One Cookie at a Time

In the beginning, the more people tried to convince Debbi that a cookie business would never work, the more determined she became. After all, these same people had been eating her cookies for years! Even her then-husband, Randy, didn’t think she could do it. Still, he gave Debbi his support, and together they were rejected by numerous banks before finally getting a loan to open a store.

By noon on her first day of business—August 16, 1977—at Debbi’s Chocolate Chippery in Palo Alto, California, it was beginning to look like all the naysayers were right. Debbi had not sold one cookie! So she went out on the street and started giving her cookies away, and soon people were coming in to buy them.

“Randy had made a bet that I couldn’t make $50 in sales that first day, but I did,” Debbi is quoted as saying. (Marilyn Sadler, “Baking a Name for Herself,” Memphis Magazine, June 1999.) “What emerged from that was setting goals in increments. If goals are within reach, they don’t look so daunting.”

She took that basic lesson and developed a management process around it. Basically, she took large tasks and began to break them down into bite-sized pieces (another pun intended). “It’s all tied to a very simple principle that’s called ‘hour-by-hour management,’” she says, “and today colleges use it as a case study in business efficiency.”

Today, Mrs. Fields has grown into a 1,600-location franchise empire. Something has got to be different to get this many people to go into a store to buy cookies. If there were ever a basic commodity, cookies have to be it. After all, how many ways can a cookie be made? Every mom I have ever known has had a “secret” recipe for the best cookie ever made. What I found was that Debbi Fields had a secret recipe (she’ll reveal it later on in this chapter), and it did make the difference.