The Power Up ⎯ SN.02/EP.01
Meet A Cake Decorating Shop Offering Classes To Expand Their Audience
There are some real advantages to running an established business in a smaller market, if you can grow, or even sustain, your profit goals over the years. Sheila Brooks shared that reaching a younger audience was one of the most challenging parts of being a part of an aging industry.
Realizing she needed to inspire the demand herself, Sheila began offering baking and decorating classes. “There is not a lot of opportunity for young kids to join this market and learn,“ Sheila shared in the episode. “ We feel like that we’re offering opportunities to younger students and kids so that they can experience it and determine if that’s really something they want to do.”
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About The Business
Business name: Cake Craft Shoppe
Founded: 2000
Founder: Sheila Brooks
Location: Stafford, TX
Website: https://www.cakecraftshoppe.com
Sales diversification strategy: E-commerce, storefront, rentals, decorating and baking classes, team building events
About Our Guest
As a professional baker, Sheila Brooks was approached because of her pastry experience with an opportunity to import high end cake decorating products from England. Thus, Cake Craft Shoppe was born as an internet business in 2000, before e-commerce was even around. Three years later, Sheila opened a brick-and mortar location now in Stafford, Texas when the business outgrew her house and storage facility.
Over the years, Sheila focused on diversifying the business in areas others in the industry were hesitant to go. With a focus on a younger audience, Sheila opened a classroom next door. There they teach cake decorating and baking to all skill levels, along with their growing Academy Program for teenagers.
Full Transcript
Sean (Thrive): Hello everyone, it’s Sean from Thrive with another episode of The Power Up, where I meet with successful small business owners and operators to learn about their business strategy so you can take their insights and level up your own business. Once your business is ready to expand, knowing where to start can be overwhelming. Our guests have some creative solutions for how they’ve tackled tricky problems and turned them into growth opportunities. Now, let’s dive into today’s episode.
Our guest today is Sheila Brooks from Cake Craft Shoppe, which started as an internet business in 2000, before e-commerce was really around. Three years later, Sheila opened their brick-and-mortar location, now in Stafford, Texas, when the business outgrew her house and storage facility.
As a trained pastry chef, Sheila started the business to import cake baking and decorating products from an English company that approached her with the opportunity because of her pastry experience.
Over the past few years, Sheila has focused on diversifying the business by opening a classroom next door where they teach cake decorating and baking to all skill levels, along with their growing Academy program for teenagers.
Sounds like you just opened a new school program, an academy program for teenagers. It’s relatively new in the last year or two. You have some students coming out of it right now. What I’m seeing here is that you believe this is one of your biggest business successes in the last few years. So, you want to tell us a little bit about that?
Sheila (Cake Craft Shoppe): Yeah, our Academy started two years ago, and we designed it to be a four-year program. They start off initially, they can come in anywhere from age 11 to 16, and it is a six to seven-month program. It culminates in a cake competition in Round Rock, Texas, where we hope and expect our students to compete.
So far, they’ve been very successful. In our first year, we had a total of five students; one dropped out, so we ended up taking four of them to the competition. They did extremely well, one of them took first, we had a second, and a fourth place. Then one kid’s cake got damaged on the way, so it didn’t make it to the table. That happens in the business, so that’s just a learning experience.
In the second year, we build on stuff they learned in the first year. The third year, we’re moving into wedding cakes—the support and structure, and the designs of wedding cakes. Next year, we’re moving into even more advanced things, more advanced baking. We’re working with blown and hot sugar; we’ll be doing a lot of different chocolate things next year. Hopefully, we’ll continue to grow this program.
It’s also opened doors for us into homeschooling. Apparently, in the homeschool programs, they have liberal arts that they need to have somebody come in and help teach. So starting at the end of August this year, we’ll have a 16-week program with one of the homeschools near us, and we’ll be going there once a week for the next 16 weeks. So it’s a growing opportunity for us.
