“My name is Dwight Dozier. I live in Great Bend, Kansas, small rural community, with my wife of 44 years, Dottie. And we have three daughters, married daughters, six grandkids, scattered from Kansas, Oklahoma, and North Carolina. And we’ve been in Great Bend for 18 years now. We pastor a First Assembly of God church here in Great Bend and very active and vibrant church and growing church, and we love what we do. We’ve been in ministry for 42 years. Most of that is pastors, lead pastors in small churches and loved doing ministry, loved doing what we do. As a pastor of an active congregation, there’s not really a typical, but my day might include meetings of some kind, staff meetings or counseling sessions. Those things are scheduled and more set, but then it’s going by the local hospital, it’s going by the local bookstore where I meet once a week with a group of area pastors from different denominations and just spending time with people.

But in our early years of ministry, there was never any money to set aside for retirement and make plans for the future. And a friend of mine recommended the Ice business to me, so I started to investigating, I thought, “Man, this could work for us. It might be the very thing that we were looking for.” And so, as we begin to narrow down our choices, we settled on a Kooler Ice because Kooler Ice has a great business model. They have a great support system for their machine owners, great service department. And they returned my calls. A lot of the companies that I’d tried to communicate with, I waited and waited and waited, and they didn’t return my calls, they didn’t return my emails. And so, because Kooler Ice was always ready to answer questions and were ready to provide the support and the help that we needed, I figured they’d be the same way after we purchased the machine, and that was the case.

We’ve had a machine now for two and a half years, and we have an IM 2,500 and great location that God’s blessed us with. And right smack in the heart of town, a high traffic area, and we do very well with it. The great thing about Kooler Ice and our experience with them has been, when I have a problem with the machine, and a lot of it’s a learning curve… If you’ve never run one, there’s some things you’ve just got to learn about it, and when I would call, I talked to Tommy or Cleveland or whoever I needed to talk to depending on my question, they were always so good about taking my call, and if they were busy, they were great about calling me back as soon as possible. I never worried about whether or not I was going to get a call back. They always did and answered my questions, helped walk me through problems, helped me walk through repairs on the machine. So, I’ve just been very impressed with the service and the support that I’ve gotten from Kooler Ice, and I think we’ve made the right choice as far as the company to go with.

And the Ice Talk makes it really very, very doable. I have that app on my phone, so if there’s a coin jam or a problem with the machine or if my bags start getting low, I can track my, I can tell how many bags I have left in the machine. If there’s a problem, I get an alert, and I can respond to that as quickly as possible and go down and take care of it. And that makes this doable. I’d hate to do this business without the Ice Talk.

I would encourage anybody that is looking for supplemental income for their future, if you’re able to turn your profits back into the company and pay off your investment within three to five years, you can have your investment paid back and be making some good money to supplement your income. Or multiple machines, which is my ultimate goal. I hope to add a second, possibly a third, machine over the next few years. It’s worth a shot. You make money. I’ve not yet had a month that I didn’t make profit. Even this last January when we had 40 below zero wind chills at times, I still had 12 to $1,400 worth of sales, so it pays for itself, it pays the bills even through the winter months. And I’d sure just encourage you, if you take care of the machine, change the filters when you need to change the filters, keep the machine in service, take care of your customers, remember you’re in the people business, not just in the ice business, I think you’ll do very well. And we like to say, it’s kind of the slogan that we adopted. I don’t know if it’s original with us or not, but our tagline is, “Kooler Ice, a better ice for a better price.”