SMALL BUSINESS: Dottle’s Dough

Until she broke her leg in a fall last year, Mrs. Dorothy Ferguson, 39, of Greeley, Colo. liked to putter about the kitchen just like any other housewife, occasionally whipping up a batch of cookies for her husband and two daughters. By last week Housewife Ferguson had become the busiest, most prominent businesswoman in Greeley (pop. 20,000), and dozens of her neighbors were in business with her.

While waiting for her fracture to heal, Dottie Ferguson got to thinking “what a wonderful thing it would be if you could just go to the refrigerator, haul out a package of dough and bake the cookies.” With plenty of time on her hands, she began to experiment with freezing cookie dough. After hundreds of different experimental batches, Dottie finally hit upon the right formula, hobbled over on her crutches to Grocer Dale Smith and sold him a boxful. Grocer Smith was soon selling as many boxes as Dottie Ferguson could turn out. She invested in a larger mixer, then in a battery of mixers that crowded her kitchen and basement. But still she could not keep up with the pile of orders.

Dottie Ferguson and her husband Frank incorporated the cookie-making venture as Dorothy Ferguson, Inc., issued 60,000 shares of stock and began selling it at $2 a share. Greeley townsfolk, from the doctor who set her leg to the garage owner who serviced her refrigeration, bought the stock. Soon Dottie’s Quickie Cookies grew so big that Frank had to leave his job with Greeley’s Consumer Oil Co. to devote all his time to managing the plant and designing special equipment for freezing the dough. In July the Fergusons moved into a new $16.000 plant with a capacity of 1,000 doz. packages an hour.

Dottie bakes her cookies in four flavors (almond butter, chocolate pecan, butterscotch nut, oatmeal pecan), but the special ingredients that keep her dough fresh-frozen, she says, “really are my secret.” To expand distribution (now in Chicago, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming) and promote new products (e.g., shortcake), her major stockholders last week voted to reorganize as a $300,000 corporation, exchanging for five shares of the old $2 stock 12½ shares of new $1 stock. Says Baker Ferguson, who expects to gross $60,000 this year: “We had the most interesting little business when we started, and we all had a lot of fun with it—that was all—and look at us now.”