Start with a base of youthful energy, add a generous portion of ambition, top with a dash of verve, and serve it on Penn Square.

What you've got is Matt Shaffer's recipe for a second Tropical Smoothie Café.

Shaffer opened his first a year and a half ago at The Shoppes at Bloomfield Village in Lititz.

Just 24 at the time, he already had ambitions for a string of the cafés and purchased territory rights for Lancaster, Dauphin and Chester counties in addition to his first franchise license.

"We were the first [Tropical Smoothie] in Lancaster County," he said. "We had the first franchise in Pennsylvania."

Branching out so soon might seem like a risky move during a recession, but Shaffer is confident he will succeed.

"Initially, I wasn't scouring the globe to find a place" for another café, he said.

But then a 1,200-square-foot space once occupied by the Amazon Café in the Fulton Bank Building across King Street from the new Lancaster County Convention Center came to his attention.

"It had a really good lease price on it. It seemed like a really good fit," Shaffer said. He signed the lease and additional franchise agreement last month and plans to open in September.

"I'm not concerned at all" about succeeding there, he said. "That's going to be a slam dunk down there."

Imported brand
Shaffer said smoothie shops were very popular in Florida, where he studied business management for a couple of years at Florida Southern College.

"It's harder to do a smoothie business by itself up North," he said, so he turned to Tropical Smoothie Café, a brand that also features sandwiches, wraps, soups and salads, for broader appeal.

The smoothies themselves are a mixture of fruit, sweetener and ice. "Ours are a little bit thicker" than other smoothie recipes, he said.

A standard decor built around bright colors, thatched roofing and bamboo paneling add to the tropical flavor. The chain, which was founded in 1997, now has 275 outlets and another 80 in development in 34 states, according to its corporate Web site.

In addition to the Tropical Smoothie Café in Lititz, there is now another one at 4635 High Pointe Blvd., Harrisburg. Shaffer receives a portion of its franchise royalties as owner of the territory.

Business at the Lititz café has been growing, Shaffer said, up about 27 percent in July compared with the same month last year.

"At lunchtime, we get a lot of business," he said, adding that the café serves a broad range of customers, "people who are wanting to eat a little bit better than shooting over to McDonald's."

The Lititz café employs as many as 24 people in the summer, dropping to about 15 when business slows in the winter. About 15 to 18 more will be hired to staff the downtown café.

"We do a lot of catering in the winter," Shaffer said. "The catering can carry us pretty well."

He said he thinks the Lancaster café has the potential to do even better than the one in Lititz.

"I don't like opening right before the winter, but the good thing about that is you can get all the kinks worked out," he said. "You do have to slowly build it."

A family affair
Shaffer's younger brother, Cody, will look after the Lititz café while Shaffer gets the new one going.

"He's pretty much made up his mind that he's going to go into this with me," Shaffer said. "I basically do all the marketing. ... Cody, he's the operations man for the most part."

Other family members help out, including their sister, Kayla; their aunt and cousin, Marci and Lindsey Herr; and their grandfather, Gene Wagner, who does some of the catering deliveries.

Shaffer's mother, Cindy Shaffer, was his partner in the first café. His uncle, Daryl Herr, is his partner in the second.

"It's more Matt's venture than mine," Herr said. "When he was in college, he had a vision of this. ... He just always wanted to be his own boss."

Herr describes his own role as more of a mentor than anything else, steering Shaffer in the direction of other people who can help and letting him develop the business by himself.

"Matt and his mom started it," he said, "and we're just taking it to another level."

Herr, a land developer and partner in Hogan & Herr custom builders, said he employed Shaffer in construction when he moved here after college.

"For a young guy, he's learned a lot and done a lot," he said.

Shaffer used those skills to do much of the interior work on his first café himself and will serve as general contractor to set up the second.

"We're going to get some people we know in there to do the build-out," Shaffer said. "It's going to be a much easier build-out than what we did here [in Lititz] from a vanilla shell."

Shaffer would like to see several more Tropical Smoothie Cafés in his three-county territory, and he thinks his construction background will help when he's advising other people how to get started with their own franchises.

He'd also like to operate some more of his own.

His partner, Herr, said he thinks there are several communities, such as Millersville and West Chester, where Shaffer could start additional cafés.

"I always told Matt this thing could grow where he has a bunch of stores and a corporate office," Herr said. "I started from the ground up, too."

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Dennis Larison is editor of the business section and can be reached by telephone at 291-8753 or by e-mail at dlarison@lnpnews.com.