Sean: That’s wonderful. So, you say it’s one of your biggest business successes in the last couple of years. What about it? How do you define big business success with it? Is it just starting a new vertical, or how do you think of it?
Sheila: Well, we think of it in a couple of different ways. Number one, it is starting a new vertical. One of the things we’ve noticed in this particular industry is that everybody who is in it is getting old, myself included. All of the names I’ve known for so many years are now retired or older or cutting back, and the new market is just not coming in. There aren’t a lot of opportunities for young kids, teenage kids, to join this market and learn and figure out whether this is something they want to do.
From that standpoint, we deem it a really big success. Also, financially, it’s brought in quite a bit. Offering the program, it’s not as expensive as culinary school, but it’s not cheap either. We try to keep the cost for parents within reason.
From that standpoint, we feel like we’re offering opportunities to younger students and kids so they can experience something and determine if that’s really something they want to do.
We had one young lady in the program for two years, and after the second year, she decided no, this is a little too much work, so it’s not something she really wanted to do. When she came to us, opening a business, opening a bakery, opening a restaurant, that was her goal. Now she’s realized, fortunately early enough, that’s not what she wants to do because it’s an awful lot of work.
Sean: I bet. So you talked a little about your audience. You said students with parents, are they high school, junior high, or college age? Where do you fall?
Sheila: We fall in the high school range. When they start at 11, they’re actually in middle school, and we’ve had a few 11-year-olds come in. Mostly, it hits the upper middle school to lower high school range.
In fact, we have one girl coming into the third year whose parents have decided she does not have to go to college because it’s not what she wants to do. This is what she wants to do, and she’s extremely good at it at a very young age, she just turned 14. She’s phenomenal. Her skills will rival most adults who have been professionals in the business for a while. She’s very focused, and that’s encouraging to us. That gives us the feeling that yes, we’ve actually done something and offered a very young person an opportunity to really learn without it being on a much higher scale.
Sean: Absolutely. Where do you go from here? Is there a certification process in your industry for this type of thing? Accreditation at some level?
Sheila: We’re going to be looking at that. Hopefully, as the program grows. I’m not sure with the number of students we have right now that we would qualify for an accreditation program, but it’s something we want to do at some point. We want to be accredited. We want them to get certifications that will allow them to enter the industry or go into internships with some of the better-known bakeries around.
Sean: That’s great. Love to hear that. Keep us in the loop on how that progresses.
I’d love to know, maybe beyond this program, or maybe it is this program and your history of business, how do you think about differentiating yourself in your business from any competition you might see in your market?
Sheila: Competition in this business is a big thing, not just locally, but all across the US. It’s a hard thing.
We differentiate ourselves by service. Even though we hire people who don’t have experience in this particular business or don’t necessarily know about baking and pastry, we try to hire those who can learn fast. We teach fast. We welcome questions.
We want our customers to be greeted when they walk in the door, but not just with “Hi, how are you? Welcome to Cake Craft Shop.” We want to welcome them with enthusiasm, ask if they need help, what we can help with today. If they just want to look around, then we’re here, ask us any questions you need.
If they don’t know the answer, myself or my partner will always be available. They can run next door, pick up the walkie-talkie, call us, or if we’re not here, they can reach one of us by phone. Most of the time, one of us is here.
What really sets us apart is our service.
Sean: You made a comment about hiring maybe less experienced people but having a high service standard. How do you approach that in interviews? What do you look for in candidates?
Sheila: A lot of it is personality. We have a young lady who’s been with us about six or seven months. She knew very little about baking and pastry when she started. She’s now one of our top people, very dependable.
She’s very quiet but takes everything in. This is her first job ever; she’s 18. Her mom taught her responsibility and work ethic.
We look for personality, not necessarily knowledge, but willingness to learn. Those are some questions we ask. We judge the personality as we go through the interview. Some are more open; some are more reserved. If you see the desire to learn, that’s what we’re really looking for.
