Jesse Folsom, a franchise owner of Crumbl Cookies in Hawaii, went from selling cars to sweet treats. A former Tesla sales executive, Folsom moved to Hawaii a few years ago and noticed there were no stores from the national chain Crumbl Cookies.
Folsom and Scott Brown became the franchise owners of the first Crumbl in the state, which opened in Kapolei in 2021, as reported by Pacific Business News at that time.
The brand's second store in Hawaii is set to open in Aina Haina on Friday, Feb. 2. The duo plans to open a third location in Pearl City in early May, he said.
Folsom spoke with PBN a few days before the opening of the new store in East Oahu to share his thoughts on starting the business and hiring staff.
What made you want to be a franchise owner? I was formerly an executive at Tesla. ... I was a VP of sales on the East Coast, and then Elon Musk did a massive layoff, and I was part of that layoff and so we moved to Hawaii five years ago. When we got to Hawaii, we just tried to look around and see what Hawaii was missing that the Mainland had and that Hawaii would like and accept. ... We saw people getting off the planes every single day with pink Crumbl cookie boxes, just like you see people with the Krispy Kreme boxes from Maui. We applied for the license. We flew to Utah, met with the Crumbl executives, and they said, "Yeah, we'd love to give you the rights to Hawaii and have you help us build it out." It's taken us many, many years. The permitting process is very long — it's getting better, I will note — but yeah, that's the story. So I came from being a sales executive at Tesla to making cookies in Hawaii, and I wouldn't change a thing. It's amazing.
What did you learn from opening the Crumbl in Kapolei? I learned that you have to be in the business working alongside all the workers in the beginning before you pass the baton. If you delegate in the beginning, then you'll lose influence and the business won't run the way it's supposed to run.
With the labor shortage, what strategies are you using to find and retain workers? We're actually finding all our workers on Indeed. When we posted in Kapolei in 2021, we had over 700 applicants in the first two weeks. Here in Aina Haina, this go around, we had 40, so we were really, really worried. What we did is we spruced up our ad a little bit. We added in that people are getting tips, as well. And then — that's actually not even the most important thing — what we found is that you have to call and contact these people within one hour of them applying for the job on Indeed, and you have to get in front of them within 24 hours. Once we did that, we've now hired 80 people in the last two weeks. So my advice with the labor shortage ... [is] it's just a changing market, so you have to almost be a headhunter.
What advice would you give someone starting a business? Go for it, but do your research. If you do good research, you'll make good decisions.
