Fired From Her Own Bakery at 40, She Sold Her Next One for Millions

And tonight’s free tool - Build a Brand Without a Budget. See the “Steal This Strategy” section below for the link.

Kathleen King was forty years old when she lost everything.

She had spent two decades building Kathleen’s Bake Shop into a Long Island institution. Her cookies were the gold standard. They were sold in high-end Manhattan grocery stores.

She was the local hero who made it big.

Then she made the mistake that kills thousands of small businesses: she brought in the wrong partners to help her scale.

The partnership was a nightmare from the start.

Her new partners saddled the company with debt that they used . . . to pay themselves back. They used the company checkbook like a personal ATM. They started to run the business into the ground.

The breaking point came in the kitchen. The partners wanted to swap her premium, all-natural butter for cheap margarine to pad the margins. Kathleen refused to compromise the product.

In response, they fired Kathleen from Kathleen’s Bake Shop.

Locked Out

The new partners literally locked Kathleen out of her own bakery.

And even worse, because of the way the contracts were signed, she was legally banned from even using her own name to sell a single cookie. She was $200,000 in debt and practically homeless, living in a small apartment above the shop she no longer owned.

Imagine being a world-class baker who is legally prohibited from telling customers who you are.

Most entrepreneurs would have spent the next decade in a courtroom. They would have let the bitterness consume them. Kathleen chose a different path: She looked for a tactical loophole.

Through a brutal legal settlement, the one thing she managed to retain was the physical building in Southampton. But she still could not use her name nor could she use the branding people recognized.

Starting Over at 40

Kathleen decided to start over from scratch (in more ways than one!) at the age of 40. She renamed the shop after her father: Tate.

She did not try to win the brand war. She knew her old partners were destroying the Kathleen brand by cutting quality and she would let them fail.

Instead, from the very start, she focused on creating a business that could scale, and then be sold.

Kathleen developed a way to mass-produce a cookie that was thin, crispy, and tasted exactly like it came off a cooling rack at a farm stand. She focused on shelf stability and distribution.

She then turned that delicious recipe into a scalable, industrial system that could not be ignored, focusing on the one thing the partners could not steal: The quality of the bake.

Sales boomed.

The Yummy Result

A few years later, after being fired and left for dead, Kathleen sold Tate’s Bake Shop to Mondelez, the owners of Oreo.

The price?

A tasty $500 million.

The Takeaway

Kathleen King survived because she realized that while her partners owned her name, they did not own her smarts, her experience, her skills.

We all hit roadblocks. But they only remain roadblocks if you fail to take that detour down the new, exciting, scary, unexpected path.

That’s where the treasure is!

Are You Finally Ready?

After my recent SCORE webinar on Starting Your Own Profitable Newsletter, Diana contacted me and we are now in the process of creating and launching the newsletter she has always dreamed of. Yves also contacted me and I am now ghostwriting his Linkedin and we are launching his newsletter next week too.

If you are finally ready to launch your newsletter or make a splash on Linkedin, let’s talk. I offer both “Done-With-You” and “Done-For-You” options to help you skip the learning curve, jump to the front of the line, and immediately launch the sort of high-impact content that will get you noticed.

Book a free call with me here and let’s get to work!

Steal This Strategy

📖 Read - The 4 Steps to Building Your Brand - Inc. article

🎥 Video - How I Built This - Tate’s: Kathleen shares her amazing story!

🌐 Free Tool - Build Your Brand Without a Budget

🛠️ Free! ‘Start Your Own Profitable Newsletter’ Webinar: A free replay of my popular SCORE webinar on how to launch your own attention-grabbing newsletter.

About Steve

Steve Strauss is the author of 18 books, and Inc. columnist, and a renowned hater of ketchup. Need a ghostwriter or a newsletter for your business? Contact Steve!