Jeff Addison: Ice Sculpting is his Niche

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He smiled brightly from a chapped face and greeted me with a cold, but firm, handshake. “I just couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up. I always liked working with power tools and making things out of wood. In high school when you take those surveys and they ask where you see yourself in ten years, I said I’d be married and working construction,”  Jeff Addison reflects on his professional journey as he takes me on a tour of the Cool Carvings operation.

        

Ten years, or more, finds Jeff married to his college sweetheart, Brooke, with two beautiful young daughters. He does work with power tools, though what he builds is not what he anticipated. Addison is a sculptor, one of the most ancient of artisan trades. Unlike the artisans of eight thousand years ago, Addison sculpts ice for his company, Cool Carvings.

        

He said hello to this world in Michigan but his father’s work took the family to many towns while growing up. Where does he think this love for ice carving came from? “As a kid my favorite things were camping, anything with scouts, everything outdoors. When I lived in Minneapolis across from our house was a city lake. In the winter, it was frozen and we ice skated all winter long. I always loved winter. In Lincoln we lived in an apartment with big parking lots. We seemed to always have a lot of snow. The plows would come through and make piles five and six feet high. I spent hours making tunnels through those big snow hills. I always had fun with the ice and snow.”  Maybe that love of snow and ice was inborn.

        

The handsome Eagle Scout graduated high school in St. Louis and went on to Southwest Missouri State (now Missouri State) in Springfield. He was still undecided about his major, let alone what he wanted to do with his life. But he found himself cooking to support himself and liked it.

In 1993 his sweetheart graduated and moved to her hometown of Blue Springs, MO. Unable to be so far from her, Addison moved into a studio apartment in the metro. His first job was to cook at Kauffman’s Stadium Club.

        

He wasn’t there long when one of the French chefs said, “You really like this don’t you?”

        

 “Yes, I do.”

        

“You need to do something with it. You need to go to culinary school.” 

        

Sensing the chef was right, Addison enrolled in the Johnson County Community College three year culinary program.

        

“I liked the creative side of cooking. One day in Kansas City, my Executive Chef got all the apprentices together and said, ‘I need somebody to do ice sculpting for Sunday brunch.’ I volunteered.

        

“He did one sculpture that I watched. And then he said, ‘You’re on your own.’ He supplied me with all the necessary tools but I thought, I can’t do this yet. Blocks of ice cost money. For this chef to give me a block of ice each week was saying a lot. For the first ten sculptures I was pulling my hair out. I could only see a block of ice. And then I was able to see through it and see the cuts I needed to make and cut through to the sculpture. I have to go through each and every cut from the finished piece and work my way backwards to know where to start.”

        

In the meantime, Jeff and Brooke were married in 1995. In a few years he was Executive Soux Chef and invited to move to Austin where he would have been Executive Chef. Did he jump at the chance?

“I had lived in 26 residences by the time I was out of college. I said, this is it. I am married and my kids are gonna have roots like my wife did.

        

“I was learning as much as I could but I realized what I enjoyed most was the catering aspect.” Soon the young couple opened Addison & Company Catering, thankful for her accounting degree. He soon discovered, “There were a lot of caterers, a lot of good chefs, a lot of competition. But not many offered ice carving as a professional business. Ice carving was always something small and done on the side by a chef.”

        

One day one his servers said,  “You ought to do that full time.”

To which Addison replied, “You’re crazy. There’s not enough work to do this full time.” But he looked into it and saw that there was work in this industry. “It’s my niche.” Cool Carvings opened its doors in February 2006.

        

“I am not gonna get rich with this. But I like what I do and I am doing a good job. People are happy with what I do,” shared the young entrepreneur. “Those first years you wonder how we’re gonna handle it and then we remind ourselves that God’s gonna provide. He always has. And if this fails then it does. And He’ll provide a different opportunity. I am not scared. But sometimes I wonder and just when we think we are not gonna make budget, the phone starts ringing.

        

“I am developing my craft. The repeat customers call back. But they want to see something new. There’s a lot of overlap between the two businesses. They both want new menus. Everything I gained knowledge wise – client relationships, selling - in catering, I have been able to use with this. Catering was a trial run. It was there that I established relationships with other chefs and event sites. I was able to call on those contacts when I started. I don’t think I would do anything different. It’s been a lot of hours but I would do it all over again.

        

“I like getting a challenge to do something large or something not done before. Lon Lane’s Inspired Occasions challenges me year after year. I have many large catering clients. But Lon has made me go to the next level. Like one year he said, ‘I would like a player piano that’s also a drink slide and the music cylinder in the piano actually spins’. So I did it. It was a life-size player piano, with individual keys, foot pedals, a cylinder that spun and it had two tubes for drinks.

        

“Last fall I did a display for the Kansas City Southern Railroad Executive Dinner at Union Station. It was a 21 foot long train. A detailed locomotive with 3 box cars. Each box car had one of their three logos carved into it. It was complete with wheels, couplers, rails, ties & spikes. It actually looked real. We delivered 128 pieces to the site and fused them together there. I really enjoy the big displays.

        

“Another client that challenges me is Aramark. They say, ‘this is the party, do what you think’. When they give me that creative license it’s the most fun and I do my best work.”

        

So how does Jeff keep a positive attitude when times are tough? “Prayer and dependence on God. During real busy times I sleep here. I carve for a few hours; sleep for a few hours. How do I make it through those times? I call my family, Brooke and the girls, and they come for a visit with a Waldo Pizza. A visit with them and I’m good to go.

        

“I’ve quit a couple of times but I keep hiring myself back,” he laughs. “You know, an employee has a boss to complain about. I don’t have that. My mascot is that penguin on the side of my truck. I call him Chilly. He becomes the boss I can complain about. You know, he works me too hard and too many hours, he doesn’t pay me enough.” A smile of satisfaction appears under gentle eyes the color of rich coffee.

Plans for the future include the continued enhancement of events in the metro, with expansion well past this central area, by creating new and innovative sculpture designs and display elements. With that will come the building facility expansion with more walk-in freezer space and the installation of an ice CNC machine, which is a computer aided cutting machine, to assist in making logos. And one of these days when his daughters are old enough to work, he’d love to set them up with a snow cone stand at the Cool Carvings site property. That’s one way to keep entrepreneurs in your family line.

What about the slow times? How does he turn them around? “Start a major home remodel project. It works every time. Recently I said to Brooke, you’ve been wanting that new bathroom for a long time now. We’re pretty slow.  It’s time to do the bathroom. I got the bathroom completely gutted and all these phone calls started coming in. Now she has to wait a few months.”

        

Though this young man is a master at his trade, he remains humble. “It’s fun to look back and see God’s plan. I’m grateful to God for the talent he gave me. I didn’t pick that up from school and my own effort. It’s something He gave me and He gave me the opportunities to use it.”

        

Contact Jeff Addison and his apprentice at 13004 7^th Street, Grandview, MO, 816.765.1900 when you’re ready for an exquisite one of a kind piece of art at your wedding, dinner reception or other special occasion.