What's the Scoop?

Even with exotic mainstays like Mexican chocolate, cardamom, El Salvador coffee, or the perpetual crowd-pleaser huckleberry, and a lifetime flavor list that tallies well into the hundreds, the decision is still an easy one for Charlie Beaton.

In fact, the owner of Big Dipper Ice Cream just chuckles when pressed to choose his favorite.

“I wrote a business plan, loosely based on the one that I wrote in Professor Paul Larson’s entrepreneurship class when I was at UM,” Beaton says. “That was the one class that got me interested in small business. I remember Bob Zimorino and some other guys coming in and telling us about their businesses and thinking, ‘Wow, that’s what I want to do.’ And I just went for it.”

It was 1995, and Beaton did everything to get Big Dipper off the ground. He made fresh ice cream every morning, delivered it himself, and teamed with friend Jen Gapay to solicit local vendors, like the Good Food Store, to sell his product. To this day, Beaton says he is incredibly thankful to some of his earliest accounts.

Beaton had no intention of becoming anything more than a wholesaler. That is, until another friend of his, Dale Bickell, was doing Beaton’s taxes that first year. Bickell saw how successful Big Dipper was and suggested they open a retail store together.

As luck would have it, the catering business on the corner of Higgins and Fifth Street was moving downtown, so after just a few months of making ice cream, Beaton moved his startup to its current location, where he partnered with his soon-to-be wife, Barbie, and Bickell.

For Big Dipper, if there ever was a rocky road, it was during that first year of retail operations.

“At the beginning we had no stronghold, nothing to put our feet on, no certainty as to where it was going,” Barbie Beaton says. “We were hearing a lot of skepticism from the community, too—‘Who sells ice cream in the winter?’ That was a really scary time. But when you feel something so passionately, which Charlie did, and had his motivation and his certainty that it would be a success, then you knew we would be okay. But it was a leap of faith for sure.”

“The area wasn’t thriving the way it is today,” Charlie adds. “Now you walk around the block and there’s a brewery, a bakery, a bookstore, coffee shops, a record store, and a bunch of restaurants. It’s a bunch of businesses that have really helped make the Hip Strip what it is. I think they’ve helped us, and we’ve helped them, but I’d like to think we played a big part in that.”

Big Dipper isn’t just a business story. It’s a family tale, too.

Barbie, who grew up in Kila and graduated from Flathead High School, spent a year in the Washington, D.C.-area before moving back to Montana to begin classes at UM. She had one friend in Missoula at the time, and that person happened to work at Goldsmith’s alongside Charlie.

“Those were the days when you could kind of just go to other people’s work and hang out,” Barbie recalls. “We started out real casual.”

She studied French at UM, eventually getting her degree in the subject in 1995, and several times traveled to France, where she thought her eventual career might be. It was on a trip back to Missoula from Paris that Barbie ran into Charlie again and, lo and behold, they were both single this time.

“From there,” she says, “well, things just kind of took off.”

As if written in the stars, Charlie started including Barbie in the planning of Big Dipper and she, too, began to immerse herself in the fledgling ice cream business. The couple married in 1996 and five years later bought out Bickell, who left for a job as chief financial officer of Missoula County. Somewhere along the way, the Beatons became Montana’s most famous ice cream couple.

“It’s funny to me still,” says Barbie, who got a teaching certificate from UM in 2000 as well as a master’s degree in education in 2005 in hopes of teaching French. “[Big Dipper] was always Charlie’s brainchild. I had a different line of interests.”

But together, the Beatons churned their way through those early years, learning from all the mistakes a pair of small business newbies could make. And as Big Dipper grew, so did the Beaton family—they have two daughters, Aileen and Sophie—and its relationship with the rest of the community. It didn’t take long for that sense of family to gain notice, both locally and nationally.

“They always do right by their workers, their customers, and Missoula. It’s really cool to see,” says Community Medical Center Director of Marketing Geoff Peddicord, who, in addition to being a VTO bandmate, has worked closely with the Beatons on several charitable giveaways. “I am always amazed. They have all these young people working for them, and they consistently, always knock it out of the park for customer service. It’s a really cool success story. They’re just really cool people.”

