Q&A with Katelyn Ice, 2025 Entrepreneur of Impact participant
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Earlier this year, Katelyn Ice of Ice Design Studio in Vincennes participated in the 2025 Entrepreneur of Impact contest. Business owners nationwide competed for the grand prize of $25,000, an appearance in Forbes and a one-on-one mentoring session with Shark Tank’s Daymond John.
Ice spoke with Inside INdiana Business about her Entrepreneur of Impact experience and her path to becoming a business owner.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell me about your business.
I started Ice Design Studio in 2018. We do full-service marketing for small businesses and nonprofits. We do website design, advertising, graphic design, social media management, email marketing, Google Ads. We do event fundraising marketing. We do a lot of that for our nonprofit clients, doing a lot of print materials for them.
Our bread and butter is mostly social media and anything that needs design. So print, digital, social, any kind of graphic design. There are four of us total. I have two graphic designers and a jack of all trades. She’s technically an account manager, but she also does graphic design and manages all of our social content for our clients. I focus mostly on sales and the web design part of the business.
I started in 2018 from my home office. I had quit my 9-to-5 job, and I had a baby. I took what most of us call an extended maternity leave. I never went back to work. I took it as my chance to go out on my own and see where it took me. I was marketing director for the Columbus Indiana Philharmonic. It was a hard job to leave, but I had so much passion in that job, I felt like I wanted to spread the wealth and work with different industries and different clients of different sizes.
When I had my son, I was working from home when I could, finding jobs here and there. Then I was like, “This is scalable.” I loved the flexibility of it. I could work from wherever I had a decent Wi-Fi signal. My son was a newborn at the time, so he was high maintenance. I could work in the evenings when he was sleeping or during nap time.
I started scaling the business as my son got older. Then I ended up having another baby, so I scaled back a little bit. It was just me in the business until 2023 when I started hiring people. I started adding services to my offerings, and I was getting to a point where I was having to turn away work because there weren’t enough hours in the day for me to maintain that kind of schedule. That’s when I determined I needed to hire people to start delegating the work.
How have you succeeded as an entrepreneur?
Recognizing that the product I had was scalable. That’s something that entrepreneurs miss sometimes. They’re comfortable doing the same old thing and not necessarily growing but making ends meet.
I joined a local coworking space in Vincennes to get out of my home office and start getting plugged into the community and meeting other creatives. I started meeting with a business advisor through the Southwest [Indiana] SBDC. She met with me a couple of times, and she knew I wanted to grow.
Like many entrepreneurs, the biggest thing in your way is money. I was like, “I don’t even know if I could afford to hire people.” She sent me a link to a grant opportunity I qualified for. I remember the deadline was in a week whenever she sent it to me. I was like, “There’s no way I can get all this documentation together and get organized enough to submit this grant. But, what the heck? I’ll try it. The worst that can happen is they say no.”
So I submitted the grant, and then I won the grant. Everything I had put in the grant that I said I would spend the money on, now it was up to me to make happen. That’s something else I’m proud of—I took a leap. I was like, “Sure, I’ll take all this free money. This is everything that I want to do with it to grow and better my community and fill a gap in the marketing world that was missing from Knox County.”
My team has been with me for over a year now. I’m proud of how I’ve grown as a leader and being able to delegate work and also mentor. It’s exciting to see them grow. Two of them are still in college, so it’s exciting to see them excited about learning what it’s like to work in the real world and better their skill set.
What about your failures or challenges as an entrepreneur?
The biggest challenge in the marketing world is managing positive client relationships. I have been lucky enough that I’ve had amazing clients. I’ve also had some conversations that have been difficult. But something I’ve learned as an entrepreneur steering this ship is that sometimes it doesn’t work out. It’s not a good match. I’ve had to learn that along the way.
Tell me about the Entrepreneur of Impact competition.
I saw a Facebook ad. I was scrolling on my business page. My feed is full of those types of opportunities, workshops, professional development type things. And I love Shark Tank. It’s one of my favorite shows to binge. I saw Daymond John on the ad, and it must have caught my attention, and I read what it was about. I don’t even remember it being an application process or anything. You had to submit your name, your business and maybe an EIN or something like that.
When I got the email that I was selected to be a part of it, I had forgotten that I had even signed up for it because it was a couple of months prior to that. I was like, “This sounds like a big deal. What have I done?” Then I learned more about the voting with the different rounds and how they were eliminating people.
I was sending texts to everyone I knew, “Here’s the link. Please vote for me.” I was sending messages on my social media, Instagram, Facebook. We were posting on stories, me and my team, about how to vote. I put QR codes around the coworking space, trying to get members to vote every day. I felt I was being annoying, but I was like, “This is an exciting opportunity. Not just for me, but I’m going to be bringing in, potentially, if I win, $25,000 to this community.”
I had plans to offer more services to my existing clients. I had plans to start a workshop series because one of the prizes was one-on-one advising with Daymond John. I thought, “I’m going to learn so much in that session with him. I would love to create some kind of course where I could bring that knowledge back home.” Maybe even create some kind of scholarship fund to help my nonprofit clients who need a website redesign but couldn’t afford it.
I was trying to get my community excited about it. The local chamber of commerce sent an email to all of their members with information about how to vote for me. The local news outlets ran stories about the competition and encouraged people to vote for me. I was excited, and there was a lot of buzz about it, but I couldn’t make it past that last cut in my group.
How has your participation in this contest benefited your business?
I’m in marketing. I like to create buzz about what I’m doing as an entrepreneur. Some people might think that’s tooting my own horn or arrogant in a way, but it’s good press.
I want our community to know there are opportunities outside Knox County that entrepreneurs can take advantage of and potentially bring that money into our community and help improve services available to small businesses or the quality of life. Whatever I can do to help spread that word, that’s what I’ll do.
What’s next for Ice Design Studio?
I would like to hire another full-time person. I would like to start expanding my reach. We have clients in Terre Haute, Evansville, Vincennes, Knox County and Columbus. I’d like to get into the [Indianapolis] market somehow and start a sales strategy. There’s a lot more competition up there, but maybe we can find a niche. Maybe there’s a small business community we would be a good fit for.
Within the next year or two, I would like to move out of the coworking space. We have a private office in The Pantheon, so I’d love to move out of here and have our own storefront where we have conference room space and a more private setting for clients to meet, but also for our team to collaborate in our own space.