Scaling up a business is not easy. But the founders of Wicked Good Cupcakes have managed to do it pretty well, thanks to a little help from Shark Tank and a good sense of old – fashioned business.
Founders Tracey Noonan and Dani Vilagie recently spoke with Small Business Trends as part of our exclusive Smart Hustle report. During the course of the conversation, the mother-daughter team talked about scaling up their business, which happened fairly quickly, even though all major stages of growth occurred. biologically.
The case began simply because Noonan was looking for a way to spend more time with his younger daughter. So they took a cake decorating class together and started doing more at home.
Noonan said, "It was just a hobby, and family and friends started ordering from us and it was great, but suddenly we started having business customers, which was really strange.I am still not really sure how it happened. "
To listen to the full interview of Wicked Good Cupcakes, check out the SoundCloud player here:
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/377756540″ params=”color=#4c7aba&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
They finally reached a point where their home cooking would not support the volume of orders they received. So they had to decide whether they were going to reduce or really go ahead. They got a little loan from Noonan's husband and opened a new location.
From there, growth occurred fairly quickly. They had the idea of wrapping their cupcakes in Mason jars through a TV show on canning. Then a photo of one of their cupcakes confiscated by TSA became viral. And they finally landed on Shark Tank.
All this contributed to the growth of the company. But they also learned important lessons along the way. Here are some tips and advice from the founders:
How to make a company evolve
Designating Specific Roles
Especially for a family business, the fact that each team member focuses on a specific part of the business is essential for growth. For example, Noonan focuses primarily on product development, branding, and social media, while Dani manages two of the sites.
Noonan said, "The fact that we have all our strength is really important because it gives us ownership of what we do, and if we all worked on the same thing, as a family, I think, invariably, the fight would ensue. "
Stop Selling on Social Media
Social media can be a great way to market your business and your scale. But you can not hope to grow if you are constantly trying to sell on these platforms. This does not mean that you can never publish on products or sales. But you should not just post on these things at the expense of added value for your followers.
Noonan said, "Give something to your customers, give them, for us, say it's a family affair, so people are interested in what we do during our vacation What we do in our everyday life We publish really stupid cupcake puns We give people recipe tips We interview people we think are interesting We do not always make selling difficult. People know who we are, they know we sell cupcake pots "
Have a specific plan and execute
When Wicked Good Cupcakes began, it was a kind of basic cupcake shop. But as the company grew and created a more innovative product that could be shipped across the country, the team had to change its plan. No matter what type of business you lead, the important thing is to focus on one important direction and execute it properly.
Noonan says, "We've grown 600% the year after Shark Tank, so it's a little out of the ordinary, but at the end of the day, if you imagine what I'm getting to tell you and just super-size, that's how we did it.You must be able to run and you have to have very good systems in place.And to do that, we had to really identify what kind of business we were. "
Image: The good little cupcakes / Facebook