In the U.S., Baby Boomers own nearly 3 million businesses — many of them local and beloved. Over the next decade, 60% of those owners say they plan to retire.

That’s a big opportunity for anyone looking to buy a business. But many of these mom-and-pops will need to be modernized, without sacrificing their old-school charm.

What does this look like? Consider this little ice cream shop in Goshen, Indiana, called The Chief.

The Chief was founded in 1962 by a local high-school coach and his wife. It’s a diminutive roadside shop, said by many (including Thrillist) to serve some of the best ice cream in Indiana —dense, creamy, and made by a seventy year-old machine. In 2018, the owners were ready to retire, so a local couple, Tracy and Chad Klopfenstein, bought the place. Tracy was a high school English teacher and Chad was an engineer. They were also recently retired, but looking for a second act.

With The Chief, they knew they had their work cut out for them.“Their reputation for delicious ice cream was strong,” Tracy says. “But there was no branding or logo, no digital payment system, and believe it or not — the cash was loose on shelves and coins were in a muffin tin!”

So the couple started making updates. The business grew. Now, the Chief has a second location, a catering business, and a national profile (including being on Entrepreneur’s “America’s Favorite Mom & Pop Shops” list last year).

Here’s the scoop on how they made it happen.

1. Preserve what’s ‘special.’

All business functions can be divided into two categories: the stuff your customers love, and the stuff they don’t care about. You have to know which is which.

For example: The Chief used a 1950s-era machine to make their ice cream. The machine made ice cream with very little air, lending it its famous creaminess.  But it was no longer in production, so if it broke, that would be an existential problem. Luckily, Chad was vice president of engineering at his previous job, so he reverse-engineered the machine and developed a new one just like it. To their relief, customers didn’t notice the difference.

Similarly, The Chief used to mix some ingredients by hand, like the Oreos in its Cookies & Cream. To ensure that every tub had consistent mixings, Chad implemented a robot. 

2. Update the experience, then delegate.

To grow a business, you need to build a system that scales. At first, The Chief was deeply unscalable.

“The shop didn’t take credit cards, and the pints were in Styrofoam that your spoon would poke through,” Tracy says. There was no branding or logo, and no digitized point-of-sale system; the employees just added things up on a pad of paper. “We didn’t want to turn people off by making it ‘too modern,’” Tracy says, but the Klopfensteins didn’t think customers would miss these quirks. So they switched to paper products, added a digital payment system, and developed a simple logo with a “sense of old” about it.

Once the original location was running smoothly, Tracy and Chad looked around for higher-level employees to help them run it. Many of their seasonal employees are high-school and college students, and because of her connections as a retired local teacher, Tracy gets to choose from the cream of the crop. Through trial and error, they’ve found they much prefer to promote from within. “Train,” Tracy says, “and some people just really shine and have the potential for leadership. A lot of our managers are homegrown.”

Five years ago, this enabled them to open another location in nearby Granger, Indiana, and to start catering. They take their ice-cream trailer to weddings, birthdays, and graduation parties. They cater for the Notre Dame football team on a regular basis. Tracy even knows certain player’s orders by heart. “Oh, there’s Malachi Fields. He likes Peanut butter Oreo,” she says. They’re also opening a seasonal drive-thru at the original location.

Related: From Kitchen Table Idea to Thriving Business — How These Entrepreneurs Navigated Success

3. Speak your customer’s language.

As the couple modernized The Chief, they ramped up its social media presence. Tracy took the lead — and watched closely to see what resonated. “People love up close pictures of our ice cream rather than a fancy, razzle-dazzle background,” she says. “They want the posts to seem real, and not too slick,” she says. Their social accounts mirror the old fashioned, wholesome, warm, community-oriented persona for which The Chief is known. Recently, they ran a popular campaign with a customer, Martha, who just turned 100 (Martha accepted only ice cream as payment). 

      Offline, the couple follows a similar mode of thinking. The Chief hosts pint sales where every penny goes to local charities. Goshen-area grade schools make regular field trips to the store. Each year, the nearby Boys & Girls Club creates an ice cream product that the store features for a week. ” She also started Monday Music when folks gather to enjoy ice cream and listen to a free live show. “It ended up being these really talented musicians who typically don’t have Monday night gigs,” she says.

Tracy’s always looking for ways to build community. It’s a small thing, but outside the shop, she put up a large chalkboard for kids to draw on. “Now,” she says, “parents can sit at the picnic tables and have a decent conversation while their kids run around the trees and do chalkboard.”

High season, there are long lines at the smaller Goshen location, but the customers don’t seem to mind. “They usually see somebody they know in line. They’re talking to each other. They’re used to it. It’s kind of a community activity,” says Tracy. “Often, somebody comes up to the window, and I ask ’em, ‘How long did it take? How long were you in line?’ Because I can see it goes all the way out to the road. And they’ll say, ‘thirty minutes, but it was fine. It’s a beautiful night.’” 

“You know,” she adds, “most people with ice cream are happy.”