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She brought in her mother-in-law and sister to help cook and clean, while she concentrated on making the batches. Though she'd retired the Sears machine for a more professional model, she was still only able to make three litres every 10 minutes.

And she was running out of freezer space and had maxed out the electricity available to her rural property.

"It got so crazy. We did a huge volume the first year. And then, once we stopped long enough to go, whew what happened? we realized we weren't making an awful lot of money. We were working real hard but we weren't making a lot of money."

To get more efficient, Pigott realized she had to move the ice cream manufacturing to a real manufacturing facility with more freezer space and bigger equipment. And with her savings already invested in the company, she decided outside financing would be worth seeking.

She had already taken courses through the Community Futures Development Corporation (CFDC) of Cowichan Region back when she was ready to start producing. (Though she had extensive business experience under her belt, she felt the program could help familiarize her with the Island more.)

Now, that networking proved valuable: she was quickly able to secure a federal loan from the CFDC. "I only asked for $10,000 for the expansion, and it went very smoothly; there was no problem at all," she says. That money helped establish the factory in Duncan at which she now employs three to seven people, depending on the season.

In the early spring of that year, she got a call from a man in Cowichan Bay, a small fishing community North of Victoria. He asked them to open up an ice cream parlour in the village, and offered "a deal we couldn't refuse" on some prime waterfront space. But by that July, they'd already outgrown the 350 square foot building. Before long, they'd moved into a larger location in Cowichan Bay, and had opened an additional two parlours in Victoria and Duncan.

While they were all bustling successes, Pigott and her husband eventually shut down the two newer locations. "It just wasn't worth the labour and frustration. We were running thin trying to maintain service, quality, proper staffing and all the rest of it. My husband was on the road all day every day, and we said, 'We're pushing 60. We don't need this anymore.'"

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