Sweet success

CMA know-how, a lucrative distribution deal and her mother’s secret recipe have helped put Sharon Beasley’s cookies on the map

By Robert Colman

Nothing beats the taste of fresh homemade cookies, and it’s hard to find anything on supermarket shelves that even approximates the experience. Sharon Beasley, CMA, is trying to change that.

Beasley is someone who really understands the value of good baking. “We never had store-bought baked goods growing up in my house,” she says. That was the reason she launched her own line of cookies, and named it Mrs. Beasley’s Cookies, in honour of her mother. “We want to give the public that same homemade quality,” she told Management from her bakery in Halifax.

Now, through lucrative distribution deals with the Price Club and Sobeys, the taste is out all over the east coast, and her plans to expand west and south stand to create a veritable cookie empire.

The entrepreneurial spirit

Beasley dreamed of running her own company long before it became a reality. It took 12 years in banking before she could comfortably set out on her own to do something she really loved.

“I went into the corporate lending department of Canada Trust right out of my B.Comm at the University of Toronto, then went on to Credit Suisse, in financial management, working on strategic planning and customer profitability,” she says. “When I was hired at Credit Suisse, they asked me where I wanted to be in five years. I said, running my own company. It took me two more years than I had hoped.”

In August 1996, she moved to Nova Scotia with her three-year-old daughter. “I spent many summers growing up on the south shore of Nova Scotia, and I was motivated to move back here. I knew it would be easier to start a company and live comfortably here than it would have been in Toronto,” she notes. “It also would have been harder to leave a comfortable, well-paying job to start my own company in the same city.”

Starting her business wasn’t exactly what she thought it would be at first. “I was hoping to have a job as a wholesaler, so I wouldn’t have to work set hours and could spend more time with my daughter. I was a bit naïve thinking that.”

Indeed, for the first year, Beasley rented out space from an established bakery, starting work at one or two in the morning, when the owners were finished for the day, to complete her orders. At the time, her clients were primarily institutions — hospitals, universities and schools.

Her client list helped substantially when it came time to call on the banks to finance her own facility. “We had customers that the bank knew were dependable for payment,” she notes. Since then, she has financed growth by pushing profits back into the business, equity investments and lending through small business plans.

The investment has paid off handsomely. Beasley now bakes 21 different varieties of cookies with the support of seven full-time and nine part-time staff. The cookies ship to big clients like Costco and Sobeys stores across Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and P.E.I.

The business know-how

The popularity of her product comes from her commitment to old-fashioned goodness, using only fine ingredients — no additives or preservatives. The success of her business, on the other hand, comes from smart, strategic management.

Beasley received her CMA designation in 1991 and has found the knowledge she gained from that a great help in growing her business. “Two years ago, time studies enabled me to look at our financial results to decide whether we were within market standards for our business and see how we could improve on timing,” she explains. “Now, market standards create milestones for everything done in the business during the day. For instance, I found out that we were under pricing some products and had to be more efficient in certain areas. Now, we can produce more with less labour than we could two years ago. For this, and other reasons, the CMA designation was instrumental in the fact that we’re still around today.”

Since the spring of 2002, when Beasley finalized the company’s distribution deal with Sobeys in Atlantic Canada, the business has changed. It went from a direct merchandising operation, which meant constantly pounding the pavement across the province to get any recognition, to a business with solid representation in a major grocery chain. Beasley sees this as a leap towards much broader horizons.

“One of my biggest challenges now is with Sobeys,” she says. “My vision isn’t small, and I want them to take a risk with me. Now that we’ve made the leap to warehousing with them in Atlantic Canada, it isn’t a big leap to say that we can be warehousing in Quebec, Ontario and the U.S.”

She is also trying to develop relationships with two other distributors in Canada, Atlantic Wholesalers (Loblaws) and Atlantic Co-op. As part of the effort to move beyond the coast, Beasley keeps busy developing new packaging for specialty cookies and determining different price points for the northeastern U.S. and the rest of Canada. “The specialty products for the U.S. market is where I can best spend my efforts right now,” she says. “That’s the best potential market south of the border. I’m putting most of my efforts into developing new opportunities like this.”

The bakery and beyond

Her business savvy has won her recognition beyond cookie lovers as well. In 2000, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada singled the company out for its vision and business plan. But she says there’s no secret to how she runs her business. “I just prepare a business plan every year and make it realistic.”

Despite the hectic pace of running Mrs. Beasley’s Cookies, Sharon Beasley still manages to find time for her daughter and her community. She’s the chair of her daughter’s school advisory program, and president of her local business association. “Our community has a lot of long-standing families, a real community, but we do have some economically depressed areas,” she says. “We are trying to get commission status for business development in the area and have brought Open for Business to the community, which delivers resources to young entrepreneurs.”

Beyond that, she is an executive in the Canadian Food Services Executives Association (CFSEA), and is in charge of sponsorship for the association’s national conference, to be held in Halifax in June.

Beasley also presents talks for the Centre for Women in Business at Mount Saint Vincent University, and guest lectures to students in financial courses in the human ecology department — essentially a business course for dietitians.

While Mrs. Beasley’s Cookies has proven a great success thus far, Sharon Beasley understands the potential pitfalls of building a business. “There are two things that result in business failures: limitations in the mind of the entrepreneur, and failing to recognize personal weaknesses.

“I think people often limit themselves before they even start a business because they believe that there are limits to what they can achieve. What a budding entrepreneur has to realize is that, yes, we all have our weaknesses, but we can get beyond those.

“Not recognizing one’s weaknesses is dangerous. If you don’t recognize your weaknesses, you could wind up giving away part of your business. For instance, marketing is my weakness — I never profess to be great at it, but I control how the marketing is done. In many cases, entrepreneurs can lose control of their financial situation because they don’t recognize where they need help.”

Sharon Beasley is certainly firmly in control of her business. And so far all that homemade goodness has resulted in sweet success.   

Robert Colman (rcolman@managmentmag.com) is the editor-in-chief of CMA Management magazine.

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