Food & Wine magazine and USA Today both named Big Dipper one of the country’s top ice cream spots. In 2013, on National Ice Cream Day, the entire Beaton family was flown to New York City to serve ice cream on the set of Good Morning America during their “Best Ice Cream in America” broadcast.

“Big Dipper has supported a lot of the arts, music, sports, and all the things that the kids are involved in, and that’s come back to help us,” Charlie says. “Most of the people who work at Big Dipper have gone to UM. That makes me feel good, that I’ve helped them make their way through college.”

Lia Munson, who has worked at Big Dipper for three and a half years, would argue that the Beatons help their employees make their way through life.

Munson, who started out as a scooper and quickly rose through the ranks, moved to Missoula a few years after graduating from college.

“I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I was working at a receptionist job in Wisconsin,” she says. “I just felt like there had to be something bigger and better out there for me.”

So Munson sold a bunch of her stuff and headed out West. But it wasn’t easy.

“Honestly, the first few months were rough,” she says. “Missoula is a tough place when you don’t have connections or a job lined up. It was very serendipitous for Big Dipper to take a chance on me.”

After a year of scooping, the Beatons promoted Munson to manager of Big Dipper’s mobile operation—an ice cream van dubbed “Coneboy”—and their satellite concessions inside UM’s Adams Center. Now she runs the day-to-day operations at the Big Dipper in downtown Billings, which opened this past March to much fanfare. Munson has a small ownership stake in that store along with Bryan Hickey, the longtime Missoula store manager who became a business partner with the Beatons on Coneboy when it first opened in 2010. Hickey has worked roughly fifteen years at Big Dipper and was one of the first employees to express an interest in being more involved with the business.

“I just felt it was important that these workers had a piece of the business,” Charlie says, “so they felt it was theirs, too, you know.”

That pay-it-forward mentality was with the Beatons from the very beginning. Bickell, Charlie’s friend and original co-owner if you’ll recall, still has a menu item—the “Dusty Dale”—named after him.

“The Beatons helped me to believe that it’s possible to do anything you want to do and to make your life what you want it to be,” Munson says.

“I could not be happier. Is there a better job to have than to give people ice cream?”

Big Dipper has grown the most in the past five years, starting with its first franchise expansion into Helena in 2010. At the time, it was another large business leap by the Beatons—one that quickly paid off.

“There are four aspects to this business, and sometimes that creates a bit of stress,” says Charlie of juggling his wholesale, retail, mobile, and franchise arms. “But it’s still just ice cream. I have to remind myself of that sometimes.”

Helena owner Anna Doran promptly made Big Dipper one of the most popular destinations on Last Chance Gulch and was named 2013 Helena Business Woman of the Year for her efforts. Beaton is proud of what Doran, a former Grizzly track and cross country star, has done for the brand.

“She’s taken what we’ve done in Missoula and applied it to Helena, and that’s get involved with the community,” Beaton says. “That is so important in small business. You have to sponsor events. You have to get involved with things. That’s when it comes back to you.”

Whether it’s Billings, Helena, or a college town like Missoula, the Beatons know a lot of their success can be chalked up to the “vibe” from the business and the area in which it resides.

“A business like Big Dipper can apply wherever there is a connected community,” says Peddicord, a 1994 and 1996 UM grad. “You stand in line for forty-five minutes, and it’s such a scene. You see all these people you know, you’re talking to them and having a good time, and then you get an ice cream cone at the end. That experience embodies Missoula.”

Big Dipper will continue to grow, of that much Charlie is certain. But what exactly it will look like in thirty or forty years, well, the sky is the limit.

“I could never envision it looking the way it does now,” Beaton says. “At the time I was just thinking ‘Gosh, I hope I’m still in business in a year.’ We’ve talked about opening up our space in Missoula, renovating it enough to serve more patrons, possibly open one or two more franchises down the road. At the same time, I hope we keep things simple, so we can just serve people good ice cream.”

Even with exotic mainstays like Mexican chocolate, cardamom, El Salvador coffee, or the perpetual crowd-pleaser huckleberry, and a lifetime flavor list that tallies well into the hundreds, the decision is still an easy one for Charlie Beaton.

In fact, the owner of Big Dipper Ice Cream just chuckles when pressed to choose his favorite.

“Anytime I get ice cream, I just get vanilla,” says Beaton, a purist when it comes to the cold, creamy treat. “I always say, ‘If you order vanilla and it’s good, then you know the rest of the ice cream is good, too.’”

