Meet the Staff & Owners of Cullens Ice Cream

CULLENS STORY in Brief. 2023

I, Coach Les J Hill, met Chad Cullen over 13 years ago(2010) in the holiday gas station when he owned a business fixing the doors to holiday gas stations as we bumped into each other I found out he lived in that close environment, and we chatted then I heard he was going to open an ice cream shop I love ice cream and I became a regular customer.

As a customer I got to know him and his wife and chatted with him along the way about life and about faith and we became acquaintances and then became friends when I met and married Kristen and she moved in we would walk the dogs and swing over to Cullens which is about eight blocks from my house, and we would stop and get ice cream. Lisa and Chad got to know both myself and Kristen.

As time moved along, I finally got a picture of myself and my wife on the wall, after asking for years. It is a long standing joke about how long it took for us to get our picture on the wall a couple of years ago we were discussing business and that they were thinking what it would look like to wrap up and maybe move to Arizona where they had a house that they went to every winter after they shut the stores down the end of September beginning of October.

As we were talking along the way time went by and while they were in Arizona in the winter of 2021, February 2022, my wife came to me and said how about owning a restaurant. I said no way do I want a restaurant with alcohol, long hours, employees, customers, cooks, managing a kitchen all of that I had once owned a restaurant for three weeks when I bought a building that had a restaurant in it in Saint Paul. After three weeks I found somebody to run the restaurant, amen. My wife said what do you think about owning Cullens the ice cream shop, if and when they're ready to sell it, I smiled and said that's interesting let's look into it and I began my journey to look into finding the funds to purchase two ice cream shops one in Champlin and one in Coon Rapids.

The time came when Chad and Lisa had a conversation with us and I went to about 18 banks looking for money, and because there is not a lot of tangible equipment and there is what is referred to as blue sky in the ice cream business, we were unable to find financing. Chad and Lisa were inspired by God to sell it to Kristen and myself and we created a plan in which all of this became possible along with the father of our kids, (Jeff “Jammin” Wilcox).

On July 1st, 2023, we took over ownership of Cullen’s ice cream and we also bought the third location at the Mississippi crossing Event Center in the north part of Champlin. Chad and Lisa remain a very powerful coaching and guiding force behind the Cullen’s legacy, and we are blessed, humbled and lucky to have them to call anytime we have issues or ideas to run past them.  This has been a privilege and an honor to have such successful mentors slash coaches to support us on this journey. We are excited to continue to honor their decorum, their ethics their cleanliness their product quality their service their commitment to the community all of which we also embody and look for ways to continue to level up. We are excited about the future and as a business coach, I personally Coach Les, I'm looking at a vision and a mission of 10 stores in five years around the Twin Cities spreading out in a spiral from where we are here keeping close to home in Champlin, Minnesota. God has plans for each of these ideas and we will follow his guidance along with the inspiration through Chad and Lisa Cullen’s LEGACY

To speak with our staff about our flavored ice cream or our catering service, call our team at (612) 867-0104 in Champlin, MN.