Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Chris Taylor. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Chris, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear your thoughts about family businesses.

I love the idea of a family business, it’s what we are. My wife runs the social media and marketing, my daughter works in the summer, and my son will work once he is old enough. I think we have a great thing going and it works for us, we love what we do. But it is our life, and our schedules are controlled by the business to a large degree. No summer vacation for us as a family and we do talk about business stuff a lot at home. Working with your spouse can be frustrating at times, but you have to separate work and family, which can be hard when you’re really busy.

I’ve talked to my kids about taking over the business, and they don’t seem that excited about doing that. I’m totally fine with it, I want them to make their own path in life if that is what they want to do. I would be fine with them working with me and taking things over too. I just want them to be passionate about whatever path they choose.

When we started Mempops we had no idea it would become a family business like it has. My wife was working full-time as a speech therapist and I was just working hard trying to get this thing off the ground. We didn’t have some grand plan about it, we were just doing the one day at a time thing. After a year or so we had some time to breathe and look at things, that is when Emily decided to quit her full-time job and work in the business, but still work PRN at the hospital. It does help having a partner that is invested as much as you are, and understands things on a different level because you are both living it every day. It works for us, but it is not for everyone.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I worked in restaurants for a number of years. I also started a corn maze attraction that was kind of a side hustle for 15 years. I really enjoy making food, and the process behind it has always been interesting to me. I started Mempops because it was a way to be creative with food, but not have the stress of running a restaurant. This business is still stressful, but not as much as a full-on restaurant.
We are really focused on customer service, and I try to make sure our customers have a great experience when using us for an event or visiting one of our stores. Special orders are no problem and if there is a flavor you want me to make, I’ll do it.

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.

We manufacture, in a sense, all natural hand crafted pops. I started to doing this at my house when I wasn’t at work, coming up with recipes and freezing them in a deep freezer.

Once we opened our first store there was a big learning curve. I bought some equipment from Brazil that was specialized to freeze popsicles. I had never used this kind of equipment, or even seen it really. So, there was some time to figure out how to use it, how to scale the recipes up and how to organize production.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

I’m a lead by example guy, I get in the mix with the crew. They see me doing the things they are doing on almost a daily basis. I think that really helps when you see your boss working side by side with you.

Contact Info:

• Website: mempops.com
• Instagram: /mempops
• Facebook: mempops

Image Credits
Credit: Mempops