The best part of Matthew Davis’s day is delivering warm, fresh-from-the-oven cookies to unsuspecting local dessert-lovers. He remembers his all-time favourite delivery: the woman was confused at first, but after realizing the cookie delivery wasn’t a mistake, she was overcome with emotion.
“She had tears coming down her face, and she jumped up and gave me a hug,” says Davis. “With the deliveries you get laughter, you get tears — I can’t tell you how many hugs I’ve gotten. It puts a smile on my face all the time.”
That’s what makes Davis’s business, aptly named The Cookie Guy, so different. Davis says that, to his knowledge, there are no other café-style businesses in town doing baked-to-order, warm cookie deliveries. And, he adds, only a handful of businesses are doing this in North America.
Davis, who spent four years working in finance in Dallas, Texas, before moving back to Victoria to open The Cookie Guy, is dedicated to cookie quality. They’re always baked to order and always made in batches of 18 or fewer for quality assurance — even if orders are as big as 2,000 cookies.
Since his business opened in October 2016, deliveries have skyrocketed. Averaging two deliveries per week in the early days, The Cookie Guy now does an average of 10 deliveries a day. And Davis is now expanding The Cookie Guy beyond Vancouver Island. He’s working to open a location in Vancouver later this year, and his goal is for stores in Alberta and across the Pacific Northwest to follow.
His big goal? “I’d like The Cookie Guy to be a Canadian household name one day.”
Q&A With Matthew Davis of The Cookie Guy
What was the best business advice you’ve ever received?
Just do it. For me the hardest part was jumping into it. After that, it’s reacting, evaluating and making the best decisions for your business.
What advice would you give to someone just starting a business?
Have a solid budget in place. I knew exactly what money I had to spend and how I wanted to spend it. If you’ve got clear-cut budget goals and you can track those goals, you’ll always know whether it’s time to keep moving on or whether it’s time to call it quits.
What was the scariest part?
Before the soft opening, I did not know how this was going to go. And on the first day of our soft opening it was not going well. That was scary!
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This article is from the April/May 2018 issue of Douglas.
