We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Claudia Cash. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Claudia below.
Hi Claudia, thanks for joining us today. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your business sooner or later
It’s really hard to say I wished I would have started earlier, because I’m a firm believer that all roads I’ve taken have led me to the business I’m in right now, and I wouldn’t change that! While it’s been an extremely long, difficult journey to own the business I do now, every experience, every hardship, failure, and previous job experience has value. BUT… yes, there’s a but to this! I wish I would have realized much earlier that I am fully capable of owning a business. Let’s back up, shall we?
In 2013, I started working part-time for a food blogger (now my current business partner) as her social media assistant. This was before the days where this was even a thing. It was before there were reels and algorithms and strategies. You simply posted a photo with a caption, and growth happened organically. I loved this job because I was able to stay at home with my three little kids while helping to bring in some money. Over time, I took on more clients, helped plan and run a small food blogging conference, and it was at this conference I met a friend who hired me to work for her website as its Community Manager. This was an incredible opportunity as this was someone who ran one of the biggest food blogs in the world, I later found out she had just sold it, so I started working with a small team. I had never previously considered having a career in social media marketing, but this opportunity came about, and I couldn’t turn it down.
I worked for this website for 4 incredible years and learned so much from my co-workers. I not only ran their social media, but I started to develop recipes of my own for this website, became one of their contributors, and planned a couple company retreats. I was on a really good career path, but Covid happened and suddenly I was working for this website, had a few other social media clients on the side, and had to work around 5 kids being at home with my youngest being 3 year old twins. I was feeling extremely burned out and needed to make a choice as to whether I continued with this large website, or keep my small clients and focus on my family and getting them through whatever the world was throwing at us.
In 2021 I decided to keep the small clients and focus on my family. It was an extremely difficult decision, and I knew it didn’t make sense, but it’s the path I felt was best for us. Since I was a contractor with these other clients, I was at the mercy of them employing me, and I had lost a couple of clients due to the instability of everything going on in the world. This was devastating and I questioned my decision to not stay with the larger website. By the end of 2021, something had shifted inside me and I knew I no longer wanted to work for anyone else. I wanted to be my own boss grow my own company. and make my own decisions. So, I started a small subscription business that shared my love of essential oils. In 2022, it fell apart due to various circumstances, and I was in a dark place mentally. Not only did this little business fail, but I had challenging family circumstances that seriously made me question what we were doing in life. Through a lot of prayer, worry, and heartache, my husband and I made the decision for him to find a new job, which resulted in us moving states.
Through a crazy turn of events, my friend who had helped to launch my social media career, decided to move states with us. We sat down and had a frank discussion on what it would look like for our 2 families to move, and we agreed that we would search for homes next to each other and build a business together. So, we both put our homes on the market and while we were unsure of what business we wanted to do, we started an Instagram account sharing home hacks. Our goal was to grown this account and gain followers so that whenever we did find the right business, we’d already have some sort of social media presence. Over the course of 2 years, moving our families states, building our homes, and everything in between, we gained over 160k followers between our IG and FB accounts. It was wild! We just shared whatever we could, and built a loyal following. We considered going down the influencer route, but something was drawing us in to owning a brick and mortar store. We took lots of little detours on the way including starting a fine art print shop, a t-shirt shop, and a home decor shop, all while sharing our home hacks on social media, and in the fall of 2024, things started to fall into place for where we are today.
I was shopping with a friend for a school fundraiser, and she asked me about what I do for work, and I mentioned wanting to own a store. Well, she happened to know one that was for sale! I told my business partner about it that night, and she emailed the store owner, and soon we started down the path of purchasing The Queen Bee Giftery. After 4 months of negotiations, bank rejections, and other issues, we finally closed on our shop. After 4 long years, my dream of owning a small business had arrived.
We have owned the shop for a little over a month, but we hit the ground running with all of our ideas to expand and grow this business. While getting to this point hasn’t been easy, I know this is just the beginning of something incredible. Do I wish that it had happened sooner? In some ways, yes. But the lessons I’ve learned about trusting in God’s timing, not taking no for an answer, and thinking outside the box are ones I wouldn’t trade for anything in the world. I am using every skill I’ve learned over the past 12 years of being on social media to grow this business, and no experience of failure or heartache is wasted.
Claudia, 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?
Well, I answered a lot of that in the previous question. :) But here’s a little bit about The Queen Bee Giftery!
The Queen Bee is a small brick and mortar store located on Ogden’s Historic Main Street. We are an independent book shop/nostalgic gift shop/artisan chocolate shop. We source unique items for our store and are best known for our selection of locally made chocolate bon bons! We order incredible bon bons from local chocolatiers and they’re our #1 seller. We are also the last stop on a local food tour and are happy to share our artisan chocolate with those on the tour!
