Back From the Brink

How Much Can You Do When It's All Too Much?

When Shaun Breese and her husband, Brady, started Urban Cookies six years ago, people thought they were crazy.

“Maybe we were crazy,” Shaun says.

Crazier still was the long road that took Shaun and Brady to the brink of personal and professional darkness — and back again. It’s a road that’s made their marriage stronger and their business thrive. And it's a road that's a cautionary tale for any young professional entrepreneur.

Urban Cookies from the Start

“From the very beginning, we knew we had to be unique and have a product that spoke for itself,” Shaun says. And not only were they confident in their product and their brand, but the Urban Cookies owners thought they had all the elements of a successful business: Shaun had a marketing background, Brady had finance experience and was a natural chef, and Shaun’s mom had the know-how to manage IT and finance.

But it wasn’t enough. After three years in business, Urban Cookies still wasn’t profitable.

“People think they’re going to start a business doing something they love, and the people and the money will come,” Shaun says. “For a lot of people it doesn’t happen that way. And it didn’t for us.”

The Turning Point

“2009 was literally the best and worst year of our lives,” Shaun recalls. “On one hand, our business was severely bleeding. But on the other hand, we were having our first child (a son, Oliver)."

While relishing parenthood, the couple was dealing with the strain their business partnership was putting on their life partnership. "We were with each other all day long and all night long," Shaun says. "There was never new conversation. It started to feel unhealthy," and eventually led to the decision that Brady would transition out of the day-to-day operations of the bakery.

As the recession deepened, Urban Cookies' financial outlook darkened. Personal and professional disaster loomed. "Our 401(k) was nearly down to zero and we had a child now," Shaun remembers. "We were looking at ourselves and asking, 'Where are we going to go live?'"

After deciding they had 90 days to either make it work or go out of business, the Breeses went full-bore into survival mode. They applied (for a second time) to APS’ AAAME Business Mentorship Program for small businesses. They then created a new line of business: cupcakes. They muddled through the latter half of 2009, and were accepted to AAAME, which empowered the Breeses to transform their business.

“We are a completely different company than we were two years ago,” Shaun says. “AAAME was a massive turning point for us. We’ve been able to realize everything we’ve always wanted.”

The program helped them see what they wanted and to learn how their business could support their goals. One of those goals was to maintain their strong marriage.

“We never could have done this together had we not had a strong marriage before,” she says. “We always made the decision we’d have a marriage before a business.”

Urban Cookies Today

Today, Brady manages creative development (and recently won Food Network’s Cupcake Wars) while Shaun heads up the day-to-day business of the bakery. In that role, she says she has a better understanding of her business than ever before.

“You literally have to understand how the numbers move around so that at the end of the day, there’s a positive number,” she says. “People make a big mistake in not understanding their financials well enough.”

Urban Cookies also continued to expand its lines of business. In addition to the retail store, Urban Cookies has an active e-commerce site as well as corporate gifts. Most recently, the bakery added a wholesale line of business — you can buy their products at Whole Foods, Press Coffee, seven East Valley Serrano’s locations and Luci’s Healthy Marketplace.

“We’re so much wiser now,” Shaun says. “We know how to make money and how to capitalize on opportunities to grow our business.”

And while it’s been a long — and sometimes dark — road, Shaun is grateful for the decisions she and Brady made.

“Now I feel like when we tell our son about our lives, we can say we were successful,” she says. “Even though it was a dark period, we got up, dusted ourselves off and moved on.”


Get Connected
Urban Cookies and OllieCake
www.urbancookies.com

This story, written by Stephanie Conner, is part of the Chamber's monthly Valley Young Professionals email newsletter. To sign up for any or all of the Chamber's email communications, click here.