From One Location to 80 in 3 Years: How Creativity and Resilience Fueled Dirty Dough’s Rapid Growth

In this episode, we interview Bennett Maxwell, the visionary founder of Dirty Dough, a cookie franchise that has expanded from one location to over eighty in just three years. Bennett’s journey is a masterclass in strategic decision-making and creativity. He shares how he compensated for his lack of experience in food and franchising by surrounding himself with industry veterans and advisors, and how he used an innovative creative strategy to drive business growth.

Bennett explains the inspiration behind this innovative strategy and Dirty Dough’s unique brand identity - the idea that their cookies may look messy but taste amazing, symbolizing how life is imperfect but still rewarding - and how this concept resonated with customers, significantly increasing market share. He reveals how this concept also inspired their bold response to a now-settled lawsuit from a major competitor, which became a pivotal PR moment that catapulted brand growth.

Tune in to this entertaining episode as Bennett shares valuable insights on growing, scaling, and selling a business. You'll also gain tips on recruitment, marketing, mentorship, and management that are crucial for any entrepreneur

In this episode of the Harvest Growth Podcast, we cover:

●      How to grow a business rapidly without prior experience and expertise.

●      The importance of surrounding yourself with industry experts and mentors.

●      Why resilience and adaptability are key to long-term success.

●      How to turn business challenges into positive PR opportunities.

●      The role of a strong creative strategy in scaling your business.

●      And so much more!

 
If you love delicious cookies, please visit www.dirtydoughcookies.com to learn more about their mouthwatering offers.

Interested in franchising? Contact Bennett Maxwell at www.bennettmaxwell.com to learn more about this lucrative business model, and how to win at it - whether as the brand owner or the franchisee.


To be a guest on our next podcast, contact us today!

Do you have a brand that you’d like to launch or grow? Do you want help from a partner that has successfully launched hundreds of brands totaling over $2 billion in revenues? Visit HarvestGrowth.com and set up a free consultation with us today!

Transcript

Jon LaClare [00:00:00]:
Imagine starting a single location business in 2021 and growing to over 80 locations nationwide by 2024, with 400 more currently being built out. That kind of growth doesn't happen by chance. Learn from today's guest how he drove this phenomenal growth, and you'll hear some strategies that can help your business grow faster as well.

Announcer [00:00:21]:
Are you looking for new ways to make your sales grow? You've tried other podcasts, but they don't seem to know harvest the growth potential of your product or service as we share stories and strategies that'll make your competitors nervous. Now here's the host of the Harvest Growth podcast, John LeClair.

Jon LaClare [00:00:41]:
Welcome back to the show. I'm really excited to be having Bennett Maxwell. He's the founder and now the director of franchise sales for Dirty Dough. If you haven't seen this store, restaurant, cookie shop, whatever you want to call it, we'll get into the details of it. Man. You got to check it out. Delicious cookies that he has really grown this business and he's got a great story behind it. But the biggest thing, you got to check out their website.

Jon LaClare [00:01:04]:
You will walk away hungry for cookies. I guarantee it. So go to dirtydough.com. but I do want to dive into the stories of the business behind it. First of all, I want to welcome you to the show, Bennett.

Bennett Maxwell [00:01:16]:
Thanks, John. I appreciate it. That was a hell of an intro.

Jon LaClare [00:01:19]:
Well, I mentioned to you, it's funny, we've met over the phone and Zoom, etcetera. And I was just recently in Abilene, Texas, for a video shoot a couple of weeks ago, and we just happened to have across the parking lot, a dirty doe, one of your stores. And so, of course, I had to go check it out, man. Phenomenal. Delicious cookies. I do recommend it to anybody. If you've got one in your town, I think there's 80 locations across the country. So check out the website, find out location near you.

Jon LaClare [00:01:46]:
Just phenomenal cookies. I'm a huge cookie fan, but these were, bar none, just the best I've had in a very long time. So great job in getting that all done. Let's dive into the business, though. You're making me hungry just thinking about it. Let's talk about dirty dough. What is it? So those that haven't heard of it, I kind of mentioned a very high level what it is. Talk about the store.

Jon LaClare [00:02:06]:
Sell cookies. Obviously I've mentioned, but I'm sure there's more to the story.

