We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Adam & Nicole Davis a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Adam & Nicole, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. One of the most important things we can do as business owners is ensure that our customers feel appreciated. What’s something you’ve done or seen a business owner do to help a customer feel valued?

Customers are everything, we want each one to walk in and feel welcome and happy to be there. We wanted to make our place a place people would want to come and stay while they are enjoying their chocolate, gelato, coffee and anything else they wanted.

Adam & Nicole, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Adam and i moved to Gilbert almost 5 years ago to slow down and enjoy our family. We knew we wanted to open our own place and had talked about many different concepts. I had previously been with a big corporate chain and loved it, but wanted something simpler. We both love the memories of going to the ice cream shop with our parents as kids and always remember it being a reward or celebration. We decided we wanted to be a part of that for other people.

We genuinely look forward to seeing each and everyone of our customers from adults to the littlest kids. We invite people to stay a while and relax while they enjoy their treats and the company they are with. We take great pride in the products we carry and make.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

We had a very long and difficult construction period that was completely out of our hands. It took just shy of 2 years to get the small strip center built. There were many days that we wondered if we had chose the wrong location and wanted to honestly pull out of it and find another location. We had to try to stay calm and positive because the location we have is the exact right place for us to be part of our community. We have a retirement facility across our parking lot and a high school (where our kids will go in the future) just beyond that. It is 8 minutes from our neighborhood and walking distance for so many others.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

My advice for anyone opening a new business is to stay calm and try not to react to each thing that goes wrong. This goes for any team maintaining high standards, lead by example! People will follow your lead. We feel that if we take care of our employees they in turn will take care of Tifa!

Contact Info:

• Website: GILBERTAZ@TIFAFOODS.COM
• Instagram: TIFA_GILBERT_AZ
• Facebook: TIFACHOCOLATEANDGELATO