A few weeks ago, I made the final decision to close Creekside Scoop.
Our last day will be August 21.
And here's the strange thing about making a decision you've been circling for a long time: Once you finally make it, sometimes you can't believe how long it took you.
For months, I kept asking myself some version of the same question.
Can I make this work?
Can we change the hours?
Can we change the concept?
Can we add something?
Take something away?
Market it differently?
Staff it differently?
Open more?
Open less?
If you've been around here for any length of time, you know I can
saddle up a rabbit with the best of them. Give me a problem and I will research, brainstorm, spreadsheet, reinvent and Google my way into seventeen possible solutions before lunch.
And there were solutions.
A play café.
Extra seating for Crossroads.
Wednesday night live music + our local farmer's market.
Outdoor movie nights.
Craft days.
Birthday parties.
That's what made this decision so hard.
Creekside wasn't some spectacular failure that made the answer obvious.
People love it.
Kids ride their bikes there for ice cream. Families sit on the patio. Grandparents bring their grandkids. Teams come after games. People wander over from the coffee shop.
It became exactly the kind of sweet little community place I hoped it would become.
Which makes closing it feel a little bit like saying:
This beautiful thing worked.
And we still have to be done.
That has taken me a minute to understand.
Because somewhere along the way, I think a lot of us learned that you're only allowed to quit when something fails.
You're only allowed to leave when it's terrible.
You're only allowed to stop when you absolutely cannot continue.
But leaving something that's still good?
Something you could keep doing?
That feels different.
So I stopped asking myself:
Can I make this work?
And started asking:
What is this costing me?
Not just financially, although ultimately that's the currency that stopped making sense.
Creekside is a seasonal business. The cost of ingredients, labor, insurance, utilities, supplies and just about everything else continued to rise. We could keep tweaking and changing and trying to squeeze more out of a relatively short Wisconsin ice cream season, but eventually the numbers are the numbers.
And they don't lie.
For a long time, I think I believed that if I could just solve the money part, everything else would fall into place.
But what I started to realize was that money wasn't the only currency I was spending to keep Creekside going.
I was also spending my time.
My energy.
And my attention.
Those four things together have become something I've started calling the
Four Currencies.
Time. Energy. Attention. Money.
Because everything we choose costs us some combination of them.
And when one of those currencies isn't working, sometimes we start overspending the other three trying to make up for it.
That's what I had been doing with Creekside.
The money wasn't making sense, so I kept throwing more time at it.
More ideas.
More energy.
More attention.
Maybe different hours.
Maybe a different concept.
Maybe this.
Maybe that.
Maybe if I just saddle up one more rabbit and ride that sucker all the way to a profitable ice cream shop...
But eventually I had to ask myself a different question.
How much of the other three currencies am I willing to spend trying to make the fourth one work?
Because money, I'm realizing, is only one of the ways we pay for our lives.
We also pay with our time: finite.
Our energy: finite.
Our attention: finite.
And our money: renewable.
You can make more money.
You can lose it and make it again. You can save it, invest it, spend it, rebuild it.
But you cannot make more time.
You cannot infinitely manufacture energy.
And you only have so much attention to give.
Which makes it kind of wild that money is the currency we're taught to protect the most.
We budget it.
Track it.
Save it.
Check our balance.
Worry about where it went.
Meanwhile, we'll spend three hours on something we don't care about, give half our energy to something we've outgrown and let something occupy our attention for six months because technically...
we can afford it.
It was spending my time.
Even when I wasn't physically scooping ice cream, there were schedules to think about, things to order, equipment to fix, decisions to make and problems to solve.
It was spending my energy.
Not necessarily in giant dramatic chunks.
Sometimes it was just a little drip.
A text here.
A staffing question there.
A refrigerator doing something refrigerators apparently enjoy doing exclusively on weekends.
Little things.
Until you realize you've had a faucet running in the background for months.
And maybe most of all, it was spending my attention.
This is the currency I've become the most fascinated by.
Because you can be sitting on your porch drinking coffee, technically doing absolutely nothing, while half your brain is somewhere else trying to solve a problem.
That's attention.
And unlike my bank account, nobody sends me a monthly statement showing me where all of that went.
I just know that when I finally decided to close Creekside, something got very quiet.
That's usually how I know.
Not because the decision doesn't hurt.
Not because I suddenly stop caring.
Not because I can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was the correct choice.
But because my body stops negotiating with me.
The answer feels settled.
And here's the part I'm still learning:
Closing Creekside doesn't give me back the money I've already spent.
It doesn't give me back the hours.
It doesn't return the energy.
It doesn't refund all the attention I've given it.
But it does stop me from continuing to spend them.
And suddenly, I can choose where they go next.
That's not failure.
That's allocation.
Maybe that's the question we should be asking ourselves more often.
Not:
Can I keep doing this?
Because holy hell, if you're anything like me, you can keep doing almost anything.
We are very good at figuring it out.
We can carry it.
Fix it.
Work harder.
Make another spreadsheet.
Come up with another idea.
Give it another season.
But can isn't always the right question.
Maybe the better question is:
Is this where I want to keep spending my life?
Because that's what we're doing.
Every yes costs something.
Every commitment costs something.
Every business, relationship, obligation, project, dream and Tuesday afternoon is asking us to spend some combination of our four currencies.
Time.
Energy.
Attention.
Money.
Some things are worth every penny.
Some were worth it once and aren't anymore.
Some cost almost nothing financially and absolutely bankrupt us everywhere else.
And some things we keep paying for simply because we forgot we were allowed to cancel the subscription.
Creekside was worth it.
I'm really glad we did it.
I'm proud of what we created.
I'm grateful for every kid with blue ice cream dripping down their arm, every baseball team that piled through the door, every family on the patio, every teenager who worked their first job there and every person who made it part of their summer.
I don't need to turn it into a mistake to justify being finished with it.
Something can have been completely worth doing and still be complete.
So these last two weeks, I'm going to enjoy it.
I'm going to eat the ice cream.
I'm going to sit on the patio.
I'm going to watch people walk through those doors and remember what we built there.
And then I'm going to close them.
Not because I couldn't keep going.
Because I've decided where I want to spend my life next.
And I'm starting to understand just how valuable that is.
The Four Currencies
I've been writing more about this idea because it has completely changed the way I'm looking at my life, my businesses and the decisions I'm making right now.
Time. Energy. Attention. Money.
Four currencies.
One life to spend them.
If you're wondering where yours are going, I put the whole framework together here:
