Project Person // Profile #5

Meet Steve Carse // Project Person #5

What project are you currently working on?  King of Pops and the Cartrepreneur® program, a franchising opportunity to sell handcrafted pops in your neighborhood.

What did it take to get started? $7000 and a whole lot of sweat and time. With hard work, I think the one-to-one interactions stack up to something more valuable than an influencer campaign or viral video. I focused on the same street corner at Buddy's Gas Station for King of Pops’ first three years.

What’s your most impressive or favorite stat? We've made over 500 flavors, and on a busy week in June we will send out over 300 carts to events across the South.

What’s something that never would have happened for you without this project? I fell in love with work. I would like to hope this could happen if I hadn't started King of Pops, because I don't think that it really matters what you do—you can find ways to make it fun. But, enjoying my work was such a primary driving force for starting the business that I made sure it happened. 

I wrote a book about this called Work Is Fun that will be out in April 2025.

What keeps you up at night? The next idea. Ideas are easy. I always think the current thing I'm thinking about is the most important thing, and it takes a lot of thought to talk myself out of it. Finding that balance of pushing things forward and staying hungry vs. chasing shiny things is tough for me.

What are some of your other projects? King of Crops, p10, Rainbow Provisions, my blog, public speaking

“It’s April 1, 2025—the season’s opening day and our company’s fifteenth birthday.”

So begins a Google Doc outlining the vision for the King of Pops Cartrepreneur® program, a side of the business founder Steve Carse never would have imagined just five years prior.

In fact, he would have said this was the opposite of his vision.

But when you’re running a business selling hand-crafted frozen pops at large events—and every single one of those events is canceled due to a surprise pandemic—you begin to reevaluate.

For ten years, King of Pops established itself as an icon in Atlanta and surrounding cities, growing a cult following who would follow the rainbow umbrella to find pops with creative flavors.

Banana Puddin’, Chocolate Sea Salt, and Blackberry Ginger Lemonade would be scrawled as options on an A-frame chalkboard beside a freezer cart, manned by a King of Pops employee known as a “slinger”.

If you were at Music Midtown, you’d find a cart and buy a pop. If you were at the Braves game, you’d find a cart and buy a pop. And soon, they even opened a bar at Ponce City Market, selling pops and pop-tails so that if you were walking down the Beltline, you’d find the bar and buy a pop (or perhaps a mule with a pop dunked inside).

Moms hired King of Pops to bring carts to their kids’ birthday parties, and businesses brought carts out to their offices to surprise employees in a conference breakout session or in the parking lot during a fire drill.

Steve deemed these Unexpected Moments of Happiness, or UMOHs, and he made this phrase his company’s mission.

Interestingly, the entire inception of King of Pops was somewhat of an UMOH for Steve himself.

Suddenly unemployed following a corporate layoff in 2010, he opened his first pop stand on a street corner in Atlanta, and the popularity grew quickly via word-of-mouth until even the national press caught on. CNN, The TODAY Show, and Fast Company covered his story with headlines celebrating Steven’s journey “From Financial Meltdown Casualty to Southern Popsicle Magnate”.

As word spread, Steve and his team consistently received calls asking how someone could open up their own King of Pops cart. Essentially—would they ever franchise?

But he firmly (albeit politely) said no. Every time.

Steve had adopted the practice of Visioning from the group Zingtrain, and he had written a vision for King of Pops in 2030—at that time, ten years out. In it, he outlined how they would continue to grow through events, partnerships, and staffing their own carts, while also pursuing brick-and-mortar shops and wholesaling.

They would decidedly not entertain the beast that was franchising. Things were working well, after all.

But then, COVID.

They kicked off “pop season” each year on their company’s birthday in April, handing out thousands of free pops across the city. And they began to plan a huge season kickoff for their tenth birthday—April of 2020.

They were a marketing client of mine at the time, and you can imagine how excited we were to plan this big milestone celebration. We began to share Steve’s reflections on King of Pops’ first ten years in social media posts I deemed “Sappy Steve”.

There was so much gratitude for the past and momentum towards the future.

But then in early March of 2020, clients began to call and inquire about cancellation policies “just in case this Coronavirus rumor turns into something more”. And then they began to call and cancel. By the time April rolled around, the calendar had been wiped clean.

“It’s easy to say no to franchising when you have money to pay your bills,” Steve told me recently when I asked him about the change in direction. “But it felt unfair to lay off team members without doing everything we could.”

Layoffs and furloughs were happening in droves at that point across all industries, and that consistent “Can I sell King of Pops?” inquiry increased as so many people tried to get creative with both their time and income.

If anyone understood the feeling, it was Steve. King of Pops began, after all, following his own corporate layoff.

Franchising felt like far too big and business-y a word for King of Pops, but there was something in its orbit that felt like it might be worth exploring. What if they got back to the company’s roots with a cart on a corner, manned by someone who was well-connected in that neighborhood?

This neighborhood partner idea began to take shape, and I even got to test it out with my kids early into the pandemic. We put a King of Pops freezer in the garage and started making “pop drops” to friends around town. We even got to donate hundreds of pops to local teachers and medical professionals in the height of the pandemic.

Steve published a blog post in May of 2020 announcing the neighborhood partner program, opening up the window for applications and sharing this updated vision:

“We believe that we will never live through another time when people need their neighbors like they do today. And while we've done a pretty good job of selling pops and fulfilling our purpose to create Unexpected Moments of Happiness the last 10 years, we're in a unique position to do it even better the next 10 years if we invite more people to join us.”

And join them, they did.

Over the course of the next few years, the idea morphed into a trademark-registered, legit franchising operation deemed the Cartrepreneur® program, and as of this writing, there are 42 individuals leading their own King of Pops businesses across 52 territories.

This is one of my favorite business-pivot stories, especially because I got to watch it unfold up close. I admire the way Steve clung to his company’s core values and mission while letting his tactics adjust as the circumstances required.

And now, post-pandemic, King of Pops carts are back at musical festivals and sold-out stadiums. But they are also at neighborhood baseball games in Dahlonega and swim meets in Canton. “The Kingdom” was able to return to its hyper-local roots in ways it just couldn’t have done before the Cartreprenurs made that possible.

But the pivot wasn’t just a win for Steve and The Business. King of Pops is admittedly (and proudly!) the most affordable franchise out there, currently requiring just a ~$9,000 franchise fee and other startup costs far less taxing than a brick-and-mortar building might require.

That means there are 40+ people who now get to own and operate their own business under the (rainbow) umbrella of this iconic local brand. These Cartrepreneurs are giving jobs to their teenage children or to others in their neighborhood, and they are contributing to their family’s financial goals in meaningful ways.

And, of course, they are creating Unexpected Moments of Happiness for a wider reach of customers.

Thousands of them, actually.

“Today, though, nobody will be paying” Steve continues in that 2025-birthday-vision-Google-doc, referencing their 15th birthday celebration to come. “It’s all about fulfilling our company purpose. Company wide, in order to stay on track, we will give out about 30,000 pops this year, and across our seventy five territories we will give out 15,000 today alone.”

He calls it their biggest day of UMOHs ever, and for a business that felt for a time like it wasn’t going to make it, thriving like this in a totally new way might be the biggest unexpected happiness of them all.

-Callie

Next week, I’ll share all about a business operating system, something I learned from Steve that has changed the way I approach my work. Stay tuned!

🪩 Just for fun: Steve recently wrote a book called Work is Fun. You can pre-order it now! (Pre-orders tell bookstores that they should order more of these, so they actually make a pretty big difference in the sales process.)

He also recently started a personal newsletter (also on Beehiiv, like this one), and his most recent article is King of Pops’ Least Greatest Hits. 🪩