Notes

Entrepreneur Project
Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Parlor
Ben Cohen (part owner of Ben and Jerry’s) was born on March 18, 1951 in Brooklyn, New York. His future business partner and childhood friend (Jerry Greenfield) was born in the exact same hospital on March 14, 1951. They were born in the exact same month in the same year and were only four days apart. Who knew they were going to be business partners later in life? They opened the first Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Parlor in Burlington, Vermont in 1978; they were only 27 years old! It became worldwide in less than twenty-five years. They ended up selling the phenomenon for $325 million in 2000. Greenfield stayed committed to the company and still is. Both Ben and Jerry are still in the food industry, they still own Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream Parlor, with the help of a bunch of managers, employees, and tons of other people that work for them all over the world.
Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield are both from Brooklyn, New York but moved to Merrick, Long Island. Jerry attended Smith Street Elementary and Merrick Avenue Middle School, where he met his best friend and future business partner Ben Cohen. They lived less than two miles apart, yet did not meet until their 7th grade year in middle school in gym class. Ben attended Colgate University, and the summer after freshman year is when he started selling ice cream out of a pied piper truck. He dropped out his sophomore year and moved to Long Island, and enrolled in the University of Skidmore College. He took courses such as; pottery and jewelry making in the years of 1971-1974. As for Jerry, after attending Oberlin College and applying to medical school twice he moved to North Carolina with his fiancée, Elizabeth Skarie. Cohen and Greenfield started their business in Saratoga Springs in New York, when Greenfield decided to move in with Cohen in 1976. They both attended Penn State to take an ice cream making course and then once that was over with, they decided to open their own Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Parlor in a gas station in the year 1978. They have been very successful obviously but they didn’t make it this far by a simple snap of the fingers. They had to go through different types of fights with different types of companies. They fought and ended up winning with Pillsbury, when they tried to limit Ben and Jerry’s distribution, because they feared that Ben and Jerry’s was too much of a competition for them. By the year 1984 with more than $4 million sales they started suffering a crisis of conscience. Greenfield apparently went into “retirement” and as for Cohen he realized that he was more of a businessman than an ice cream man, he thought long and hard about whether he should sell the business or not. Finally he and his business partner just decided to adapt the company to him instead of him adapting to the company, so that they could still ne the proud owners of Ben & Jerry’s.
Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield are very giving/caring people; they sponsored different types of charity’s, festivals, and concerts by giving away tons of free ice cream. Cohen was very loyal to his company; he gave them the chance to have three pints of ice cream a day. They also stated rewarding their employee’s with things such as; health-care benefits, day care services, and college tuition. Ben & Jerry seem to be very responsible people, responsible people with their company and their employee’s. They seem like very high energy people with good health and a strong need to succeed. They didn’t get to where they are now by just a simple handshake; it took a lot of patience, self-reliance, and most importantly partner-reliance. They needed to be able rely on each other to work together for so long and actually get along most of the time. I’m sure they disagreed on a couple of things out of all the years they were partners. But that taught them how to get along and work things out a lot easier in the future. Learning is probably one of the best qualities these men have. They had to go through so many ideas from each other and from a lot of CEO’s of other companies getting them where they need to be.
Writing this report on this particular entrepreneur was very interesting and I learned more than I expected too. Ben and Jerry are two very successful and professional men that made their business like it was easy as cake. These two men in particular are risk-takers because they gave up a lot. They gave up their most of their education (college experiences), they moved from place to place until they found a comfortable environment to start their parlor, they also gave up a lot of their own money to pay for a lot of supplies that they had to get to make their business possible, also paying for things such as; down payments and company profits. I have never thought about being an entrepreneur but if I were to be I feel that I would have quite a lot of the same qualities as these intellectual men. Some qualities I would possess from them are being caring, loyal to my company, succeeding in everything that I do, and an ability to associate with colleagues and employees. I am a very self-confident person; I know that whatever I believe I will get through to the person I am arguing with, even if they did not agree I would still get my point across. I am not afraid to speak my mind to anybody if I know that what I am saying is the truth. Being an entrepreneur has never really come up on my list of things to be, but if I were able to pick out of anything in the world it would have to be starting my own Pediatric Hospital. Ever since I was a child I have always loved helping people, but as I have gotten older I am more interesting in helping little kids with special needs. I would love to be able to do everything in my power to help them.