Today we’d like to introduce you to Mike Maddux.
Hi Mike, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I guess I was born an entrepreneur. At an early age, I was looking for ways to make money. Around the age of 10, I set up a haunted forest in the woods in our backyard and charged the neighborhood kids 10¢ to go through it. Then I had the proverbial lemonade/kool-aid stand that seems to be a pre-requisite & entrepreneur 101 for beginners. Then that spilled over into vegetable stands selling excess vegetables from my parent’s and grandparents’ gardens.
I moved up from there to shooting down mistletoe around Christmas time and selling it door to door in the neighborhood. I finally graduated up to mowing lawns, cleaning up lake debris in the yards of the rich people living on the lake, and shoveling snow, plus a lot of other odd-n-end endeavors. After graduating college with a degree in communications, I entered the life of corporate America as a sales representative for a Fortune 500 company. While the company I worked for was fantastic, and I had success with them, I still longed to own my own business and control my own destiny.
After 3 years with the Fortune 500 company, I made the decision to take the leap into business ownership, with my new bride’s permission of course. I started a pizza delivery company (The Pizza Doctor) after hearing about a college acquaintance that had done the same and was killing it. The business was only modestly successful due to intense competition, limited capital, and my inexperience. I voluntarily closed the business after 3 years when my lease expired, owing no one a penny, but I was basically broke except for the pittance of money I got from selling off the used restaurant equipment from the store.
My next endeavor was a direct mail advertising business. I was able to scratch out a living selling direct mail advertising for almost 20 years. During this time our children were born. That put us in need of an outdoor swing set. We had a bad experience with a cheap box store swing set and were in need of another one. We came across some high-quality swing sets in another city that no one was offering in Knoxville where we lived. After purchasing ours in another city and having it installed in our yard in Knoxville, we started getting lots of inquiries from friends, family, and passers-by about where we had gotten our swing set.
A light bulb went off, and another business was born (FunMakers). We have expanded and grown FunMakers into a very solid business and are currently in our 22nd year of operations. FunMakers led us into another outdoor business, pet containment (Rocky Top Dog Fence). I guess pets and kids just go hand in hand and it was a natural fit with our outdoor playground equipment business. We have now been operating Rocky Top Dog Fence for 19 years. Finally, my most recent entrepreneurial endeavor was launched 7 years ago with Moonshine Mountain Cookies.
This company kind of takes me full circle back to the pizza company because the original chocolate chip cookie that we sell today was created as a dessert for the pizza company. People loved our cookies so much that I thought if I ever foraged back into the food business someday I would do it with a cookie company instead of pizza. My old college roommate and dear friend (Rick Dunlap) called me one day and said that he was going to leave corporate America and needed something to do. He wanted us to consider opening up that cookie company that I had mentioned years ago. After running the idea past my wife, who, to my surprise, was receptive to the idea, we decided to make that leap together into the cookie business.
We knew that people loved our cookies, but we also knew that the cookie business was a crowded field and that we needed something to get people’s attention. At the time, moonshine had just been legalized and it was a trending topic. Plus, being from TN, all of us had some moonshining in our heritage. So, as an attention grabber, we set out on a journey to add moonshine to our cookies. The intention was never to make an adulterated product, but rather to get people’s attention. As most bakers know, alcohol burns off during the baking process, so our cookies are perfectly safe for children and anyone who may be concerned about the effects of alcohol from the consumption of our cookies.
We like to say that we use just enough TN Moonshine to add a splash of flavor, but not enough to upset the preacher. Our cookies are genuinely unique and delicious with a very distinctive hump in the middle (mountain). Crisp on the edges and soft & chewy in the center. We offer a variety of flavors and have witty names for each. We allow our social media followers to help us name each new flavor that we come out with.
Our cookies have been awarded “Best Cookie” in the state multiple times and are available in our 2 retail stores in Knoxville, TN. We also offer our cookies to the entire country with our online ordering and shipping. Corporate gifting is also an important part of our business model, with many large and small businesses choosing to send our cookies as gifts to their clients.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Opening a business is hardly ever a smooth road, no matter what business category you may be in. Start-up capital is typically one of the most challenging struggles. I “boot-strapped” my way into my start-ups by using whatever little money I had stashed away, by paying Visa with MasterCard (balance transfers), stayed away from capital intensive businesses, and learned to keep overhead to a bare minimum initially.
Another struggle was not always knowing who or where to turn to for solid business advice. No one knows it all, but a lot of us think we do. Entrepreneurship quickly humbles you and exposes your shortcomings rather quickly. While sales, marketing, creative thinking, work ethic, and passion were all within my wheelhouse, I struggled with all of the administrative things involved in supporting the operations of a business. Especially with all of the tax, licensing & insurance requirements.
Additionally, staffing is another primary struggle for entrepreneurs whose businesses require employees.
Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
By definition, entrepreneurs are one’s who are willing to assume the risk of doing business. While I don’t consider myself a big risk-taker, I certainly understand that starting a business is definitely risky.
The risk I took was leaving a successful position with a Fortune 500 company, newly married, at the young age of 28, and opening up a business in an extremely crowded field with little experience in that industry. When you don’t have anything to lose, the risks are minimized. When you have everything to lose, the risks are amplified.
Most of us consider risks to be financial, which they certainly can be, but risks can also be social, legal, or spiritual. I’m typically a “measure twice, cut once” kind of thinker. I proceed cautiously, but once the whistle blows, then I’m all in.
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