One Thursday evening, Amanda Perri set her alarm for 6:58 p.m. Still, by the time she pulled up the webpage for ordering just after 7, she was too late. The ice cream flavor she wanted was gone.

But in her years shopping at Good Karma Creamery, Perri has learned a few tricks. One, wait a few minutes if an item appears sold out. “Sometimes people don’t check out in time, and so the flavor comes back,” said Perri. “When you love a product this much, you figure out how to get it.”

That’s exactly the strategy for Good Karma Creamery, a small-batch ice cream shop owned by Howard County resident John Williams. “It’s not easy to get the ice cream,” Williams said. But experience has shown him: If the ice cream is good enough, people will find it.

A former vice president at T. Rowe Price, Williams reviews and tweaks his ice cream recipes with the same obsessive precision he once used to monitor billion dollar investment funds. He creates new flavors for each of his regular menu drops, aiming as close to perfection as God and chemistry will allow.

So far, it appears to be working. Online, his reviews border fanatical. “Every ice cream from Good Karma is the best ice cream I’ve ever had,” a customer wrote last year. “We can’t enjoy any other brands anymore, we’re so spoiled!”

Perri joked that her own obsession with Williams’ ice cream has become “problematic.” Her husband urged her to track how much she buys in their monthly budget. Her response: “I will, but I’m not gonna buy less.”

After Williams posts his offerings, the ice cream typically sells out within a few minutes. “Sometimes it’s like everything’s gone in 10 seconds,” Williams said. The scarcity ensures that he doesn’t have any wasted inventory and helps keep costs down. While his ice cream is more expensive than most versions at the grocery store, around $13 a pint, it’s also more expensive to make, incorporating high-end ingredients like Atwater’s jam and artisanal baklava.

While he has a few part-time employees, he makes many of the deliveries himself. Pulling up to a brick rowhome in East Baltimore last Friday, he double-parked his Subaru Forester and turned on the hazards. He lifted the black lid of a cooler lined with Tundra ice packs and removed two pints of ice cream in the flavors “Berry Corny” and “Golden Ticket.”

Just before he arrived, an app tracker would have alerted the customer that he was close by. Still, he rang the doorbell and waited a few moments. Should a customer fail to answer after a few phone calls, Williams loads the ice cream back in the cooler, giving them the option of picking it up later. “I would never give someone melted ice cream because it’s not going to reflect well on the quality of the product,” he said.

Williams tends to go above and beyond for his customers, even paying $30 for a secondhand freezer for a group of teachers at Hammond High School in Columbia, who couldn’t fit what they ordered into the teachers lounge fridge. It was a thoughtful gesture, but he admits, “It’s partially selfish.” If they have a bigger freezer, they‘ll buy more ice cream.

A native of St. Mary’s County, Williams was the first in his family to go to college. While a student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, he became interested in the stock market and the power of saving and investing money. Later, he learned about the Financial Independence, Retire Early movement, FIRE for short. It spoke to him. “The rule of thumb is that you need about 25 times your spending in savings,” he said.

After getting his MBA from the University of Chicago, he pursued a finance career and was “ridiculously overpaid versus the value I was contributing to society.” While many young people in finance buy up mansions and splurge on fancy dinners, he and his wife, a public school teacher, settled into a modest home in Howard County and started a family.

He was good at his job, but found it all-consuming. To find some sort of equilibrium, he began meditating daily, and returned to church. He watched his diet and worked out five days a week. On weekends, he’d indulge in “as much Ben & Jerry’s as humanly possible.”

On Jan. 2 of 2020, just after his bonus check cleared, he resigned. At first, he didn’t know his next move. The idea came while sitting in the driveway: He could make ice cream. He bought an ice cream maker on Amazon and made his own batches at home. Later, he rented space inside Atwater’s commissary kitchen in West Baltimore.

Though he had no prior experience working in food, he found his background in finance, researching businesses with spreadsheets, translated well into recipe development. “It really is a lot of analysis,” he said. If a flavor doesn’t work out, he’ll adjust the ingredients until he’s happy with the result.

When I met with Williams, one of that week’s flavors was corn-based, created especially for an event at Ellicott City’s Manor Hill Brewing, where he sometimes sells by the scoop. Williams did a similar version last year, but it wasn’t nearly as tasty, he said. This time, he steeped hot milk with fresh corn kernels and strained it. To the base, he added a crunchy cornmeal streusel and Atwater’s blueberry lemon zest jam. “It just complements the corn perfectly,” he said as the Subaru turned onto St. Paul Street.

After two years in business, Williams has outgrown the space at Atwater’s and is now relocating to a 2,000-square-foot space in Columbia in hopes of scaling up the business. Right now, he’s transitioning from biweekly to weekly ordering, which he estimates will increase business by 50%. Customers can also pick up their pints in Columbia, or place monthly bulk delivery orders.

Though unique in this area, Good Karma Creamery is one of a handful of similar brands nationwide that Williams draws inspiration from, such as Underground Creamery in Houston or Cafe Panna in New York City. “The biggest ones are doing north of 1,000 pints a week,” he said, a figure he hopes to eventually reach.

But even as he expands, William says, he doesn’t have ambitions to make Good Karma Creamery the next Ben & Jerry’s. “At a certain point you just can’t control the quality of it,” he said. He’d rather be the best than the biggest.