Welcome to My World…

Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step,” and those words summarize a lot of my actions and decisions in my life.  Some characterize me as impulsive, stubborn, bull-headed, but the truth is, if I didn’t risk taking the first steps, I would never have been blessed to get to travel this crazy road I call my life.

Let me introduce myself.  I am Kelley Marie Costa, and I have been chasing the entrepreneurial dream pretty much since I learned what entrepreneurship was.  I have been in ice cream, coffee, wholesale, franchising, clothing and resale over the last twenty years, and the stories, experiences and lessons I have learned are countless, at times crazy, but always valuable.  I am embarking on a blog journey to share some of the best, and worst, moments I have endured, both in business and in life.  I encourage you to subscribe and follow along, as each week new posts will drop Thursday at 7:30pm, bringing you into story, chapter and journey in my days.  My basic demeanor is honest and blunt, and I will provide nothing short of that with my weekly posts.   

A quick overview of some of my background…I ran Kelley’s Dari-Delite (seasonal soft-serve ice cream shop) on Baptist Road in Bethel Park, PA when I was in college.  I attended Duquesne University and kept my main focus in Marketing, Entrepreneurship and Accounting, specifically in Corporate Taxation upon graduation.   I kept Kelley’s Dari-Delite in Bethel Park after graduation for a few years, and it is still in my family today being operated by my mother (another person you will hear a lot about). It has officially been in my family since 1999.  I started another Kelley’s Dari-Delite on Babcock Blvd., in Shaler, PA in 2010, mimicking the original, while also starting a career in corporate taxes for what I expected to be my forever career path.  I did both jobs, corporate taxes and ice cream, for years.  The seasons conflicted so my busy season in taxation was my slow season in ice cream, and vice versa.  Eventually, life dealt me a crazy hand, and I got diagnosed with a cerebral brain aneurysm in 2010, and then two more in 2020.  If you ever want life to change your route, experiences like that will do it.  I stayed in corporate America for four more years doing as I was, but in 2015 took a leap to open a year-round coffee and ice cream shop, with hopes and dreams it would replace my corporate career entirely.  Today, I can say, with more hard work than I ever imagined, countless tears, crazy victories, intense failures, sleepless nights, 15-hour workdays…I still run that business daily, almost eleven years later.  We have had grand openings, closings, multiple buildouts, franchising, wholesale production and so much more.  We operated during COVID, did buildout completions to align with major life events; we rose, we fell, yet we still are here living the tale.

I hope you will join me as I drop hot topics, outrageous tales, shocking encounters, big regrets, even bigger wins, and of course, future dreams.

Here are some glimpses of the past, and now brace yourself to get ready for the stores!  I will enjoy seeing you every Thursday, 7:30PM, every week going forward!

Next weeks topic, “My Three Biggest Mistakes.”

Xoxo,

Kelley