Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Bobbie Adam Denise Brown. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Bobbie Adam, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Almost all entrepreneurs have had to decide whether to start now or later? There are always pros and cons for waiting and so we’d love to hear what you think about your decision in retrospect. If you could go back in time, would you have started your business sooner, later or at the exact time you started?

We would definitely of started our business sooner than we did, although the timing was very perfect. Before we started Lakeside Sweets we worked together at a factory local to Kalamazoo. We then got laid off during later in the pandemic. After we found it hard to find a job to fit us we decided to try some different hobbies and ended up doing Hot Cocoa Bombs which got us our first customers. We then got the best of both worlds by working from home for the most part and working together.

Bobbie Adam, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

We started our business after trying our hand at Hot Cocoa Bombs after seeing many videos about them. After posting it on Facebook and getting a lot of interest we got our very first customers. Soon after that we begun trying different desserts such as Cake Pops, Cakes, Decorated Sugar Cookies, and more. We started by doing all custom small orders for gifts and small parties and have expanded over the past year to larger events such as weddings and large business meetings. We slowly earned a customer based in Kalamazoo, Michigan and the surrounding areas. We opened many doors for ourselves when we began offering more variety of desserts and delivery all over the state of Michigan. Certain holidays and events cause us to work completely around the clock. Some days we have worked from 2am-10pm. In the moment it seems like a very difficult task but at the end it is all worth once we get compliments from all of our customers and great feedback on our Facebook page after posting photos and videos. We still sit down every month or so to try to plan ways to expand our small business.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

Our most effective strategy for building our clientele has definitely been marketing! We had spent a lot of money out of pocket to go to events locally(knowing we wouldn’t sell much) just to get our name out there. It was always very important to also always ensure our customers were happy with the products they received so they would tell more family and friends about our business and return to us for business. We also used social media as our main marketing technique.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

In the beginning of starting our business we had to use all out of pocket money from each other. After selling products for the first 6 months or so we used all of our profit in order to make our other existing orders or to try out something new. Thankfully we had money saved previously and had partners to help fund our business.

Contact Info:

• Facebook: Lakeside Sweets

Image Credits
DaniLyn Photography