Betting the House on Ice Cream: How Toa Green Built Crank & Boom Ice Cream

About this episode

Toa Green shares her journey of building Crank & Boom Ice Cream and the realities of entrepreneurship in a conversation with Ellie Puckett.

What if the best business you build is the one built around your life—not the other way around? In this live episode of Renegade Ventures Podcast, Ellie sits down with Toa Green, founder of Crank & Boom Ice Cream, to unpack her unconventional journey from her family’s restaurant to building one of Lexington’s most loved ice cream brands. What started with a $60 ice cream maker and a homemade coconut ice cream recipe inside a Thai restaurant grew into a thriving brand with multiple locations, nationwide shipping, and a fiercely loyal customer base. But this conversation is about more than ice cream. Toa shares the realities of entrepreneurship: taking calculated risks, surviving failed ideas, navigating seasonal cash flow, and learning that business doesn’t get easier—you just get better at doing hard things. Ellie and Toa dig into what it really means to scale without losing your soul, why defining your dream life matters before defining your growth plan, and how to build a business that supports the life you actually want. If you’re in a season of growth, uncertainty, or reinvention, this episode will challenge the way you think about success, failure, and what’s worth…

People in this episode

Host: Ellie Puckett

Guest: Toa Green

Topics covered

• entrepreneurship
• ice cream business
• calculated risks
• scaling a business
• defining success
• work-life balance

Keywords

• entrepreneurship
• ice cream
• business growth
• calculated risks
• success
• failure
• work-life balance

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Crank & Boom Ice Cream, Thai restaurant

Places: Lexington

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