Nick Carse has built a FROZEN empire! Find out how the King Of Pops Co-Founder did it… on C-Level

Nick Carse has built a FROZEN empire! Find out how the King Of Pops Co-Founder did it… on C-Level

- You know what's interesting. So you take your failures.

- Yup.

- Or what you think is a failure, right. Because I don't actually love all of our pops.

- Right.

- And you put that out there to the world and it is somebody's favorite pop.

- [Chris] Yes.

- And they're gonna remember it forever.

- Yup.

- And so, it's kind of like, I don't know, in your industry, a bad movie or a bad advertisement that you think, like, "We went the totally wrong way with that."

- Right.

- Someone is gonna remember it and quote it forever.

- [Chris] On this episode of C Level, I'm chilling with the king himself, Nick Carse, co-founder of King of Pops.

- I'm super excited about this episode, because it focuses on a lot of people that, they have a career already, and they have a business idea, and making that decision that, you know, making that decision to actually go after their passion.

- Yeah.

- But for the small people, the small amount of people that don't know who you guys are,

- Yeah.

- Tell 'em a little about yourself and King of Pops.

- Yeah, so King of Pops. It started in 2010. My brother and I started it. Actually, he started it. He lost his job, and the financial crisis, 2009. Sleepin' on my couch. And at that time I was a prosecutor in Gwinnett County. So I was in court--

- Wait, a prosecutor. So how do you go from prosecutor to this?

- Eh, you know. We'll get there.

- Yeah.

- But, so, I was doing that. I graduated law school in Atlanta, Georgia State. Was putting people in jail for misdemeanors, things like DUI, domestic violence, shop-lifting, minor drugs, whatever it was.

- Yeah.

- And that was just like, interesting, I think it helped me a lot. It helped me with personal confidence, helped me with confidence in speaking in front of people, all those kinds of things.

- Right.

- But at the end of the day, I didn't have passion for it. I think that is a very important part of law and an important part of the world, but not for me.

- Right.

- So, you know.

- It's 'cause you recognized that early on as like.

- Yeah.

- This is not really.

- Right.

- What I'm.

- And before that, I was working at AIG, so I was doing insurance, like, rate analysis. And also, very interesting, but not something I was passionate about. I'm pretty good with numbers, pretty good with computers, can put all those things together, but at the end of the day, that wasn't something where I was interacting with people and making them happy. So fast-forward back to where we were with that question.

- Yeah.

- And Steve lost his job in the financial crisis, he's my brother and business partner. But my older brother, he's an anthropologist. And so he was doing work in Central America and my younger brother, Steven and I were traveling in Central America with him, falling in love with these desserts everywhere we went. So frozen desserts in Mexico, or the paletas.

- Oh, yeah, yeah.

- Frozen desserts in Guatemala were kind of the rum raisin things in a bag and then going down into Costa Rica and Panama and everywhere, there's just their own versions. So we fell in love with that. Over maybe some drinks on the beach, talked about what it would be like to have your own business, to sell these amazing frozen desserts to people and make them smile. But then it was also the time where food trucks were starting to come on the scene. So in the hip cities, whether in Portland or Austin or LA, that was happening. It wasn't really happening in Atlanta yet, but I knew we were on the cusp. And so it was kind of the confluence of those ideas. Losing the job, frozen desserts, food trucks, all kind of coming together and say, "What can we do with this?" And so he started to bring it out to his friends who were in offices, who were kindergarten teachers, who were, whoever would eat the pops and give us a little feedback on it. We'd give 'em out and then kind of just set a drop-dead date of April 1st of 2010 for the day we started King of Pops.