Page 7 - BusinessWest December 21, 2020

Things Are Heating Up
Hot Oven Cookies Seizes Growth Opportunities During Pandemic
FBy George O’Brien
or many small-business owners, 2020 has
been a year to hunker down. To focus
on survival. To put plans for expansion on hold and devote time and energy to simply getting to next month, or even next week.
Not so for Sheila and Dan Coon, owners of Hot Oven Cookies.
For them, 2020 has been a year to take their brand to places, and
the holidays. But mostly, this has been about entrepreneurial spirit and seizing opportunities when they have come about — traits that have defined this venture from the start.
About a year or so ago, none of what has transpired since seemed likely or even possible. In fact, as Sheila recalls, the husband-and-wife team were thinking about packing it in and turning the oven off for good.
Indeed, by late 2019,
the company, then
located at 1597 Main
St. in Springfield, had
endured several months
of turmoil with its land-
lord over conditions that
had made it increasingly difficult to do business — no heat in the winter, no air conditioning in the summer, for example. By mid-November, matters had come to a head, and the company had essentially ceased activity in that location,
For Sheila Coon
and her husband, Dan, the pandemic has been
a time to expand, not retrench, and set new and ambitious goals for the future.
operating for a time out of its Cookie Cart (a food truck of sorts) until its pipes froze in the winter.
Hot Oven
Continued on page 71
“My husband and
I were thinking, ‘we should probably
close and collect unemployment, because this is going to be bad.’”
a level, it had never been before, and to foster plans to take
it further still in the years to come. It’s been a time to estab- lish themselves down- town and uptown, as they like to say (we’ll explain later), and expand not only the footprint, but also the product lines, includ- ing cookie dough by
the pint — ‘dough to go,’ as they call it.
There has been some good fortune, or seren-
dipity, if you will, along the way, and some strong evidence that cookies have become a comfort food in the midst of this global pandemic — there’s even talk of a possible cookie shortage for
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