Scroll
Cookie Confidant Blog
Featured
Hundreds of customers all over Houston, Texas are getting to experience the joy of our Cookie Confidant cookies. Here is another satisified Cookie Confidant customer, and we want to welcome you to the Cookie Confidant family. Click on the title of this blog post to watch the video.
You can get our decadent treats locally In Houston, Texas through our cookie delivery service. We also ship our cookies all over the United States through our shipped cookies service.
Talk to our customers, and read the cookie testimonials, and you will see that we absolutely have hands down the best cookies in Houston.
Valentine’s Day is fast approaching, and we are hard at work in the kitchen preparing new Valentine’s day artisan treats for our customers. The creativity never stops, and we are always thinking of more ways to keep you happy. You can you watch to see our decadent Stawberry Marshmallow Bombs for Valentines Day by clicking on the title of this blog post..
You can get our decadent treats locally In Houston, Texas through our cookie delivery service. We also ship our cookies all over the United States through our shipped cookies service.
Talk to our customers, and read the cookie testimonials, and you will see that we absolutely have hands down the best cookies in Houston.
Watch one of our customers break into the the Deluxe Chocolate Chip Pecan cookies for the first time by clicking on the title of this blog post. The Deluxe Chocolate Chip Pecan are our number 1 selling cookies, and they remained the most in demand and favorite among our Confidants. 🍪🍪🍪🍪
As a small business owner there are many things I have learned along the way about how to grow and scale. First and foremost, you have to recognize that you cannot do it all. If you try to scale a business by yourself, and you are stuck in the day-to-day operations side you will have little time to execute the creative thinking needed to grow, market, and scale your small business.
I have had the opportunity to surround myself with other entrepreneurs in Houston who have given me guidance and lessons learned needed to grow a small business. One of things I have learned is as your business begins to grow so do you. Your mindset will change with regard to how you interact with customers, how you interact with supply chain wholesalers, how you create, sell, and ship your products, and implement new technology for business automation. You begin to realize your small business is not just a local store or website that customers purchase your products from. They are literally buying you - your creativity and hard work, your experience, your trust, and your historical business legacy to get them the product in their hand they enjoy so much. Making this visible to your customers is how you create a memorable experience for them and gain customer loyalty and appreciation. Never forget you are the brand of your product, and when your customers buy your products they are buying you.
I met one technical entrepreneur over three years ago who built our first website for free. I was impressed but also wondered why he would do that? He said that the idea of the ‘Cookie Confidant’ was a great idea, and he could see how it could scale into something much larger when it was still a hobby interest of mine. The entrepreneur said that idea of the ‘Cookie Confidant’ garners mystery and memorability. I did not understand fully what he meant at the time. He said it means that customer loyalty is best preserved when your business stands for a concrete idea that customers can grasp onto. In a sense this means after we experience the products of the Cookie Confidant we become a Confidant ourselves, and we can revel with other Confidants in our own cookie experiences. This is memorable!
As a technical entrepreneur he went out of his way to further help me scale the online presence of the Cookie Confidant and implement Search Engine Optimization (SEO) so more domestic customers could find the Cookie Confidant website. He overhauled the website to make the customer experience and checkout more intuitive for local delivery and shipping customers. He helped with product and logo re-branding to reach a larger customer base. He gave all of his services for free for two reasons. First, he appreciated the grit and grind I have been through the last three years to perfect our cookie recipes, and grow our local delivery customer base one person at a time through face-to-face deliveries and communication. This showed him I am a person who never gave up even when the times got hard. Second he had another entrepreneur who did it for him seven years ago when he started his online Water and Natural Products Business, and this was his way to give back the same experience.
This technical entrepreneur who helped the Cookie Confidant scale is an emotional intelligence and business process management expert. As an entrepreneur he said he has to understand and research how technology, visual layouts, colors, text, and content affect people’s behaviors, emotions, and buying patterns. I am not an expert in this field, and I had to go find the skillset or strength I did not have. I have learned businesses that grow and scale quickly typically have a technical expert who understand the cross pollination of technology and psychology. It has been very interesting to be mentored on the topic, and also see how the implementation of it has increased Cookie Confidant sales 50% year over year (YOY) in the first month of January 2021.
Takeaway and lessons learned from this blog:
1. Don’t spend time trying to turn your weaknesses into strengths. There will always be someone who has your weakness as their strength. Finding experts to supplement your weaknesses will make you that much more effective at scaling your business faster. When you find someone who complements you form a long lasting business relationship with them so you can leverage them for other future opportunities.
2. Realize you cannot accomplish everything yourself to scale your business if you are also handling the all day-to-day sales and operations. Take time to write up a business plan and project what your future resourcing requirements are if your business happened to scale faster than you anticipated. You will find when you write up what if scenarios some of them will come true.
3. When you work hard and give yourself or your services to others eventually someone will do the same for you unexpectedly. If this happens to you just show you appreciation for what is happening and learn as much as you can.
4. Ideas, hobbies, and interests that you want to scale into a small business are best sold to customers when they are delivered in a memorable and shareable experience with your customers. The outcome of this is customer loyalty, appreciation, and satisfaction.
