Making their own success

Sisters are doing it for themselves these days. Lured by a more flexible workplace than the kinds of jobs their college degrees could secure them in the corporate world, single women and mothers from Atlanta and beyond are stepping into the world of food entrepreneurship.

But the road to the kind of profit margins most yearn for is paved with lots of caveats; there’s more to making a killing —- or even a living —- at entrepreneurship than having a great cookie recipe.

As with any start-up company, you’ve got to know the ropes, or in this case, oven mitts. Five Georgia ladies who literally lunch have lots of advice for all fledgling foodies out there.

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“Believe in yourself and resolve —- I mean resolve —- to make it happen.”

CATHY CUNNINGHAM HAYS, Geraldine’s Bodacious Food Co., Jasper

“If I talk to you about going into the food business for yourself for more than five minutes and you don’t go screaming from the room, you might have what it takes to make it as an entrepreneur,” laughed Cathy Cunningham Hays, president of Geraldine’s Bodacious Food Company in Jasper.

Chances are you’ve eaten Geraldine’s cheese straws, named after Cathy’s mother. They’re sold at every major supermarket chain in the Southeast. So are the company’s all-natural wedding and Key lime cookies.

And it took a long time to get them there.

Cunningham Hays started in 1995 when she was a 42-year-old radio account executive with two small children and a cush Dunwoody ZIP code.

“I had been in broadcasting for 18 years, and I was burnt out. I felt like I had already forgotten what half the young kids coming up in that business would ever learn,” she said.

All she knew about food was that she liked to eat. But she knew she could market just about anything. She started testing her mother’s recipe in her kitchen and moved the baking to a “co-packer” —- a company that makes and packages your product for you —- as soon as the straws started selling.

Cunningham Hays jokingly told of her early days when she and her family lived on credit cards and exhausted most of their savings, eventually moving her family from Dunwoody to Jasper when an old suit manufacturing plant became available —- a space just right to produce and package her product.

“I wanted to eliminate my co-packer,” she explained. Her husband, David, joined her and runs operations and production for the company, which now employs 15 full-time workers. It took them four years to turn a profit.

“You have to learn to live with uncertainty,” Cunningham Hays said, “and never give up.”

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“Be ready to do everything from marketing to sales to distribution. And stay curious.” —- SUE SULLIVAN, Hot Squeeze, Atlanta

When Sue Sullivan hands out her business card, she usually raises a few eyebrows: It’s square-shaped like a pocket for a prophylactic and says “always use a condiment” on the cover.

Her company, Hot Squeeze, produces a “sweet heat chipotle sauce” that can be used on everything from napa cabbage to noodles. A mom of two teenagers, she hatched the idea to sell the sauce in 2006, when she and her then-partner in Sue Sullivan and Carol Bosworth Catering were making a killing with it at the catering functions they hosted.

“It started the way you hear anything like this starting,” said Sullivan, who at 47 looks more like a model than someone who spends most of her time in the condiment aisle. “We would use the sauce on pork tenderloin and it was always a big hit. Everyone told us to bottle it.”

Like Cunningham Hays, Sullivan started with a co-packer, but remembers her first case run as if it were a nightmare. “I talked the production company into a 500-case run instead of the usual 1,000-case run and still freaked out when I saw the bottles coming off the assembly line. I thought, ‘Oh my god, they [the bottles] won’t stop coming.’”

A Skidmore business graduate who worked at NBC and as a PR representative for Estee Lauder, Sullivan spreads a handful of credit cards across her desk like a deck of cards and explains that she has put up her own cash and opened lines of credit and credit card accounts just to stay solvent. After two long years, she still only makes enough money to cover operating costs.

Sullivan and Cunningham Hays peddle their products at major trade shows, which can run $6,000-$8,000 to attend, often splitting the costs by sharing a booth with each other. Both feel the exposure the product gets at a national show can really springboard into profit.

“Big shows such as the New York Fancy Food Show can really impact my business,” said Sullivan, who said a lot of her biggest accounts have come from the contacts she makes at her booth. “The key is follow-up.”

Sullivan and Cunningham Hays recommend starting with an advisory board of business people in your area —- lawyers, public relations, marketing and advertising professionals, bankers and other business owners. Invite them to be on your board and try to meet with them regularly to garner feedback and ideas.

“Don’t be afraid to ask anything,” Sullivan said, “you’ll be surprised at how helpful people are willing to be.”

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“Be ready to pick up and go with any aspect of the business. I mean any aspect, from testing the product to shipping to marketing.”

TANISHA J. LOFTON, 3 Sisters Creative Specialty Foods LLC, Atlanta

3 Sisters, which sells Pop! Popcorn Truffles online, began using a co-packer almost as soon as Tanisha J. Lofton arrived in Atlanta from Ohio last April.

Joining two partners in Atlanta after making the product in her home kitchen in Cincinnati, the 36-year-old former paralegal was tired of ending each day covered in white chocolate and popcorn. The frozen truffles are bite-sized goodies of popcorn with a chocolate filling, coated and drizzled in white chocolate.

“With a co-packer, all I have to handle is the shipping end,” said Lofton, who has been on her own since Sept. 15.

And losing her help has been the hardest part, financially and logistically. At times, she feels she might not be able to keep Pop! popping. But she’s looking into trade shows as an option for increasing her marketplace exposure. And to start off fresh in 2009, she’s dropping 3 Sisters as a name and coming up with something new (as yet undecided), as well as adding new products.

“We had an early plug on Daily Candy [a blog on all things trendy in major cities], and it was a huge help getting us started,” Lofton said.

Setbacks have made her realize that she could have used a more formulated plan before she launched the endeavor. “I would have liked to have known more about what I was getting myself into.”

Consequently, she advises having a clear plan for what you want to do and knowing a little about everything you can research —- from Web sites to packaging. Allowing one person to take charge of an area early on leaves you open to vulnerability if that person decides to leave.

“You can’t know it all,” she said, “but you need to know a little.”

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“Work hard and ask lots of questions.”

LENI ALTOE and LEIDE BARROS, Sweet Oven, Lawrenceville

Leni Altoe and Leide Barros met through a friend at lunch, but it wasn’t until Barros tried Altoe’s pao de quejo (cheese bread) at a baby shower that the two Brazilian moms got the idea to market their delectably chewy cheese rolls.

They rented a kitchen in Lawrenceville three years ago to test the product; now they sell their rolls to Fire of Brazil, an area Brazilian churrascarria restaurant chain, and Whole Foods.

Driven and tenacious, they have literally gone door to door to sell their product, and they spend lots of time behind booths at Whole Foods to introduce the public to a delicacy that in Brazil is as popular as coffee.

A favorite Brazilian breakfast and snack item, the rolls are made with manioc flour, which means they are gluten-free. Plus, they are all-natural and use no leavening agents. These ladies learned early on to push these marketable traits to the public, and it worked. Made with a blend of Parmesan, Pecorino and Romano, the rolls are sold frozen, popped in the oven and 20 minutes later come out gooey hot and deliciously tangy and soft.

Sweet Oven does not yet have its own storefront, and since the rolls are sold frozen, Altoe and Barros don’t ship (yet). “But we’re thinking about it,” Altoe said.

The two seem to share an almost blind faith in place of marketplace know-how, and their will to succeed has been rewarded so far. Altoe and Barros still make and package their product, but if sales keep growing they will eventually have to move to a co-packer.

“Do you know of anyone who might want our rolls?” Altoe asked.