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October 8, 2004/Tishri 23 5765, Vol. 57, No. 6
'Cookie Queen' has home-baked message
MICHAEL MIKLOFSKY
Staff Writer
Susan Brooks is a mom on a mission. The mission: to create enthusiasm in the workplace.
In the mid-1970s, Brooks was a schoolteacher and mother of two young children. Her husband was a homebuilder.
"In those years, a working mom was not the norm and I really had to work, not only because it was great to have an extra income, but more importantly, I felt that I needed to be out there ... I couldn't be home," she says. "I needed to be doing something in a much greater picture."
That "greater picture" today includes a multimillion-dollar Tempe-based gift business, Cookies From Home, which ships cookies throughout the nation, and Serves You Right, a company which Brooks uses to educate other businesses on service enthusiasm.
Brooks' husband, Barry, co-owner and co-founder of Cookies From Home, oversees the company's 45 employees and has designed and built the company's 12,000 square foot bakery.
Brooks, also known as the "Cookie Queen," began her cookie business after years of baking cookies for family and friends as a way to say "thank you."
"Those people who supported that lifestyle, who helped me raise my children and who supported us, I wanted to give a special gift to every year and so literally, we put our family re-cipes together and we would give them home- made cookies," she says.
Brooks would have people call her and request favorites, so she decided to start selling them and opened the company's first store in Athens, Ga., in 1977, around the same time that Wally Amos opened his first cookie store on the West coast.
Now the company is headquartered in Tempe, where a retail location stands at 1605 W. University Drive, Suite 106.
Brooks calls herself a "service enthusiast," which she defines as "the joy of serving others."
"Work is an expression of spirit and when your spirit is involved and aligned with your work, that enthusiasm just has to bubble over," she says.
Being enthusiastic about serving customers will give any business the competitive edge, but most of the customer service in this country is "arrogant, apathetic and mediocre at best," Brooks says.
Her own style of leadership is leading by example. Brooks says that she doesn't ask her staff to do anything she wouldn't do herself and she doesn't let a bad batch get her down.
"I think that there is a continual level of training that gives our staff permission to show up in a larger-than-life kind of way," she says. "You know how sometimes when you go and work someplace, they hold the lid on who you are? Well, we encourage our staff to be the best that they can be, whatever that is. Not to be like me, but to be the best they can be that's right for them."
In her role as a service enthusiast, Brooks writes a regular column in the Phoenix Business Journal, hosts seminars throughout the country, and now has published her first book, "Serves You Right! The Ins ... the Outs ... Great Customer Service" (Serves You Right! Ink, $15.95 paperback).
She has written the book for the general public because everyone is a consumer, buying products on a daily basis. The book can serve as a way to understand the type of service that people should be getting, but aren't.
"Part of the problem is that we've become so numb to expecting less and therefore, we don't expect anything less than mediocrity," Brooks says.
"When I leave Safeway and I've given them my Safeway card, they always say, 'Thank you for shopping here Mrs. Brooks.' Now how easy is that just to read my name on the card and to use my name? That's where I go because for some reason, in that moment, I feel recognized, I feel important. That's what we deserve as customers."
Contact the writer here
Details
- What: Book signings
- When: 7:30 a.m. Tuesday, Oct. 19, and 5-7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 27
- Where: The James Hotel, 7353 E. Indian School Road, Scottsdale, and Cookies From Home Gift Center, 1605 W. University Drive, Suite 106, Tempe
- Call: For Oct. 19 event, call 602-230-8400 and for the Oct. 27 event, call 480-894-1944
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