But make no mistake, Beaton’s personality is not vanilla. Before you start applying that classic projection test question—you know the one: If you could be any flavor of ice cream, which one would you be?—you better think again.

“Oh man, I’d pick vanilla,” he says, “but I don’t consider myself plain.”

And, at roughly 25,000 gallons of ice cream served annually, neither does the rest of the Treasure State.

Big Dipper, the super-popular, super-friendly ice cream spot located on Missoula’s Hip Strip, celebrated its twentieth year of business this summer. The homemade ice cream is considered one of Montana’s sweetest homegrown success stories.

Beaton first came up with the idea for Big Dipper while studying business at the University of Montana and making ice cream at Goldsmith’s, another well-known, family-run ice cream parlor that was located along the Clark Fork River just across the walking bridge from campus.

“It was a great job while I was in college,” Beaton, age forty-six, says. “But I felt there was more to offer.”

And by that, Beaton meant wholesaling. In his mind, producing large orders of ice cream and distributing them all across this über-cool college town he’d come to love had a real future. But first, Beaton felt compelled to use the degree he’d earned in 1991. So he took a job with Prudential. It lasted two years.

“Turns out securities and insurance was a really tough job for me,” says Beaton, an avid distance runner and the lead singer/guitarist of famed local rock band VTO. “I came back to ice cream because it was the one thing that I really loved and knew how to do well.”

An interesting opportunity came his way when Tim O’Leary, a childhood friend of Beaton’s from Helena, said he was opening a brewery—the Kettlehouse—in an empty warehouse on Myrtle Street. O’Leary told Beaton he had some extra space in the back where he could start up his ice cream production.

“I wrote a business plan, loosely based on the one that I wrote in Professor Paul Larson’s entrepreneurship class when I was at UM,” Beaton says. “That was the one class that got me interested in small business. I remember Bob Zimorino and some other guys coming in and telling us about their businesses and thinking, ‘Wow, that’s what I want to do.’ And I just went for it.”

It was 1995, and Beaton did everything to get Big Dipper off the ground. He made fresh ice cream every morning, delivered it himself, and teamed with friend Jen Gapay to solicit local vendors, like the Good Food Store, to sell his product. To this day, Beaton says he is incredibly thankful to some of his earliest accounts.

Beaton had no intention of becoming anything more than a wholesaler. That is, until another friend of his, Dale Bickell, was doing Beaton’s taxes that first year. Bickell saw how successful Big Dipper was and suggested they open a retail store together.

As luck would have it, the catering business on the corner of Higgins and Fifth Street was moving downtown, so after just a few months of making ice cream, Beaton moved his startup to its current location, where he partnered with his soon-to-be wife, Barbie, and Bickell.

For Big Dipper, if there ever was a rocky road, it was during that first year of retail operations.

“At the beginning we had no stronghold, nothing to put our feet on, no certainty as to where it was going,” Barbie Beaton says. “We were hearing a lot of skepticism from the community, too—‘Who sells ice cream in the winter?’ That was a really scary time. But when you feel something so passionately, which Charlie did, and had his motivation and his certainty that it would be a success, then you knew we would be okay. But it was a leap of faith for sure.”

“The area wasn’t thriving the way it is today,” Charlie adds. “Now you walk around the block and there’s a brewery, a bakery, a bookstore, coffee shops, a record store, and a bunch of restaurants. It’s a bunch of businesses that have really helped make the Hip Strip what it is. I think they’ve helped us, and we’ve helped them, but I’d like to think we played a big part in that.”

Big Dipper isn’t just a business story. It’s a family tale, too.

Barbie, who grew up in Kila and graduated from Flathead High School, spent a year in the Washington, D.C.-area before moving back to Montana to begin classes at UM. She had one friend in Missoula at the time, and that person happened to work at Goldsmith’s alongside Charlie.

“Those were the days when you could kind of just go to other people’s work and hang out,” Barbie recalls. “We started out real casual.”

She studied French at UM, eventually getting her degree in the subject in 1995, and several times traveled to France, where she thought her eventual career might be. It was on a trip back to Missoula from Paris that Barbie ran into Charlie again and, lo and behold, they were both single this time.

“From there,” she says, “well, things just kind of took off.”

