Heritage Cookbook Update: We're Projected To Do $1M In Sales This Year

Virginie Martocq

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Published: December 12th, 2022

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Virginie Martocq

Founder, Heritage Cookbook

$62K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Heritage Cookbook

heritagecookbook.com

from Toronto, ON, Canada

started January 2004

$62,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools recommends to grow your business!

Discover what books Virginie recommends to grow your business!

Want more updates on Heritage Cookbook? Check out these stories:

1. I Reinvented Our Family Legacy & Built A $744K/Year Cookbook Business (2021) ➜

This is a follow up story for Heritage Cookbook. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published about 3 years ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

Hi! I’m Virginie. I run an online cookbook-building company that allows families, professionals, fundraisers, and corporations to make their custom cookbooks.

We developed an online tool that is very simple to use, designed forward, and paired up with a print partner so that users can easily create stunning, professional-quality books at a reasonable price.

The tool allows people to combine their recipes, stories, and photos and customize their pages and layouts to come up with truly unique and personal books. They choose their binding, decide on how many books they want, and we print and ship them to them.

Last year, we launched a new version of the website after three years of development! The company is almost 20 years old, but I bought it from my family about four years ago and have been working on it full-time since then. My sales projections for 2022 are in the $750,000 to $1,000,000 range.

Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?

Ultimately, I realized that my business is solid, my customers love my product, and the market is pretty niche.

After three years of research, development, and coding, we finally launched the new version of our website late in December 2021. It was a big deal for me! I had originally planned to launch in Jan of 2020, so when we finally got there, I was relieved and nervous!

Upon launching the new site, we had a very dramatic and worrying decrease in traffic. Sales completely plummeted. It was devastating after all the time and money I had invested! I thought I had been so careful with site mapping and SEO research, so I had not expected this. But I put on my big girl hat and tried to keep the panic at bay. It took me a while to realize that yes, while I had done all my research and hadn’t made any major mistakes, in the eyes of search engines, I had essentially launched a brand new website. I had to be patient with all the hard SEO work we had done to start paying off.

To get things going again, I invested in paid ads to try to get traffic back, focussing mostly on Facebook, as well as Instagram and google. It was expensive, and I didn’t get the results I wanted. I got lots more traffic, but my conversion rates were too low to justify the cost.

I played around with trying to create social media strategies, but as a solo operator, had a hard time keeping up with it.

In the spring, my company was chosen to be part of a Women in Business growth program offered by the government. I jumped on the opportunity.

The program was amazing- I had access to all sorts of experts to help with everything from marketing strategy to basic business consulting, tax experts, shipping and distribution experts, etc. It also gave me access to a network of women to lean on. It can be pretty lonely running a business by yourself!

Ultimately, I realized that my business is solid, my customers love my product, and the market is pretty niche. With the new program, I am by far the best product on the market- better pricing, better product, better tool. Given that I had spent so much on programming and non-effective SEO freelancers, I pulled the plug on all spending and decided to work on just getting sales back up and ending the spending bleed!

I decided to focus on the low-hanging fruit, and higher conversion rates, rather than spending on SEO. That’s pretty much where I am now. I have found a new cheaper programming company to take me through the next year and changed the programming priorities to focus less on customer experience upgrades, and more on sales tracking and marketing tools.

I am waiting until I get one year of data to decide how to tackle new marketing priorities. These will include:

Better customer UX tracking to email and incentivize to close sales
Targeted emailing to companies to get more re-orders
Hone in on better messaging on the site to get more clicks

Things I am considering:

Digital marketing coop student to lead a marketing campaign - there are lots of programs available to get students
Zoho or other CRM company to create sales and targeted email campaigns
Salesperson to target large order corporate/entrepreneurial, customers

What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?

Running a company alone is hard and lonely.

And bootstrapping a company is hard.

After the government program I attended, I had all sorts of notions in my head about how to jump to the next level, attract investors, and go for max growth.

But I’m not so sure. The company is a niche, and my customer base is solid. Slow and steady is still the right way to go. Unless I were to change the focus of the company and try to break into the online food/recipe world, I don’t know that there is a market out there for my product that warrants taking on investors looking for ownership.

