The Long Game Wins: Business Lessons from a Soft Serve Stand with Gemma Geldmacher

Coffee with Jon - Think Big. Get Unstuck. Grow Your Business · Aug 10, 2026 · 54m

Playing the Long Game: Lessons from a HUD Specialist and a Soft Serve Stand

I sat down with Gemma Geldmacher, Managing Director of Mortgage Banking at Berkadia, to talk about her successful career and her blog — Playing the Long Game: Hard Lessons Through Soft Serve. It's the story of watching her parents immigrate from Australia in 1984 with three kids, buy a local community ice cream shop, and the lessons that came with it. The business lessons inside that shop can help all of us in business and life.

Here are a handful of the lessons Gemma and I talked about:

* Efficiency is an act of…