A recipe for success - Cookie Time

I started Cookie Time at 21, but my story starts earlier, says Michael Mayell. We talked about money around the dining table growing up, so by the time I was 18, I had decided I wanted to own a business. Over the next couple of years, I wrote this goal down – that I wanted to be a millionaire by the time I was 30.

I did a basic business course at Christchurch Polytechnic. Then I got a job that took me to America, to promote skiing in New Zealand. I stayed with a small business owner called Diana Corbett. She was very encouraging of me starting my own business. She took me to a retail chain store that was doing well, Mrs Field’s Hot Cookies, and said, “Maybe this is something you could do.”

By the end of those six months, the job was over, and I was back in New Zealand with no job and $10,000 in the bank. I was 20 or 21-years-old and it was as good a time as any to start the business I had said I was going to start.

On this page: How Cookie Time began The value of a mentor A dynamic partnership The value of time out of the office

How Cookie Time began

I went to a couple of bakers and asked them to bake me a chocolate chip cookie. They all baked me this very, very average cookie. So I rang Diana and she sent me the North American housewife cookie recipe – the ‘Tollhouse cookie recipe’ that comes on the back of every Nestle chocolate morsels pack.

These chocolate chips were nothing like what we had in New Zealand. I knew I had to have big chunks of chocolate. One thing led to another and I finally got Cadbury’s dark chocolate and unwrapped 250g of it. I put this on a bacon slicer and found I could chop six or eight bars at a time into chunks.

So I baked these cookies myself from the Tollhouse recipe, gave them to everybody, and they thought they were delicious. I thought, “I’ll try to find a bakery, to bake my cookies at night when they’re not using their equipment.” So I got the Yellow Pages out and started knocking on doors. Six said no and I was about to give up, when the seventh baker said yes.

I’d come in at 7pm after he had gone home, bake through the night, clean up, and be gone by 5 or 6am, when he came back again.

Now I needed the outlets. So I started knocking on doors in Christchurch. I told people, “I’m making these chocolate chip cookies. I’m going to be delivering the first batch on Monday the 7th of February, wanna take a jar?” Seventy out of the 71 stores I spoke to said yes!

On Sunday the 6th, I went into the bakery with my mother, one staff member, and the baker, who had to teach me how to use the equipment. We just took the recipe and scaled it up 200 times. It was midnight when we drove home. I delivered my 35 jars, Mum delivered hers.

I went back to the flat and waited by the phone, with no idea of whether these things were going to sell. At 3pm that day, the phone started ringing – all the outlets had completely sold out. They were asking for more! And so it went on for the next six months.

The value of a mentor

I was cruising along, doing well, and I decided I needed a better way of breaking up the chocolate than the bacon slicer. So I looked in the Yellow Pages and found a guy who looked like a bit of an inventor. I went around to see him and he ended up designing me the chocolate crunchers. At the same time, he became my mentor. I was 21, he was 65.

He introduced me to a goal-setting programme called the Dynamics of Motivation. We talked about visualisations, affirmations and goal setting, and how you create your own reality; how success comes to you, and how happiness is a state of mind.

If you want to know what the absolute most important thing in goal setting is, it’s to write your goals down, and put a date on them. The difference between a written goal and one in your mind is night and day. In your head, it’s an intangible thought that’s not measurable, but the minute it’s on paper, it’s in the world.

A dynamic partnership

That December, my younger brother Guy came back from Massey Uni for his summer break, where he’d been doing business studies. Sales had suddenly, for no apparent reason, slowed – a lot. So I sat down with Guy and he had a look at it. For me, it was just so nice to be able to share this stuff with someone.

It took a few years for us to figure out why sales dropped over summer. Eventually, we realised that people tend to diet more to look good on the beach, they’re also on holiday and away, and schools and takeaway bars completely close down.

That inspired us to come up with Christmas Cookies, which went on to become one of our most successful products.

The reason we succeed is because we try so many things that don’t work. It’s a numbers game, just like selling encyclopaedias. Guy loves the practical side of business so much and I love having him. We worked and lived together for at least a year. We were literally working, eating, sleeping. But it was heaps of fun, and we were on fire. We were making tons of mistakes and having lots of successes too.

Guy and I are a very complementary partnership. It’s one of the biggest factors in the success of the company. I’ve basically got my head in the clouds, he’s got his feet on the ground. I’m the accelerator, he’s got his foot on the brake.

The value of time out of the office

This business has been going 27 years. Guy and I have been working out of a home office for 20 of those years. We’ve both been one step removed, we’re not in there every day. There have been times where we have had to take an office in town, and get into the business again. Yet working from home means that we’re in a separate headspace, and it’s a better place to work on, not in, the business.

At one point, I wanted to get out of Cookie Time and do something different. After 15 years, I was a bit tired of cookies. One of the best things was getting out for two or three years, because it allowed me to come back into the business with renewed passion and enthusiasm.

Say, if you move to Australia, you’re forced to look at things differently. Then you come back to NZ with different ideas that make your NZ ideas better. Having been in a new landscape results in new way of looking at things.

We’re about to open our first retail cookie store in Queenstown: an immersion experience with a cookie bar where people can go to order fresh cookies. It will have NZ music playing and touch screens – the whole deal. We want to take Cookie Time global and are looking for a strategy to do so.

You need an inspirational goal to work towards, so that nobody in the company gets bored. You just have to have something that you’re excited about.

In business, you always have to be aiming for the next rung up. If you want to be a really big local brand, you need to be a national brand in NZ. If you want to be a national brand in NZ, you need to aim to be a global brand.

Business Drill-down

• Business type: Cookie manufacturer
• Main products: Cookies! Producer of the original Chocolate Chunk, rated New Zealand’s most popular cookie.
• Number of staff: More than 80 full-time, about 90 part-time during the busy Christmas period.
• Trading since: 1983
• Main markets: New Zealand
• Website: www.cookietime.com

• This information is provided by CapabilityNZ
  
  www.capabilitynz.org