Mary's Mountain Cookies -Belton

Oh, if you're going to come into Grammy, you've got to stop at Mary's Mountain Cookies. You're going to come in and you're going to smell fresh baked cookies daily. We opened July 1st, 2023. Were able to get our gondola concept built into Winter Park Resort, which was right at the base there, right where all the traffic comes through, which was a great next step. When considering a mountain location, you first need to understand your customer. Are they locals? Are they tourists? Is a combination of both. It's great to be in the mountains in the s The winter tends to focus more on your resort. So for us to be successful as business owners, we felt we needed to tie in and have some sort of presence at the resort to make sure we could cash flow you the year-round model. We do believe in our residential component and we wanted to make sure we hit with them, but also maximize our tourists. Fast forward to Memorial Weekend 2024. We opened our second store location, which was in Steveville Springs downtown. Once you go from one operation to two, you cannot be in more than one place at one time. This evokes a complexity that really makes a small business owner have to think about what that looks We really invested trying to find the right people to celebrate what we have and then build the decor and the smells and everything else around it. There is a lot of upfront costs in any business. You start with equipment, franchise fees that can be pretty exuberant to start finding a good spot, location and building that up. It's kind of hard when you don't have any financials to support your story. Sometimes that's the end of the road and the Colorado Enterprise Fund listen to us, listen to our story and they allowed us to take it to the next step and provide that funding. The main difference when you're considering a franchisee versus a standalone business is that instead of just looking at the borrower and their business plan, we're also looking at the franchise. Is the franchise strong? This navigation is really here to help our borrowers have a second set of eyes and someone to bounce ideas off of. My personal bay actually recommended Colorado Enterprise Fund and it was a great recommendation.