Bennett Maxwell [00:02:09]:
Yeah. Dirty dough is a gourmet cookie franchise. As far as competition, crumble is the largest so if you think crumble similar to that consumer facing, we're serving these large third of a pound cookies. They're rotating quite often, served fresh, warm. All that on the backend, though, we do a centralized production model. So rather than, again, looking at a crumble or somebody else, rather than making flour, sugar, butter, you know, making everything from scratch per location, weighing it by hand, portioning it by hand, we do that for our franchisees and then ship it out to each franchisee. And the uniqueness about a dirty dough is, it's all dirty dough means the dough is dirty. So it's everything is stuffed.

Bennett Maxwell [00:02:50]:
We use more mix ins, more fillings. We do three layer cookies as well, and then we ship that out to our franchisees. They have to do is pop it in the oven, press start. Ovens are programmed. Every cookie cooks for the same time, temperature, and fan speed. So that's what dirty dough is on the consumer facing as well as, I guess, to the franchisee as well.

Jon LaClare [00:03:08]:
So it makes it super easy for the franchisees. And let's go down that path in a second about building the franchises, et cetera. First of all, the name, though, so what, dirty dough or the name of the company, what does that mean in terms of why'd you choose that name? Why did it get developed originally?

Bennett Maxwell [00:03:22]:
Yeah, so the. A guy that I went to high school with chose the name, him and his wife just because it sounded good. I came in as an investor. Then I ended up purchasing it and franchising it when they had just one location. And I think it was the first time I was ever in the store. A customer walks in, what does dirty dough mean? And again, the truth is it just sounds cool. Well, the employee doesn't know that. The employee goes, oh, dirty dough is named dirty dough because we focus on the inside of the cookie.

Bennett Maxwell [00:03:46]:
And I'm like, oh, that's awesome. So how many chocolate chips? And I remember we used six cups per batch because that was before we did a centralized production where we're increasing it by 50%. Now we're doing nine cups. And then, and then I found some specialized machines to do a three layer cookie. Again, it's. It's supposed to correlate to life, you know, dirty dough. This cookie is dirty and messy on the outside, but just as you testified, it's pretty damn good. Don't wait for life to be perfect in order for, you know, you to enjoy it.

Bennett Maxwell [00:04:13]:
So all of the messaging around the brand is before you walk in a store, if you notice, it said, we care about your feelings on the window. And then you walk in and it says the inside matters most. Then you grab a box and on your box it says, life gets messy and that's okay. So it went from one thing to now meaning another thing. And I do think that was pretty pivotal in grasping onto, I guess, a bigger picture and a bigger meaning of the name. I think both franchisees and customers alike have gravitated towards it.

Jon LaClare [00:04:43]:
That's really fun. It's part of the success, I think is you've got the branding, you just talked through the story, you walk in and everything kind of fits. It all makes sense and you've done a really nice job with it. The other part I mentioned the visuals, but the taste is phenomenal. How do you come up with these recipes for our listeners? You can tell us maybe, but it's roughly half. Some of the recipes are the same every week. You've got your standards and then you've got a few that are changing out every single week. So how do you come up with those constantly new recipes, good baker and.

Bennett Maxwell [00:05:11]:
A lot of taste testing. And the secret to taste testing is you take a bite. If you eat the whole cookie, you know, you're 4000 calories and you're done with your taste testing. But that, but that's really fun. We started with 50 or 60 different cookie flavors and bases but that means we have to produce 50 to 60 skew items. Ship it out from, you know, we're in Utah, we ship it out to Pennsylvania, down to Florida, out to California. So what we've done more recently is I think we're down to 13 different bases. And then each one of those bases has five to ten flavor profiles built on top of them.

Bennett Maxwell [00:05:47]:
So it's, what are the unique bases? Let's make sure they're all stuffed. And then what can we top them with that tastes the best? And I think something, I guess the last thing I'll mention on that getting the emotion outside of the business. Like, I don't care if we change the chocolate chip recipe or any recipe. I don't even care if I hate a cookie because it doesn't. I'm not the one that keeps us in business. So looking at it more objectively and saying, like, what is our target demographic? You know, 25 to 55 year old mom, what do, what is the majority of them think is the best chocolate chip cookie? You know, so a lot of it is that tasting and then trusting the data and trying to take away that emotion.

