decrease in revenue and profit which led to money loss and customer dissatisfaction. Eventually and as well as a consequence for his unprofessional management, the probability of competition in the area increased dramatically; ultimately, another ice cream shop was opening up in the town to challenge Hannah’s Ice Cream. This led to his second biggest mistake: his lack of will to be competitive and reassure communitarian responsibility subsequently disappointed the community. To clarify, he assigned Nafeeza Shelfie, his assistant manager who is studying management at a local college, to develop a marketing strategy to attract customers to re-establish Hannah’s fame in for its annual promotions on Canada Day. This included flyers, coupons, newspaper advertising, and so on. It should have been Ike’s responsibility to deliver the message to the community by submitting the copy to the local newspaper, but he was careless and forgot about it. This not only damaged the business’ reputation but also had Nafeeza’s time wasted to which she was rightfully furious about. In other words, being an irresponsible member of the community and not appreciating his assistant manager’s loyalty to company cost him a lot of money and a damaged prestige. To rephrase it, Hannah’s Ice Cream lost sustainable competitive advantage to its rival, the newly open ice cream shop.
Ike has gotten himself in a predicament due to his indecorous behaviour.

For this purpose, he would have to implement a carefully planned strategy to regain its lost customers and respect from the community. First of all, he has to reintroduce the previous approach before Hannah, the founder, retired. This means he would have to publicly apologize for his unethical decision making and improper treatment of his employees. To further expand the effect for positive results, he should also write a letter to or set up an interview with the local newspaper to get the community’s attention. In addition to this, he should also apologize for wasting Nafeeza’s time. Second, when hiring new employess, he should from now on treat them with respect and dignity, and he should not substitute the costs for employee benefits. To regain high quality work performance, he would have to, as mentioned before, reintroduce the old managerial approach that includes: incentives, improvement meetings, and more than minimum wage. Furthermore, he should refrain from shouting and directing offensive words at his employees, especially in public. Instead, he should from now on call out the employee making errors to meet him in the manager’s office, so they can privately discuss the work-related issues in a professional manner. By doing so, he will achieve respect from his worker, which ultimately results in positive feedback from his community. Lastly, he should immediately develop an innovated

marketing procedure to attract customers to the store. So, instead of waiting for the next holiday, he should as soon as possible design a 7-days promotion for the following week. However, this time, he should do the work rather than asking Nafeeza to do the hard work again. After all, he used to be the regional marketing director of Waterloo Ice Cream for Southern Ontario; therefore, he has the experience for task. Equally important, this time, he should make sure to have his promotions week advertisement published in the local newspapers. This essential step will definitely contribute to satisfying the community. All in all, the result will be restoring business success.