CFO at Lucy's Lab Creamery

How It All Started

There’s a small local business, located in the heart of Kakaako, called Lucy’s Lab and Creamery and they serves delicious handmade ice-cream in a variety of fun flavors. It really is like a lab, with fun flavors being churned every now and again. But just like many other small businesses, this company was struggling to stay afloat. It did not have the energy or resources under the current management to create other streams of income or fully pivot. Strapped with just a little over two years left of the lease, the owner sought out different organizations that would be willing to take over and learn something, maybe even turn it around! One thing led to another and we, the Hawaii Student Entrepreneurs, a student organization under the Shidler College of Business, ended up taking it over.

My Role

Running a small business takes a lot of time and effort. Similar to a larger corporation, a small business needs a leader to guide the company and make the final decisions, an operations department to make sure the day-to-day tasks are taken care of, a marketing department to drive demand, and a finance department to make sure the company has the funds to keep going. My role as the Chief Finance Officer is to gather data, monitor the current state of the business, and create reports to communicate our financial health. As the first Chief Finance Officer for Lucy’s, I am also creating the groundwork for future CFO’s to understand the company’s financial past, the current state of the business, and where it is headed as clearly as possible.

My Take So Far

While this job does require business background, I was also able to use the knowledge I had gained from taking a machine learning class as well as a data mining and visualization class to create my models to forecast demand and pinpoint inefficiencies. In academia, without harsh deadlines, one can take as long of a time as they need to create the fanciest of models, but in a rapidly changing environment where the most up to date information is needed as soon as possible, it is more common to see shortcuts and tricks used to find information as efficiently as possible. I’m quickly learning that “Perfect is great, but done is better”.

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