About the business: What began as a dessert business, Mrs. Jo’s Petite Sweets, out of a commercial kitchen in Lorton has expanded to include corporate catering and, soon, a brick-and-mortar operation inside the Pentagon Federal Credit Union headquarters in Tysons, partially backed by a grant from Wisconsin-based Fiserv Inc. (NASDAQ: FISV). The name, too, is changing, to Mrs. Jo's Petite Eats.
How it started: On Jan. 1, 2017, Errin Roth retired from the U.S. Army as a lieutenant colonel after 24 years. Two days later, she enrolled in pastry school.
She attended Gaithersburg’s L’Academie de Cuisine to shore up those skills, but her baking and general cooking knowledge had already evolved quite a bit since her childhood in Mississippi. There, she learned, if you were asked to bring a dish to a community event, then you could cook — and if you were asked to bring lemonade, well, “that let you know where your pecking order was.”
“I saw grandmothers, mothers, great aunts just create phenomenal dishes,” Roth said. “I wanted to do that. I ventured toward desserts.”
Two years before her Army retirement, Roth’s mother passed. She was Mrs. Jo Bradford Hardaway, a “true Southern lady with the pearls and aprons,” her daughter said. That’s where the business was born.
“Our mothers are like the centers of our universe,” said Roth, also a graduate of Georgetown’s Dog Tag Bakery fellowship program, which readies veterans for entrepreneurship. “I just wanted the world to know my mom.”
Pandemic effect: Pre-pandemic, Roth said she added corporate and client catering at the behest of a dessert client. Mrs. Jo’s did about $18,000 in revenue in 2019 and Roth expected a “blowout” year in 2020.
Then Covid-19 consumed our world, and the business just stopped — 90 to 180 days passed without orders. She lost three corporate events in March 2020, two in April, one in May and a wedding in June.
“Did I think about quitting? I did,” she said. “But I hung in there.”
Pandemic pivot: “Even though it hurt, it allowed me to step back and reevaluate some things,” Roth said of the pandemic. “I pivoted. For me, OK this thing happened, now what? So I focused on family dinner packages.”
Those dinner packages were available to order online and kept the business afloat until her corporate business picked back up in the latter half of 2020.
Meanwhile, Roth pursued, unsuccessfully for the most part, grants and other aid. There came a point where she didn’t think she had a “snowball’s chance in hell” of landing one, until Fiserv, a global provider of financial payment technology, came through.
Fiserv set aside $50 million for its Back2Business program, and Mrs. Jo’s was the beneficiary of one of the $10,000 grants. Roth collected that check at the Sept. 29 Congressional Baseball Game.
“That was one of those hallelujah moments for me,” Roth said.
She will use that funding as she readies her cafe and catering operation at PenFed’s headquarters. She needed funds for small wares, china, glassware and her relocation. This grant, she said, provides a cushion to ensure things go smoothly.
The challenge: Roth is a solopreneur, for now, with the option to bring in surge help when catering calls. But that has to change with the new space. So she’s in hiring mode, and it’s not so simple. That’s not only because finding qualified workers has proven challenging across industries, but also because, to work in the PenFed building, her prospective staff must pass a more thorough background check.
But that issue, Roth said, “is a good problem to have.”
What’s next: Obviously, the brick-and-mortar operation at 7940 Jones Branch Drive is next — Roth just signed the lease earlier this month, per her Facebook page. But that’s only the start. She would like to see Mrs. Jo’s on European military installations and in other large urban areas. She’s weighing the creation of another business: Mrs. Jo’s Jams, Jellies and Relishes.
And she wants to teach. It all comes back to Mrs. Jo.
“So many people want to cook, but they don’t know how,” Roth said. “That’s what my mom did. She was a teacher.”
Email mneibauer@bizjournals.com to share your business with us.