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Molly Moon Neitzel founded her ice cream shop in 2008 with a plan to offer strong employee benefits.
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Three years ago, it began offering staff child-care subsidies of up to $1,000 per month per child.
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This move led to more hiring, lower turnover and fewer call-outs.
This article as told is based on a conversation with founder and CEO Molly Moon Neitzel. Molly Moon’s Homemade Ice Cream in Seattle. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I founded Molly Moon’s in 2008 to see if I could start a for-profit venture that would make the world a better place.
My business plan included a living wage and free health insurance for anyone working at least 18 hours a week. We use organic ingredients and everything that leaves the store is compostable. This is the job of my dreams.
Right away, we were really successful. I accomplished everything I wanted to do in my first year in the first three months of sales.
We now have Seattle’s second most expensive ice cream scoop. But it’s locally sourced and everyone in town knows that’s how we pay our people.
The prices are high, but it’s making the world better one spoonful at a time, and our customers know it.
Top-notch ice cream isn’t our only mission
For the last few years, we’ve been offering another important employee benefit: child care.
Molly Moon is made up of approximately 70% female or non-binary employees, and many of us are having kids and trying to do it all.
One of my colleagues had a child at the kindergarten my daughter went to. I knew how much I paid him. I couldn’t understand how right it was to spend such a big time. percentage of your salary about child care.
Employees didn’t talk much to me about child care costs because it was so unexpected that they would get help from an ice cream company. People don’t come to the CEO to chat about their business. child care expenses.
Seeing and fixing problems drives me.
What really started to impress me was thinking about some very talented young employees who were parents, and I thought they definitely should be on the management track.
They seemed to be keeping to themselves.
“Why don’t they apply for promotions?” I asked myself. These are incredibly talented people with all the right skills.
They had small children.
I realized there was a barrier to child care
Employees’ children are provided with full-time, quality, safe, predictable child care.
What we came to was that we needed to provide at least $1,000 per month per child to encourage people to work full time and get involved in management.
Due to the working hours of our stores, the schedule also needed to be flexible and not tied to a specific child care center or partnership.
We are also a reimbursable subsidy. If you turn in receipts for your child care, we will reimburse you up to $12,000 per year until your child goes to kindergarten. After that, we provide $4,200 per year for after-school and summer camps for children through age 12.
The cost is really starting to increase as more people get the subsidy and apply to work here. This spending has tripled in the last three years.
But it more than pays for itself.
Calculating the return on investment of child care
My chief financial officer and I worked with a group called Moms First, which designed a return on investment calculator that we use to analyze how our child care initiatives impact the business.
The analysis included an employee survey, and one of the most valuable insights we gained was that employees who don’t have children or don’t plan to have children really value the program. It makes them want to work here because they believe in the company and the investment in our children.
They want to work here too, in case they decide to become parents one day. This was a benefit we did not expect.
The biggest financial benefit comes from people not calling in sick, not coming in late, and increased productivity because they are not late. stressed about childcare.
Turnover is really high in our industry and we don’t have that. One employee has been with me for over 12 years.
It also helps with recruiting. We employ approximately 100 seasonal workers every summer and approximately 600 young people apply for these jobs. Approximately 20% of these seasonal staff become year-round employees.
What I’ve learned in my 18 years in business is that managers trained through the company are often 10 times better than those hired from outside.
All of these benefits contributed to a 128% ROI we found using the calculator.
Benefits go far beyond the end result
My CFO and I were quite shocked by this return on investment, but it also felt right.
Not only does this employee benefit from a great recruitment and retention tool, but Moreover It enabled people to advance their careers. Plus, we never have to find outside managers, and parents don’t call in sick very often.
Two employees have had babies thanks to this program: One who doesn’t have children yet, and the other who told me, “We weren’t planning on having a second child, but since you created this program, we’re going to get pregnant again.”
Thanks to this program, there are little people on the planet; You cannot calculate the return on this investment.
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