Martha Wolf and Susan Welch-Saunders both had a passion for cooking and entertaining. Investing $100 each, along with three other friends, the quintet started baking and selling goods on a sheet-covered ping pong table in Sue’s basement in January 1992. Friends and family visited the home-based bakery and sales grew slowly as word spread about the availability of delicious, homemade sweet treats. A small neighborhood grocery store soon gave the women shelf space to sell their baked goods on a commission basis. Three more retail outlets followed suit, and before long the women were unable to keep up with the demand and found themselves having to bake into the wee hours of the morning. “It truly was a crazy way to make a few bucks,” says Martha. Three years into the business, the women had found a niche market, creating homemade, quality baked goods. The bakery business was also outgrowing Sue’s basement, and the health department regulations had changed, disallowing the sale of baked goods from a home-based kitchen. Three of the original quintet decided to call it quits; Martha and Sue decided to expand the business into a downtown location. After finding an ideal location in a historical building in downtown Fort Madison, the pair decided to go into the restaurant business. 
 
The first problem Martha and Sue faced was figuring out what type of restaurant they should open. The pair decided to visit various cafés and bakeries in Iowa, Mississippi, Colorado, and California to do research. They took note of what people ordered, how much they were willing to spend for lunch, menu offerings, service area efficiency, and customer ease of ordering. They found that the majority of people wanted fresh choices. The pair visualized a café/bakery in a historical building serving fresh food and baked goods.

In order to obtain financing, the pair needed to write a business plan. Martha and Sue went to Deb Dalziel, Regional Director of the Small Business Development Center (SBDC) at Southeastern Community College in Burlington, to get direction on writing their plan, or as Sue and Martha call it, “an attempt to predict the future”. On November 5, 1995, The Ivy Bake Shoppe opened its doors in Fort Madison to throngs of people expecting good food in a warm and friendly atmosphere. The business was very successful and was acknowledged as such as the inaugural winner of the Deb Dalziel Woman Entrepreneur Achievement Award in 1999. The award is given by the Iowa SBDC in memory of Deb Dalziel to successful women entrepreneurs who have not only overcome personal challenges in starting and maintaining a successful business, but who have striven to significantly change and improve the lives of others around them.

Sue and Martha were still delivering the same exceptional service and quality food fourteen years later when they were offered an opportunity to open a second store in Burlington at Shottenkirk Ford/Mercury. Martha had taken the FastTrac training courses offered by the Small Business Development Center, but still was not comfortable with working with the company’s “numbers”. The pair came back to the Southeastern SBDC, where current Regional Director Janine Clover helped them put together projections to see if the expansion was feasible. The projections were favorable so Martha and Sue decided to expand.

Martha and Sue have utilized the Southeastern SBDC since 1995, working with all three regional directors of the Southeastern center on their business plan, financial projections, pricing options, marketing the business, figuring gross margins on food items, expansion, and packaging products to sell retail. Martha has taken the FastTrac Growth Venture class offered through the SBDC, as well as other SBDC workshops and classes. These classes offered networking with other entrepreneurs, helped clarify business plans, taught how to read numbers, assisted in establishing a marketing plan, stressed the importance in establishing an exit strategy, and overall taught a great grasp of “running the business, instead of the business running you!” Martha praises the assistance they received from the SBDC saying, “The Southeastern SBDC offered us skilled personnel who could project numbers and helped us determine if our move [to Burlington] was viable.”

Martha Wolf and Susan Welch-Saunders continue to manage both Ivy Bake Shoppe locations; Sue in Fort Madison, and Martha in Burlington. The business employs 24 part-time employees and has been a featured story in many publications, including an article in Time Magazine in 2000, and one in the Chicago Tribune in 2004. The pair has also authored and published a cookbook featuring their beloved recipes and business story. You can visit their web site at www.ivybakeshoppe.com, but you’ll only truly understand their success story by stopping at one of their restaurants and sampling their exceptional sweet treats.