Ogden is truly a hidden gem with an extremely supportive community, and our shop is proud to be a part of it. My business partner and I looked for over 2 years for a business that would foster a sense of community while providing local goods. When we heard about The Queen Bee, we jumped at the chance to be a part of its history, and to also share its goodness with those across the nation! We plan to expand to an ecommerce store so others can know just how special Ogden is when we ship them locally made goods.
How’d you meet your business partner?
Not everyone goes into business with one of their best friends, and some may think we’re crazy for going into business together, but we love working together!
I mentioned that I had worked for my business partner before on her other business. I managed her social media for over 10 years, so we have a long working history together, but let’s back up to when we actually met.
We met at church and became fast friends. She was pregnant with her second child at the time and had just moved to the area. She had a daughter that was the same age as my daughter, and I mentioned to her that if she needed a place to for her daughter to go while she was in labor, I’d be happy to help out. A couple months later, she took me up on that offer, and we often joke that was the official start of our friendship.
About a year after that, she mentioned she wanted help with her social media so she could run other aspects of her business, and I mentioned I was looking for some part-time work, and so she hired me out as a contractor. Over the next 10 years, we would welcome more kids into both our homes, deal with our husbands career changes, and she even moved across the country, so our friendship literally spanned the United States. Eventually she moved back to Oregon during Covid, and she worked while her husband stayed home to homeschool their kids. I was homeschooling my kids at the time, and we would often coordinate lessons. We decided to take a 2 week “homeschooling field trip” to Hawaii, and that’s where our love of business truly blossomed, and we knew we wanted to go into business together.
We’ve come up with over a dozen business ideas, but we always came back to owning a brick and mortar store. It truly is our passion, and we have often said to each other we can’ t believe that owning The Queen Bee Giftery is what we get to do every day!
Let’s move on to buying businesses – can you talk to us about your experience with business acquisitions?
This was the first business Lauren and I have ever purchased. She started and ran a successful business, and I’ve had a few small business ventures, but we’ve never outright purchased anything. We have a lot to learn, and nothing really ever comes easy, but you quickly learn as an entrepreneur that you don’t take no for an answer!
When we first thought of buying The Queen Bee, we weren’t sure how to even go about funding it. After we had met with the previous owner and knew it was something we wanted to pursue, we met with a free adviser at the local college who helped us get started on our path. He recommended we reach out to our local credit union and see what loans they had to offer. We reached out to them, and they recommended another bank. We contacted the bank, sent over the info they needed, and were quickly turned down.
After the bank turned us down, we pursued another avenue of getting funds, and that quickly turned into a disaster, and we decided not to continue down that road. My husband was talking to his co-worker about this roller coaster of a journey with getting funding, and his co-worker suggested we go to a local bank he had worked with. We reached out, met with the branch manager, and she was more than happy to work with us on securing an SBA loan.
The process was pretty smooth because our loan is so small, but it didn’t come without some surprises! We had to negotiate with the owner the price of the business, and what assets we wanted included with the sale of the business. This took some back and forth negotiations, but we finally settled on something we thought was fair for everyone. Things were going smoothly until the week of closing, and we learned that we had to do a bunch of health inspections because we sell chocolate in our store. We needed the state’s Department of Agriculture to come out and inspect our property, and they were extremely hard to reach. Through some short miracle (and extreme persistence on our part), we finally got ahold of our caseworker at the state, and she was able to come up and meet with us for an hour to approve our store. It was a Friday afternoon, and we were set to close on Monday! Shortly after she signed off, we zipped over to the city building to apply for our business license. The lady we had been working with wasn’t in the office, so some other nice human jumped right in to help us. Around 4:30 pm on that Friday, we had everything we needed to close.
Monday morning came, and we drove to the bank to sign all the documents. While we were signing, we made the realization that we couldn’t use the previous owner’s POS system, and we had nothing in place to be able to continue business the next day… which would have been our first day of owning the shop. We naively thought that we would be able to change the EIN and banking information in the system, and it would be an easy switch. Nope. So, we finished signing on the loan, and weren’t actually sure that we’d take over ownership that day, or if we needed to wait a couple of days due to the dates that were filled in on our paperwork.
We went to lunch to digest everything that was happening, and the previous owner called us and said to come on down, and she’d be ready to give us the keys. We were stunned because we thought it would be another couple of days! We went down to the shop, and she gave us the keys to the shop, and we were officially the new owners! We promptly called our POS system provider and rushed to get our own account set up. While working on that and trying to digest that we actually owned the shop, we had a book event to attend that very night. We had no clue what that meant, so we showed up to the book event where the previous owner gave us a quick rundown as to how these things go, and then that night we got to work importing the store’s inventory into our new system so we could be open for business the next day. It was a late night, but somehow we got everything up and running and were able to make sales under the new system!
This was not at all how I expected things to go, but being flexible and able to pivot on a moment’s notice is what entrepreneurs do best!
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @queenbeegiftery
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheQueenBeeGiftery
Image Credits
Headshot Image: Mallory Lynne Photography
All other images: Claudia Cash