After moving to Houston, TX I was introduced to Tiff Treats and Tinys Milk & Cookies businesses. They also have very delicious cookies. Tiff Treat’s even delivers their customers decadent warm cookies which everyone in Houston loves. Houston is truly an amazing city for businesses to thrive and after whitnessing how amazing business like Tiff Treats are doing it let us know that it was possible for the Cookie Confidant to do it too.
I am so happy I leveled up when it came to knowing what quality I wanted to deliver to my customers. Everyone has to start somewhere but I’m glad I knew there was something more I wanted to achieve by believing Cookie Confidant cookies could always be better. I lost my job right before the current pandemic took place, and I am honestly grateful to be able to put my ALL into Cookie Confidant. Thank you all for your support both near and far 💌😊!! I am so appreciative for each and every one of you.
I would like to say that being in Houston, TX over the years has definitely been a life-changing experience for me. I am from Albany, NY originally, and I have never seen a place with so much passion and opportunity for entrepreneurship. Houston has a very diverse culture, and its a great place to meet the most genuine, supportive, caring, giving, and honest people. I moved here, started a small hobby cookie baking business at the time, and sometimes I sit back and say “what have I done?” 😂. Early on I had dreams of it growing into a successful business but with a full time job it was hard to be all in and committed. You might be saying to yourself that you can also relate. Having a success business requires laser focussed creativity and innovative thinking. Creating a service or a product through a hobby you enjoy is sometimes the best way to begin to achieve your dreams and goals, and starting small is the easiest way to success. Multi-million dollar businesses happen everyday, but even those most likely started with a small idea.
I really love the City of Houston, and if you cannot make it here you cannot make it anywhere. I have met so many interesting people with different perspectives, and formed many long-lasting relationships with great people. The food is amazing and better than New York. They can keep that Pizza and Chinese food. 😂 If you ever get the opportunity to visit or move to Texas I highly recommend it.
Being a small business owner you have to be very careful in how you invest in your business marketing when you go online. We market our business currently through a few of our favorite channels - Facebook, Instagram, Nextdoor, and we always see an impact immediately when we create targeted marketing campaigns for our own posts. When you work directly with promoters who own Facebook pages with huge followings you want to make sure they got their followers organically.
We had been inactive on the Cookie Confidant Instagram page for a few days trying managing many local delivery orders. We decided to give another promoter a chance to grow our business. Their premium was much higher than we would normally paid for marketing and advertising. We thought the promoter’s different demographic could introduce our business to a more diverse audience and get us more likes and followers on Facebook and Instagram. After having our marketing post on the promoter’s page for over an hour, we received no new followers, likes, or comments on our marketing post which we paid a lot of money for up front.
We paid for these services through PayPal, and we requested for a full refund from the promoter. The woman who runs the promoter’s page removed my post + story but said “we could not get a refund because her boss already left with the money.” 😂 She said that “we can put a hold the money through PayPal” which isn’t true. We told to her “thank you for acknowledging that we can get our money back!”
I am normally a great judge of character 🥴, and I felt misled. I work with the three other trustworthy promoters, and the post promotions I put on thier pages causes activity on our Cookie Confidant Facebook and Instagram pages to immediately spike.
As a small business owner when you’re working with limited capital, it’s hurtful when you come across pages online that promote an artificial reach that you can be fooled to buy into. The lesson learned here is to make sure you research the promoters you work with, and ask them for references of happy business owners whose marketing posts were successful on their pages. It also helps to look at a promoter’s page followers, likes, and comments ratio on all post. Pay attention if the promoter only gets a lot of likes on selfie photos verses the number of likes on actual promotional posts. 💡
Cookie Confidant has been making delicious cookies for nearly three years before we realized how much people really loved our cookie products. We have seen the high and the lows in perfecting our craft and quality, and we are finally at a place of pure confidence that we can deliver the world’s best cookies to you. We want to share our cookie confections with more customers locally and domestically to bring more happiness and ejoyment into this world with every bite.
We started selling our cookies in the Fresno / Missouri City / Pearland / Sugarland suburbs just outside of Houston, TX. Now we deliver throughout the entire Houston and surrounding areas. We were inspired to embark in this cookie crusade by one of our favorite cookie shops in the world, Levain Bakery in New York City. Levain Bakery has very delicious cookies, but we trust and believe the Cookie Confidant has created a cookie which rivals Levain Bakery cookies that are made from scratch and baked daily. Levain’s Oatmeal Raisin and Double Chocolate Peanut Butter cookies are heavenly, and they have huge lines at all of their locations in New York City because people simply love their cookies like us. Like Levain Bakery, we have aspirations for the Cookie Confidant business to grow and be able to serve long lines of happy customers every single day too.
Lester York JR. Born 6/5/1980 & went into eternal rest on 10/21/2022. Lester was a very integral part of starting Cookie Confidant. In fact, I was throwing different names at Lester, and he spoke “Cookie Confidant” and the rest was history. I cannot thank Lester enough for seeing my vision early on and believing in me.