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From Farmers Wife to Successful Woman in Business

Guest post by: Angelina Musik

Article Overview: Joyce McGeehee has been a farmer's wife most of her adult life and an EMS Paramedic. Her friends and family encouraged her to start her own cookie business because she's always enjoyed baking. Angelina visited this MOMtrepreneur at her new retail shop in Littlefield, Texas, to capture her story and taste her cookie dough!!

From Farmers Wife to Successful Woman in Business

We are in Littlefield, Texas and visiting with Joyce McGeehee at Maw Country Cookies.

Joyce has been a farmer's wife most of her adult life and an EMS Paramedic. Her friends and family encouraged her to start her own cookie business because she's always enjoyed baking.

Joyce shares, "My greatest challenge was all of this process. My daughter's helped me by sending me examples of business plans. It was overwhelming and I thought 'I just can't do this'. So I sat down one night and took it page by page and the things that dealt with me I tried to answer those and if didn't I didn't. I've had a passion for baking all of these years from making Christmas candies to pies to cookies. I brought them to my fellow partners and one day they said you just need to open your own business. And that's what I've done. I've established Maws Country Cookies."

Joyce puts herself in every batch. She had friends at a coffee shop taste, rate and share changes she needed to make to the cookies.

As a quality driven baker she takes the care and the time to create a superior product for her customers from her original recipes. Her cookies are the equivalent of two cookies, like a 'man cookie', she calls it and are homemade. She decided to include fourteen cookies per batch instead of selling them by the dozen.

The kind of cookies that customers prefer most are the Snickerdoodle, Chocolate Chip, Peanut Butter Kiss, Sugar M & M's, Oatmeal Raisin and the White Macadamia Nut Cookies.

She can now take orders online where she ships out baked cookies and those that come to her shop can still buy them frozen. You can order her cookies at http://MawsCountryCookies.com

STEPS THAT JOYCE TOOK TO MOVE START HER BUSINESS
Pick a Profitable Passion:
She extended what she was already doing on a small scale, that she enjoys and that she's received positive feedback and encouragement from others on to go the next level.
 
Recruit Help:
She asked her daughters to help her. Between finding the location, putting the business plan together to get the funding for the right equipment to run an efficient business, and delegated some of the business responsibility, not much - just some, on them so she could focus on her recipes being created on a greater scale with the new equipment.
 
Get Input:
Joyce also continue to gather input from those in the community about her cookies through a taste testing process so she could also only focus on making a select few very well first and then will expand to include more at a later time.
 
Focus and Follow Through:
Joyce shares she would like to be as big as Keebler but she wants to focus on being faithful with her business as it is now first.

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Article Tags: adult life, baked cookies, chocolate chip, christmas candies, coffee shop, cookie business, country cookies, examples of business plans, fellow partners, greatest challenge, littlefield texas, macadamia nut cookies, maw, next level, oatmeal raisin, own business, peanut butter, positive feedback, share changes, white macadamia nut cookies



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