Jon LaClare [00:06:24]:
Well, I have to say I'm a huge chocolate chip cookie fan. For me, it is the cookie, right? It has to be. And compared to your competition, I must say yours is phenomenal. I actually don't like your biggest, your major competitors. Chocolate chip cookie, it's all milk chocolate. And anyways, yours was phenomenal. So I was eager to try that the first time I went in your store and it did not miss. It was truly phenomenal.

Jon LaClare [00:06:47]:
We talked about recipes, the flavors, et cetera. A quick story on taste testing. I will say one of my favorite jobs I've had back before I started this for many years ago, one of my first marketing jobs was with Nabisco, and I was there during the transition. Unfortunately, in some ways, when they got rid of trans fats, if you recall, Oreo was sort of the big brand that they came after in the very early days, caused us to lose trans fats. We could have a whole discussion on right or wrong or whatever, but as part of that, I was able to participate in a lot of taste tests as we changed the recipe to get rid of them. And they're not as good as they used to be, but it was a lot of fun, I must say, to go through those taste tests. So that's got to be a pretty fun part of your job to taste them recipes.

Bennett Maxwell [00:07:27]:
Like, can you taste the difference between the, like, which one tastes more saltier, more buddy? I'm like, I don't know, this one tastes good and this one tastes great.

Jon LaClare [00:07:35]:
That's, yeah, same.

Bennett Maxwell [00:07:36]:
That's what I know.

Jon LaClare [00:07:37]:
Yeah. I drew smiley faces. A big smiley face means it was good. Really good. A small smiley face means it was pretty good. Whatever. Yeah. So I wouldn't say I'm refined.

Jon LaClare [00:07:45]:
I was not the main person doing it, but on the marketing team, you know, we had experts that came in that were trained and, like, you know, as a consumer, you can tell good or bad. Right. Which is, which is going to be better than another version or whatever. So it's, that's a fun part of the job for sure. So the taste is important, but the visual is so important. Again, I do encourage our audience. Check out their social feeds or go to dirtydough.com dot. You can see photos and then great video as well, showing these delicious.

Jon LaClare [00:08:11]:
I mean, you could taste them just by, by seeing the videos. How do you do that? Where do you, where do you film? How do you come up with these great shots of food, which is hard to film?

Bennett Maxwell [00:08:19]:
Yeah. Yeah. The goal is definitely the food porn. That's kind of the joke. Like, if you make it look really good. It is like, holy crap. I mean, starting off even without, I guess the product itself helps you because right when I bought the company, we were at, you know, one store, no marketing budget, nothing. You, you have an employee that has a little bit of a downtime, you know, an ASU college girl, she breaks a cookie open and it has some, this ain't Amazon or some, some weird clip and it gets millions of views, you know, just because it was the product itself.

Bennett Maxwell [00:08:52]:
But it's mainly because of the inside. Like you're, what I wanted to do is go the opposite of the competitors crumble is, you know, plain cookie with a lot of things on top, you know, half inch of frosting and it's like, no, can we take that frosting or sweet cream or caramel and throw it in the middle? And by doing that, it's made our videos a lot more appealing. But yeah, we've switched through different marketing agencies and a lot of that same thing as testing. Is a 32nd video better or ten second video and just which platforms. But that's always fun. The first set of videos that I got, I remember I was so stoked. I was like, this is a professional company because these videos look good.

Jon LaClare [00:09:31]:
That's awesome. That's fun. And now you talk about the franchise model. Let's shift gears and talk about the business a little bit. So you've grown this from one to now over 80 different franchises. How'd you do that? What was the tipping point in your growth?

Bennett Maxwell [00:09:46]:
Yeah, we franchised end of 21 December of 2021. And my background in sales, I've done a lot of door to door sales. I served a two year Mormon mission which has a lot more sales. Cutco. And so way before we franchise, I was kind of pre pitching the idea, you know, like, John, what do you think about, I'm thinking about franchising this cookie company and I'm thinking about centralizing the production and doing this. And, you know, and then I'm getting the feedback and then I am slowly creating what I know the market wants. And then, hey, what do you know? It's launched now. Hey, John, I created exactly what you want.

Bennett Maxwell [00:10:18]:
Are you or somebody you're interested in buying a dirty dope right off the bat? We'd sold 60 franchises in the first, like six or so months. And then none of them have been opened yet though, right? You sell one and it takes, you know, six months to a year to actually open it. We get a lawsuit from crumble saying that we had rectangle boxes and they had rectangle boxes. We had sprinkles. They had sprinkles. They use vanilla ice cream. We did. They use whimsical designs.

