This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Molly Moon Neitzel, founder and CEO of Molly Moon’s Homemade Ice Cream in Seattle. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I started Molly Moon’s in 2008 to see if I could start a for-profit venture that made the world a better place.
My business plan included living wages and free health insurance for everyone who worked at least 18 hours a week. We use organic ingredients, and everything that comes out of the shop is compostable. It’s the business of my dreams.
Right away, we were really, really successful. Everything I wanted to make in my first year was made in about the first three months of sales.
We now have the second-most-expensive scoop of ice cream in Seattle. But it’s locally sourced, and everybody in town knows that we pay our people this way.
The prices are high, but it’s making the world better one scoop at a time, and our customers know that.
Premium ice cream is not our only mission
In the last few years, we’ve been offering another important employee benefit: childcare.
Molly Moon’s is about 70% women or nonbinary employees, and many of us are having kids and trying to do it all.
One of my colleagues had a child at the same preschool where my daughter went. I knew how much I was paying her. I couldn’t reconcile how it was OK to spend such a huge percentage of your pay on childcare.
Employees weren’t really talking to me about childcare costs because it was so unexpected that they would get help from an ice cream company. People don’t come to the CEO to chit-chat about their childcare costs.
It’s up to me to lead — to see problems and fix them.
What really started getting to me was thinking about some very talented younger employees who were parents, and I thought they should definitely be on the management track.
They seemed to be holding themselves back.
“Why aren’t they applying for promotions?” I asked myself. These are incredibly talented people who have all the right skills.
They had toddlers.
I realized there was a childcare barrier
We started looking at what it would take to help employees put their kids in full-time, quality, safe, predictable childcare.
What we landed on was that we need to give people at least $1,000 a month per child to encourage them to work full-time and be on the management track.
Because of the hours our shops operate, the program also had to be flexible, not tied to a particular childcare center or partnership.
So we created a reimbursable subsidy. You turn in your receipts for your childcare, and we will reimburse you up to $12,000 a year until your child goes to kindergarten. After that, we provide $4,200 a year for after-school and summer camps for kids up to age 12.
The cost started to really add up as more people took the subsidy and applied for work here. That spending has tripled over the last three years.
But it more than pays for itself.
Calculating the ROI of childcare
My chief financial officer and I worked with a group called Moms First, which designed a return-on-investment calculator that we used to analyze how our childcare initiatives were affecting the business.
The analysis involved an employee survey, and one of the most valuable insights we gained was that employees who don’t have kids or weren’t planning to have them really value the program. It makes them want to work here because they believe in the company and the investment in our children.
They also want to work here in case they do decide to become parents one day. That was a benefit we didn’t expect.
Financially, the biggest returns come from people not calling out sick, not coming late, and increased productivity because they’re not stressed out 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 hire about 100 seasonal workers each summer, and about 600 young people apply for those jobs. About 20% of those seasonal staff become year-round employees.
One thing I’ve learned in 18 years of business is that managers who came up through the company are, for the most part, 10 times better than external hires.
All of those benefits contributed to a 128% return on investment that we found using the calculator.
The benefits go far beyond the bottom line
My CFO and I were pretty shocked by that ROI, but at the same time, it felt right.
Not only is this employee benefit a huge recruitment and retention tool, but it has also kept people moving forward in their careers. Plus, we never have to go find external managers, and parents don’t call in sick so often.
Two employees have babies because of this program: one who didn’t have a child yet, and one who told me, “We weren’t planning on having a second child, but because you created this program, we’re going to get pregnant again.”
Little humans are on the planet because of this program; you can’t calculate the return on that investment.