The best thing I can do is cut down on spending (big time) and focus on the things that can make the most money.

Staffing is also a huge challenge. Trying to balance the books means that having an employee may or may not result in a better bottom line. This is something I struggle with a lot.

I need to be patient and wait until I get to the end of this year to be able to make better sales projections and figure out whether I can grow enough to justify taking on someone to help. Or whether this is the type of business that will always cap out at around $1M in sales per year. If that is the case, my strategy needs to change to cut down on expenses and draw the maximum revenue from the company.

One of the big challenges with an online business is the cost of tech development. It moves so fast and is so expensive. To keep up with customer expectations I need to constantly invest in the tool. Because my site is custom-built, everything I do is very expensive. Monthly tech costs were $20,000/month while I was developing. I’ve managed to get them down to $5,000/month, but that doesn’t give me a lot of time with my programmers, so new product development is slow. As well, customers expect to be able to do more and more in the program, so it’s hard to balance that.

What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made is hiring freelancers too quickly. I wasted so much money hiring SEO freelancers, design freelancers, and programming freelancers, before I was ready, and before I had a clear strategy about what I expected from them. I think when you are running a company alone, you are missing the feedback and ideation that comes from working in a group, so the tendency is to hire freelancers to fill that gap, their end goal is to bill hourly, so your interests are not always aligned.

For 2023, I will lean on friends and acquaintances that have a business background to develop a long-term strategy for the business, so that I make sure I invest in things that will move me toward my goals.

I also learned that there is a lot of help out there in the form of government groups, accelerator programs, online communities, etc that are helpful when you run a business alone. These are great places to share ideas and concerns, and network your way out of problems, rather than spending your way out of them.

I’ve also learned to pull back on customer experience and focus more on sales conversion. This doesn’t come naturally to me as I am an interior designer by trade and also worked in magazines for many years, so the look and feel, and experience of the brand are so important to me. But that’s not the thing that makes me money. I already have that bang on. Sales conversions are what makes money. Because I don’t come from a sales background, I find that intimidating, so I avoid it.

This year I am going to make sales conversions my #1 priority.

What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?

In the next year, my focus is on conversion rates. My SEO ranking is already good, and with the new program, there is no reason I can’t move my sales conversion rate.

Repeat customers are also an easy money-making priority for me. I already do a lot of repeat business, but with a small sales push, I know I can move that number even higher. Customer satisfaction is HUGE with my brand, and it’s something I am going to start capitalizing on.

Working more aggressively on finding new/larger markets is also going to become a priority. Corporations specifically have become a big market for me. Developing a sales strategy to market to them using things like Facebook and LinkedIn is a good way to reach those people.

I also need to look into a new feature we built into the site that allows people to store their recipes online in a personalized digital recipe box. I don’t have a lot of data yet on how people are using this, but if it has legs, I think this could become a whole new revenue stream that is huge.

Finally, expanding my markets internationally is always at the back of my mind. I get constant emails from the UK and Australia about people wanting to use our service to make books there. Shipping is just too expensive. Working with a print network could be the solution to servicing a global market more efficiently. Cloning the site for Latin America is a very interesting notion.

What’s the best thing you read in the last year?

I’m not a big business book reader! I tried to read “Venture Deals” by Feld Mendelson, but I had such a hard time. Instead, attending the local Board of Trade Accelerator Program was way more helpful to find help and inspiration.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?

Join groups. Reach out to your local Board of Trade to see what they have going on. They can be very helpful to find resources, and also government money or employment placement programs that can help you.

Put sales first. I don’t care what business you’re in, if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re in sales. I put the product first for a long time, which means I had great customer engagement and satisfaction, but my sales were flat. That is changing now.

Seek out advice. A lot of people are happy to sit down and talk to you about how they became successful. Let’s be honest- when you ask someone for help, they feel great because it puts them in a position of authority. So ask for help. Take people out to lunch. Show them your challenges, and ask them what they would do. It feels good for them, and it's incredibly valuable.

Look for students to help you. Coop students need work to finish their degrees. And they know a lot about the digital world. So lean on them.