As if written in the stars, Charlie started including Barbie in the planning of Big Dipper and she, too, began to immerse herself in the fledgling ice cream business. The couple married in 1996 and five years later bought out Bickell, who left for a job as chief financial officer of Missoula County. Somewhere along the way, the Beatons became Montana’s most famous ice cream couple.

“It’s funny to me still,” says Barbie, who got a teaching certificate from UM in 2000 as well as a master’s degree in education in 2005 in hopes of teaching French. “[Big Dipper] was always Charlie’s brainchild. I had a different line of interests.”

But together, the Beatons churned their way through those early years, learning from all the mistakes a pair of small business newbies could make. And as Big Dipper grew, so did the Beaton family—they have two daughters, Aileen and Sophie—and its relationship with the rest of the community. It didn’t take long for that sense of family to gain notice, both locally and nationally.

“They always do right by their workers, their customers, and Missoula. It’s really cool to see,” says Community Medical Center Director of Marketing Geoff Peddicord, who, in addition to being a VTO bandmate, has worked closely with the Beatons on several charitable giveaways. “I am always amazed. They have all these young people working for them, and they consistently, always knock it out of the park for customer service. It’s a really cool success story. They’re just really cool people.”

Food & Wine magazine and USA Today both named Big Dipper one of the country’s top ice cream spots. In 2013, on National Ice Cream Day, the entire Beaton family was flown to New York City to serve ice cream on the set of Good Morning America during their “Best Ice Cream in America” broadcast.

After a year of scooping, the Beatons promoted Munson to manager of Big Dipper’s mobile operation—an ice cream van dubbed “Coneboy”—and their satellite concessions inside UM’s Adams Center. Now she runs the day-to-day operations at the Big Dipper in downtown Billings, which opened this past March to much fanfare. Munson has a small ownership stake in that store along with Bryan Hickey, the longtime Missoula store manager who became a business partner with the Beatons on Coneboy when it first opened in 2010. Hickey has worked roughly fifteen years at Big Dipper and was one of the first employees to express an interest in being more involved with the business.

“I just felt it was important that these workers had a piece of the business,” Charlie says, “so they felt it was theirs, too, you know.”

That pay-it-forward mentality was with the Beatons from the very beginning. Bickell, Charlie’s friend and original co-owner if you’ll recall, still has a menu item—the “Dusty Dale”—named after him.

“The Beatons helped me to believe that it’s possible to do anything you want to do and to make your life what you want it to be,” Munson says.

“I could not be happier. Is there a better job to have than to give people ice cream?”

Big Dipper has grown the most in the past five years, starting with its first franchise expansion into Helena in 2010. At the time, it was another large business leap by the Beatons—one that quickly paid off.

“There are four aspects to this business, and sometimes that creates a bit of stress,” says Charlie of juggling his wholesale, retail, mobile, and franchise arms. “But it’s still just ice cream. I have to remind myself of that sometimes.”

Helena owner Anna Doran promptly made Big Dipper one of the most popular destinations on Last Chance Gulch and was named 2013 Helena Business Woman of the Year for her efforts. Beaton is proud of what Doran, a former Grizzly track and cross country star, has done for the brand.

“She’s taken what we’ve done in Missoula and applied it to Helena, and that’s get involved with the community,” Beaton says. “That is so important in small business. You have to sponsor events. You have to get involved with things. That’s when it comes back to you.”

Whether it’s Billings, Helena, or a college town like Missoula, the Beatons know a lot of their success can be chalked up to the “vibe” from the business and the area in which it resides.

“A business like Big Dipper can apply wherever there is a connected community,” says Peddicord, a 1994 and 1996 UM grad. “You stand in line for forty-five minutes, and it’s such a scene. You see all these people you know, you’re talking to them and having a good time, and then you get an ice cream cone at the end. That experience embodies Missoula.”

Big Dipper will continue to grow, of that much Charlie is certain. But what exactly it will look like in thirty or forty years, well, the sky is the limit.

“I could never envision it looking the way it does now,” Beaton says. “At the time I was just thinking ‘Gosh, I hope I’m still in business in a year.’ We’ve talked about opening up our space in Missoula, renovating it enough to serve more patrons, possibly open one or two more franchises down the road. At the same time, I hope we keep things simple, so we can just serve people good ice cream.”