KENT, Ohio — "I never once thought that I would be sitting in a pop shop that I own," remarked Amy Mucha, the owner and Chief Pop Artist of Daisy Pops.
Mucha, a former high school math teacher, who retired a few years ago, now has a new side hustle of baking cake pops in her own bakery in Kent.
The shop named Daisy Pops, after her daughter, opened earlier this year and is really popping.
"We make a lot of cake pops,” Mucha said. “We are going through almost 3,000 cake pops a week."
While Mucha is a master of the shop's 30 different flavors, it was the business operations she needed guidance on.
"I definitely needed some help and some expertise and some more education, honestly, of how to run a business," admitted Mucha.
A friend recommended the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Business program also known as 10KSB. It's a free 12-week program at Cuyahoga Community College, for businesses that meet a set of requirements. Graduates come away with a custom, detailed growth plan.
"That growth can look like additional locations. It could look like entering new territories, collaborating with different industries,” said Erika Hill, the Executive Director of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Business Program at Cuyahoga Community College.
"I really learned a lot about marketing. I learned a lot about people and how to employ people, how to treat people, even,” Mucha said.
10KSB is a national program. It launched here in Cleveland a decade ago. Tri-c says 900 area businesses have gone through the program.
"And it's been definitely one of the major ways that Cuyahoga Community College gives back to the community," said Hill.
The numbers are impressive. After graduation, 66% increased their revenue in six months, 44% created new jobs and 85% of 10KSB businesses do business with each other. Mucha credits her classmates with pushing her to think bigger when she wanted to be the best cake pop shop in Northeast Ohio.
"Amy, why just northeast Ohio? And I was like, like, no, I'm not going to say national. Like, that's too big,” recalls Mucha. “And then I kept thinking about it. And sure enough, by the next week or next meeting, I had changed it to the National Cake Pop Shop."
She was even invited to Goldman Sachs in New York for a holiday market of 10KSB graduates.
"We got to sell our cake pops to all of the workers of Goldman Sachs. We went through about a thousand cake pops the day that we were there,” Mucha said. “I got to meet John Waldron, the president of Goldman Sachs. We got a good picture together as fellow Ohioans."
Mucha is savoring her new success but is holding on to the math, from her past profession.
For each cake pop sold, customers are encouraged to flip over the pop counter tracking every sweet treat sold.
"This week we've actually hit 113,000 cake pops for the year, and we are not even in the holiday season yet,” Mucha said excitedly. “So, we have really, really been growing a lot. And I attribute a lot of that to what I have learned in 10KSB, as well as the connections that I've made.”
Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses has well over 13,000 graduates nationally and continues to grow. Cuyahoga Community College runs the program three times a year and is accepting applications for next summer's class. The deadline to apply is Jan. 30, 2024.
