CHARLESTON—Starting a business in a poor economy may seem daunting, but Main Street Sweets did just fine in October.
“We sold out the first three days,” said Bobby Morgan, baker and visionary behind the Oct. 13 launching of the downtown donut and breakfast shop. Both Morgan and his mother, Melony Fox, are members of First Baptist Church here and believers in a faith-based enterprise. The journey so far has been uplifting.
“I just saw a movie here recently, and the main character opened the bakery in the middle of the recession, and her bakery closed down,” Morgan said. “I watched that right before we opened, and it put a little doubt in my head. I thought, ‘You know, we are opening a bakery in a recession. Is that really going to work?’ But at this point I’m almost glad we did, because had it been normal economic times, I don’t know if we could handle this. At what we’re doing right now, it’s taking everything we’ve got to keep our display cases in stock.”
Morgan, 29, said their faith has been on the line since April. “The banks aren’t lending,” he said. “Most people in this economy realize that. We realize that, too. We’re such a small operation that we didn’t figure it would be that much of a problem, especially with our local banks that we’ve done business with for years and years. But most of them weren’t able to give us the loans that we needed to get our equipment and get everything that we needed.
“Actually it was my wife’s grandfather’s pastor at a Southern Baptist church in Tennessee, one of his old friends in Sikeston, I think she’s a bank president there. I told my mom that she should go over and talk to her, and she did, and within a week, week and a half, we had the money that we needed to get going.”
Main Street Sweets is strategic in that Charleston, the county seat of Mississippi County, had been without a bakery for 10-15 years, Morgan said.
“I had heard that the previous bakeries had done well,” he said. “Either people retired or just decided to do something different, so I’d always felt like a bakery would work if we were able to stay at it and not get burned out on it.
“But actually the main reason was our location. In the middle of downtown, we’re so close to all the offices—doctors’ offices, insurance agents, the courthouse is just two blocks away, two banks within a two-block radius. We’re right around where everybody is, and personally I just wanted to bring business back to the downtown area. Our hope is that other people will follow suit and try to get more businesses down here.”
Morgan said his mother has had this dream for years.
“I was working a desk job in a manufacturing company, and I was tired of it,” he said. “We had talked about it a little bit, and I told her if she still was interested, then I was, too. I told her I would like to go in with her and open a business.”
To do so they had to spend 11 months remodeling an old building from the 1880s that Morgan said had been falling apart for the last 20 years. This involved the labor of Tim Markworth, Bobby’s stepfather, and the support of Chrystal, Bobby’s wife who is now general manager of the local Pizza Hut.
The community came to celebrate the grand opening on Oct. 15 and it has been a steady stream of working 17 to 19 hours a day for Bobby, Melony and Tim.
“We’re adding new stuff every day,” Morgan said. “We have lots of things that we want to get into that we just haven’t had time to get into yet. We’re looking into hiring a cake decorator.
“At this point we’re not even serving close to half of everything that we plan on making and providing. The more products we sell, I think the more business we’ll actually get. We’ve got people coming in asking us when we’re going to have our lunch items—cakes, cupcakes, all those things that we haven’t even had a chance to get into. It’s been me and my mom in the kitchen, doing all the cooking and baking, and my poor step dad at the cash register.”
Morgan is a baker who has gotten this far based on “a willingness to learn.” His method is “a lot of hard work, and it all comes together.”
With many church members coming in to buy the sweets, Morgan said he feels blessed. The pastor of First Charleston, Michael Brewer, is blessed as well.
“Every small town needs a Main Street Sweets,” Brewer said. “Who knows what it can become?”
ALLEN PALMERI/associate editor
apalmeri@mobaptist.org