We were lucky to catch up with Vicki Kotris recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Vicki thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What do you think matters most in terms of achieving success?

Success is such a funny word because it’s so subjective to the person who achieves their own level of it and the tools they use to measure it. There are some keystones of success that we all tend to identify with like money, fame / recognition, the ‘things’ (houses, cars, toys etc.). Over the past 5 years, my definition of success has changed drastically from what I thought ‘success’ was to what I know now that it is.

Five years ago, I had all the ‘things’: a nice house, a nice husband, a nice salary, nice benefits, nice car. I always felt like something was missing. Like I wanted to “do” more, not necessarily “have” more. So I started a business. Or ‘that little food truck thing’ that many friends and family referred to it as. Five years later that little nights and weekends hobby turned into two six-figure businesses that allowed my husband and me to leave corporate America behind, has employed 60 people over the course of 5-years, allows us to giveback to our community and take time off without having to ask anyone for an hour of PTO.

That’s my new measure of success: happiness and flexibility.

I think that COVID has opened our eyes to that. Climbing an invisible corporate ladder is fun and all but we are people, not machines and we deserve to spend our time how we want to spend it.

So that’s what we do now. We work when we want to. We take weeks off when we want to. We still have to do plenty we don’t want to do (work is work after all). But more often than not, we get to call the shots and decide what we want our life to look like.

That’s the good. Here’s the bad and the downright ugly: The bad news is that everything takes time. Unless you have a rich uncle or are related to a professional athlete. Which I have neither. We made $15,000 in 2018. In 2023, that’s like $5 with inflation. That first year, we worked events where we made $5 in 3 hours. We worked our corporate jobs 8-5 and then we worked in our commercial kitchen from 6-11. We attended networking events begging people to try our cookie dough samples. We had people laugh in our face.

We had to put in the time to learn how to run a business. We learned everything from production to scheduling to accounting. We learned that feeling embarrassed is a useless emotion and to ignore what people said.

That’s what people don’t want to hear. No one wants to know that in order to achieve the best kind of success that you have to go through the muck. That you spend months, maybe years feeling like a failure and then trying again and again and again. That you might have to sacrifice working a job you hate to pay the bills while you create something for yourself. That even those closest around you will doubt you.

So my short answer of what it takes to be successful, it’s: be brave enough to get through the really tough stuff and don’t ever lose sight of what is REALLY important to you.

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

I’m Vicki Kotris, owner of Cleveland Cookie Dough Food Truck and REMIXX Ice Cream + Cereal Bar. I also produce a podcast called Confetti Filled Life.

After a decade spent in software sales, I was how you say…BORED! I had a kind of awakening and began really thinking about how I wanted to live my life and what was really important to me. My husband was feeling the same after serving his time at a CPA firm for the past decade. We both knew we didn’t love the vision of us in 10-years working behind a computer and taking 1 vacation / year so we threw out hundreds of ideas.

After a couple IPAs and a trip to NYC, we got the idea to open a cookie dough themed restaurant. The problem was we didn’t have enough money or time to open a brick and mortar. So we googled food trucks and the rest is history. Four months later we hit the road and sprinkle extra sugar on every event we attend from festivals to corporate events to grad parties!

Two years after CLE Cookie Dough set sail, we decided to open a new ice cream concept called REMIXX. REMIXX is an elevated, made-to-order ice cream experience swirled with nostalgia and loaded with fun . Our innovative REMIXX machine lets you be the DJ of your own dessert and pick from 50+ toppings to create the perfect treat!

That year we opened was also 2020. Ironically enough, opening a physical restaurant during a global pandemic isn’t the best timing. 01/10 would recommend. BUT what’s been our biggest challenge has also been our biggest reward. We serve thousands of treats each summer and employ 20 people throughout the season.

My favorite thing about owning an event based business (food truck) is how many special life events we get to be a part of. We get to see the fun stuff when celebration is in full swing. In my opinion, that’s the best! My favorite part about owning a brick and mortar biz is two fold: 1.) being a beacon of fun in the community and watching guests come back week after week! 2.) It’s changed me in so many ways from managing an amazing team to understanding what makes a business successful.

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?

To paint the picture: when we started our food truck business in 2018, we had no background in food / restaurants. No experience in small business marketing. What we did have was a network. So it was time to work it.

We launched a food truck business in September in Ohio which any Midwesterner knows, is not the best time to launch an outdoor business. So my strategy was brand awareness and creating a buzz so by the time event managers were booking for the spring / summer of 2019, that we’d have credibility.

At that time, breweries around us were doing a lot of collaborations were local businesses so I thought this would be a fun place to start launching our business. We had our friend introduce us to his friend who owned a local brewery and pitched him on a weird idea. We pitched a ‘cookie dough / beer pairing’ night at the brewery. They thought the idea sounded cool and supported it!

The next week we launched the event, tickets sold out in an hour. So we scheduled another one. And another one. And in true DJ Khalid style…’ANOTHA ONE! This model worked so we did this at 4 other breweries and 1 winery throughout the winter.

This was the momentum we needed to 1.) create market validation 2.) keep redefining our target market and 3) make money.

On paper cookie dough and beer have nothing to do with each other. If we would’ve done something more normal, we could’ve synched up with local bakeries or even explored wholesaling but we went the unconventional route and I think it made all the difference. It made us more creative and scrappy when we need to be.

The biggest lesson I learned aside from doing something a little outside the box is to leverage our network as much as possible. We’ve booked more events and gotten more customers at REMIXX by just promoting to our friends and family.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

The biggest lesson I’ve learned over the past couple years is how to be a good leader and manager. The unfortunate truth is to those of us who have worked in corporate America, that our leaders don’t go to Manager School to become good leaders. Odds are they survived a layoff, got promoted and BOOM now they manage hundreds of people. Or nepotism. Always nepotism. Many (not all) lack the skills, experience and understanding it takes to successfully manage a team.

I had to go through my own Manager School which is a collective of learnings from the past 2 years. One big example is early on I had an employee that was going through a hard time. She was young and had a hard time navigating this issue. This resulted in a late call off. My solution was a written warning and a cold conversation about how disappointed I was in her. Since then, I have had dozens more employee issues so my biggest lesson is empathy.

My corporate brain was telling me I needed to be stern and cold or I’d get walked all over. It was my reminder that I was the boss and I held the cards. This wasn’t true and isn’t true now.

I’ve learned to have more open communication with my team and respect their lives outside work. My level of empathy extends to understanding that my role is not to just pay them on time but to be a mentor. Being a mentor can be giving advice where needed, move shifts around so someone can make it to their kid’s soccer game, helping someone kind an apartment, etc.

This is not a strategy for everyone but it has helped me have better relationships with my team and also allows me to have difficult conversations when needed.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.confettifilledlife.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/clecookiedough or www.instagram.com/remixxicecream
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/remixxicecream or www.facebook.com/clecookiedough
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/victoriakotris
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/remixx-ice-cream-cereal-bar-cleveland