Dakota Rising Picks Cheryl's Catering as a 2013 Fellow
October 15, 2013
Nine more South Dakota small business owners have been chosen as the 2013 Dakota Rising Entrepreneur Fellows. Three of them are right here in this area: Cheryl Schaefers, Lisa Mueller and Melanie Hoke.
The first of these entrepreneurs that the Record inter- viewed was Cheryl Schaefers of Cheryl’s Catering.
“Back this past December, I wasn’t sure that this would be for me,” Schaefers said. “I worried that they might not accept me because I’m pushing 60, and although I’ve been self-employed for a long time, I will have less working years left than many others might. I’ll be looking to scale back over the long term. But I was accepted and happy to be so. Being an entrepreneur means making money doing what we love to do, and I’ve always loved to cook. I’ve always worked very hard, but I maybe haven’t always worked “smarter”. So I went into the Dakota Rising process with the idea that I wanted to learn to work smarter, not harder, and they have definitely given me the tools to do that.”
“Now I won’t say that the $10,000 dollar expansion grant isn’t important, because it is, but I will say that it’s not as important as the mentoring sessions and your cohort groups. It’s hard to put a price on something like that. Meeting with other business people face to face, well, often as a business owner you feel that you must be to only one that struggles with certain problems, but you find out quickly that you aren’t alone. You can be honest about your business, both your failures and successes, and your mentors are good at getting tothe root of your problems, to find the hole in the bottom of the bucket and help you take the first steps to plugging it up and fixing it. And the fixes travel all the way up to the top.”
“To me, my faith, family and my business are the most im- portant things in my life,” she said. “The saying is very true that if you love your job, you never work a day in your life. I love to cook, and anything that makes doing what I love better is a good thing. The Dakota Rising program has helped me do that more than I could have guessed it would, even without the grant money.”
Cheryl Schaefers with her husband Fred began a dairy business back in 1976, and worked together on that until their barn burned to the ground in 1992. From there Cheryl began working at the Legion Cafe in Orient. Soon afterward she began Cheryl’s Catering, and earned a well-deserved reputation for quality. Currently she works out of the Ponderosa Restaurant’s kitchen in Polo.
“Though the Ponderosa itself is not open regularly, we do host parties here,” she said. “With our new van we can take our catering all over, we’ve gone as far as Bismarck, Belle Fourche and over into Minnesota . . . though of course I prefer working closer to home. Growing up as farmers you learn right away to be an entrepreneur. I’ve been self-employed all my life, but now this program is teaching me to be a self-employed business woman.’
Cheryl said that part of her new business plan is to create more opportunities locally, notin Faulkton only, but in her home town of Polo, and in every town in Faulk County.
“Weddings, family reunions and retreats,” she said simply. “There are existing buildings closed schools and churches that we can use and we have businesses that can support those things. Florists, decorators and retailers that can create unique and personalized gifts, hotels and a number of bed and breakfast establishments that can support these things, and of course, I can handle the food. Good home cooked meals, perfect for the country setting.”
Schaefers thinks that if cooperative arrangements can be made in communities to use these otherwise derelict spaces then everyone could benefit.
“The more you use a building the better off it will be,” she said. “If a community group could rent the spaces out for different functions then it would be much more easy to maintain and the cost to maintain would be spread around. I think Polo could lead the way in this. I think we need to focus on the positive on what we can do with what we have, rather than brooding on the negatives of what we’ve lost. That’s how we move forward and make everything better for everyone.”
Schaefers on the whole is brimming with new ideas and enthusiasm.
“From starting in on social media to promote my business to new ideas to market my catering, to the amazing sup- port I’ve received from this program, I encourage anyone who’s thought about applying for this program to do it,” Schaefers said.