Ben & Jerry & Scott

“There’s a lot of, ‘What are you doing here?’” says Eller, a personal injury attorney at Best & Flanagan. With a smile, he adds, “It’s kind of fun.”

Last year, Eller bought two Ben & Jerry’s franchises, one in Calhoun Commons and the other in Southdale mall. Now he splits his time between depositions and Chunky Monkey.

“Doing something crazy like buying a business when you’ve never done it before and doing so much of it personally—I am unloading the trucks, cleaning ice cream off of floors. It surprises everybody I know.” He adds, “I kind of like that feeling. I’m surprised.”

In his mid-50s, Eller was looking for something to shake up the routine he developed over 30 years at Best & Flanagan. “I think a lot of people my age, when they’ve worked at some place for a long time, think of things they didn’t do or might have wanted to do,” he says. Owning an ice cream shop seemed like the perfect detour.

“I’ve always believed in Ben & Jerry’s social mission,” he says. “It’s a very progressive company that always makes everybody’s list of corporate responsibility, so I like that.”

But getting the keys to the ice cream stores wasn’t an easy task. “They care who their franchisees are,” he says. “They don’t want investors. They want owner-operators. I think they looked at my application a little bit skeptically. I wasn’t sure they were going to approve me because I had never run a business before, and they didn’t like that very much. Ultimately, I persuaded them. I got to use my lawyer skills for that.”

The training was rigorous: 11 days at Scoop University in Vermont. “It was hard,” Eller says. “In the days we were in classes, in the evenings we were working in the Burlington stores. Man, that was quite an ordeal.”

Eller’s 22-year-old daughter Alicia trained with him in Vermont, and now manages the Calhoun Commons location. His son Nico, 19, helps out at both stores; and his wife, Christie, contributes when she can escape her job at the attorney general’s office. (“She makes some major trips to Costco every week,” he says.)

“I enjoy the product,” says Eller, whose favorite is Willie Nelson’s Country Peach Cobbler. “But it’s much more work than I expected—the challenges of running a small business. That half of my week is much harder than my law firm half of my week.”

When he’s out of his apron and in his suit and tie, Eller’s co-workers enjoy giving him a hard time. “I take a lot of teasing about [my second job] in this office,” he says. “It’s the first unpredictable thing I’ve done in my life.”