Sean: Have you come up with one killer interview question over your years of interviewing people? Any secret line you use?
Sheila: We tend to ask if somebody comes in mad or upset about something, how would you handle it? We might throw out a scenario.
For example, if a product like chocolate blooms, that’s when chocolate gets a white cover on the outside, which is cocoa butter coming to the surface, not a bloom. If a customer is upset about that, can they handle it?
If they can’t, we ask how they would handle it and what they would do if they couldn’t handle it.
If they say, “I’ll do my best” or “I’ll get somebody else who knows the answer,” that’s a good indication.
That’s one of the things we really push: how would you handle an upset customer?
Sean: I was looking at your website, you have a ton of products. How do you think about product assortment? Does it change based on sales channel, online versus in-person?
Sheila: That’s a hard one because trends change quickly. We have to stay on top of those trends, identify them early, and then bring those products in.
There are many things we’d like to have but don’t have room or finances to purchase because they may be expensive.
The new Shopify collection that just opened up, we’re seriously looking at that. It would allow us, without financial investment, to offer products to customers without having to store them or buy in maximum quantities.
We do a lot of online advertising. One thing I like about Thrive is the Google integration, which helps drive more people to our website and physical store.
Printed advertising is not working for us. If you’re doing wedding cakes and want to hit the bridal market, you have to be in those magazines. For us, there’s not a big enough draw for that kind of advertising, so we try to stay on top of everything and bring in products people want.
We do a lot of events, which is a good way to get our name out. We’ve been invited to several local conferences by colleges and school districts to do presentations on starting a new business and the challenges involved.
Sean: Back to Shopify collections, you said this is a big thing you’re looking at. What is it? Pretend I don’t know what it is.
Sheila: We got an email from Shopify about a week ago. I forwarded it to my business partner, who does most of our marketing.
If you opt in, both on the retailer and seller side, it allows us to offer things like KitchenAid mixers sold by someone else. We don’t have to purchase the KitchenAid, but we can link their business to our website and offer it. It will be shipped from that seller, but we get a portion of the profit.
There will be shipping charges, but margins are good, 20 to 40% depending on the product or company.
It allows us to offer much more than we’ve wanted to but haven’t been able to because of space and finances.
Sean: Have you thought about dropshipping?
Sheila: We have, but most of our suppliers don’t want to do dropshipping. One supplier said she would, but most want us to purchase and hold products in store.
Most suppliers are big corporations that only sell wholesale and don’t want to enter the retail market.
As a business grows, you look at that because the bigger the quantities you purchase, the lower your cost. It’s all about cost and profit in retail.
Sean: Okay, let’s wrap up. I have four quick questions to close.
First: What is your fastest-growing sales or marketing channel?
Sheila: We haven’t done much advertising on Google, but that’ll be next. Google brings more people to our website than anything else.
MailChimp, tied into Shopify, has 3,000 subscribers growing daily.
Shopify itself has about 1,500 subscribers.
We’re looking at all kinds of channels.
Sean: Great. Second quick question: What is your biggest business challenge right now?
Sheila: Our biggest business challenge is staffing. Finding people who want to work, who want to learn, and who want to be part of the team.
It’s been very difficult in the last few years, especially after the pandemic. People are more selective about jobs, hours, and pay.
We try to offer competitive wages and a good environment, but it’s still a challenge.
Sean: Understood. Third question: What is one piece of advice you would give to someone starting a small business today?
Sheila: Plan ahead, but be flexible.
You can plan all you want, but things will change, and you have to be ready to pivot.
Listen to your customers, listen to your team, and be willing to adapt.
Also, don’t be afraid to ask for help.
Sean: Excellent advice. Last question: What motivates you to keep going every day?
Sheila: My passion for baking and teaching.
Seeing students grow and succeed, seeing customers happy with their cakes, and being part of their celebrations.
That personal connection keeps me motivated.
Sean: Thank you so much, Sheila, for sharing your story and insights with us today.
Sheila: Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.
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