We were lucky to catch up with Stephanie Hernandez recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Stephanie thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love for you to start by sharing your thoughts about the pros and cons of family businesses.

Owning a family business has many advantages and disadvantages as well. One of the advantages is that we can help each other out a lot more because we’re more comfortable around each other and we’re not working around many random people. Also by not working with many random people there’s a lot of trust within each other, especially because we’re all putting a lot of effort to being successful. One of the disadvantages would definitely be having to work around our schedules to be able to plan family gatherings without us having to be working that day at the shop. We love spending time with our family so we really try our best to manage our working schedules. We’d love our children to join the family business for them to carry on the business, but ultimately it is up to them to decide what career they want to pursue when they grow up. We wouldn’t want to force them into something that they don’t see themselves doing in the future.

Stephanie, 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?

For everyone reading about us we’re Catalina’s Michoacana. We specialize on selling authentic Mexican ice cream and snacks that are to traditional to Mexico. We sell a wide variety of snacks, but our top sellers are our Mangonadas. It’s a cup rimmed with chamoy fruit sauce, tajin, mango ice cream, with fresh mango chunks, and tamarind candies. Besides our Mangonadas we have many ice cream flavors and popsicles. What sets us apart from a regular ice cream shop is that we also sell a few non dairy ice cream’s and popsicles. Some of those nondairy flavors are lime, strawberry, mango, pineapple, tamarind, and guava. We speak fluent Spanish and English so we’re able to help you answer any question that you may have on your preferred language. We have an in depth menu that describes each item on our display menu to help with some questions as well. We encourage everyone to come give us a try and to step out of your comfort zone we might just become one of your favorite ice cream shops!

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

We truly believe that sometimes it’s the smaller details that can make the biggest impacts in building a good reputation. Sometimes the small details can be anything as small as staying a few minutes longer to a larger group that may have come in right before closing. You just never know you might make someone’s bad day get better by simply staying a little bit longer for them to get a treat. We really care about our customers and for as long as we can we will always try our best to have great customer service.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

Social media and local events. It’s honestly amazing how fast word can travel especially on social media. With this generation being very much high tech and into electronics we’ve noticed that social media has been one of the key source to spread the word about our business. Doing local events has definitely helped out as well, because we have realized that a lot of people within the community still don’t know about us being in Waite Park. With so many small businesses opening and as well as closing we know how hard it can be to keep updated with all the businesses around, so we think it’s important to attend these events so people know the businesses that are in the community.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://catalinasmichoacana.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/catalinas_michoacana_?igsh=MTJheXpscXdoazAzdg%3D%3D&utm_source=qr
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100090091161622