Well, summer has finally arrived in Montreal. As a colleague of mine said this week, there is nothing like June in Montreal. June brings warm weather but not oppressive heat, the Grand Prix, the start of the Jazz Festival and the excuse to eat ice cream on a regular basis, which, instead of an entry about small business financing, is the topic of today’s entry.

The neighborhood I live in used to have 1 ice cream “store” (is it a store, a stand, an outlet, a restaurant?), good ole’ All-American, Dairy Queen. On a nice weeknight the last couple of years or a Sunday afternoon a standard wait was 10-15 minutes for my Medium Skor Blizzard. This had been going on for a couple of years, and Dairy Queen is only open about 7-8 months of the year. So, finally someone realized that there is a big enough market for ice cream in this neighborhood to provide Dairy Queen some competition. A local company that makes high-end ice cream and sorbet named Le Bilboquet decided to open a second location, on the same block as Dairy Queen.

First off, I love seeing local businesses succeed. It is great to see that both outlets are busy, this past Saturday night, either one would have had a 10-minute wait. I have been doing a non-scientific study of who frequents the locations. Dairy Queen had more younger kids and families while Bilboquet had more couples and teens. This is a great case of an entrepreneur seeing an opportunity in the market and acting upon it. In some ways this is a coopetition example that I mentioned a while back. I have no doubt that the principals at both locations assume that due to each other’s existence, the overall market size will increase.

We get many requests from businesses like Bilboquet (who is not a customer) who want to use Merchant Cash Advances from 1 location in order to open a second location.