Bennett Maxwell [00:10:41]:
We use whimsical. Just a bunch of bullshit. And it's like, whatever, you know, you could sue companies, just kind of slow them down. We had thrown up some billboards, dirty dough coming soon, and then crumble. Kind of responded with like a million billboards, because they're a billion dollar company. We're one store company. And then a local news article picked up the lawsuit. Crumble, suing these companies.

Bennett Maxwell [00:11:04]:
And then it's like, okay, now it's public. So how are we going to respond? So the first thing was billboards. And I think that gave us a lot of exposure. And they were billboards. Like, our cookies don't crumble with competition. Cookies so good, you're being sued. Let your taste buds be the judge. Things like that.

Bennett Maxwell [00:11:18]:
Kind of, you know, tongue in cheek. And I'm sure a few hundred thousand people saw them on the freeway. But I posted on LinkedIn and other social medias. Tad crumble. I like your billboards. What do you think about mine? And then that got us interviews on CNBC and Good Morning America and really got millions of eyes on us. By the end of that year, we'd sold like 290 franchises. We had cookies are hot.

Bennett Maxwell [00:11:42]:
We had a simplified model. We had a really good team. We just needed more exposure. And our response to the lawsuit gave us a lot of exposure about that. Since then, it's all been settled, which is great, but it did launch us from a one store company. Now we've sold 450 plus 80 of which are open.

Jon LaClare [00:11:59]:
That's amazing growth. And you think back to 2021. So in three, four years, that's phenomenal growth. And part of the reason it's interesting to hear the lawsuit story behind this. I like how you capitalized on something that could be so hard, right? Difficult to go through a lawsuit. It's never fun to get notice on something like that. But you made the most of it. You turned it into something fun and really grew that business.

Jon LaClare [00:12:23]:
So that's a great story to think about for our audience's sake. If you've got some trials, difficulties, struggles you're going through, how do you flip it? Right? Flip it on the side, especially when there's natural exposure. Going out there, getting pr by going through a struggle or a trial is, I think, easier in some ways. Right? People love to hear those stories. So getting onto CNBC, as you mentioned, and other platforms, and hearing about what you had to go through, you can truly turn it into something positive. And the old adage of no news is bad news kind of thing. Even bad news can help grow your company to a point. Right? But if you use it in the right way, it's all about how you use those news.

Jon LaClare [00:13:01]:
Any tips or kind of like things you learn through that process if others might be facing struggles, whether it's a lawsuit or something else with their business, to flip it on his head.

Bennett Maxwell [00:13:11]:
Yes. Well, my purpose wasn't like, this is going to blow up and it's going to sell franchises. It's like, oh, this is a bad situation. Six weeks have gone by, nothing's happened, but now it's public. So now everybody who's going to inquire to buy a dirty Doe franchise is going to be asking me about the lawsuit. Might as well just get out there and be open about it. So I broke down every single point of the lawsuit and showed my opinion on it. And most of them were like, this is verifiably false.

Bennett Maxwell [00:13:38]:
And this is how you check out. And a lot of people are like, why are you doing that? I mean, we did same thing with the billboards. We paid some professional actors to make silly commercials of big Cookie Co. Shutting down lemonade stands for selling cookies and just had a lot of fun with it. But I guess sticking by who you are and what you're wanting to do, that original news article said, crumble suing two smaller cookie companies, Dirty Dough and Crave. And I know the owner of Crave, great guy. We both spent over $300,000 on the lawsuit. I sold 400 franchises because of it.

Bennett Maxwell [00:14:11]:
And, you know, $10 million in revenue because I was out there. And the whole time I was pushing him as well. Some other cookie companies that I know are getting sued and nobody, they're like, oh, I don't want to make them. You know, I don't want to anger them. I'm like, dude, they're already suing you. What are they like? Are they going to make up more stuff to sue you? Which for us they did. But again, we got it all also. But I do.

Bennett Maxwell [00:14:32]:
I do think it's like, don't. I guess, don't run away from the battle. And if you have a stance, be open with it. I think people gravitate towards authenticity.

Jon LaClare [00:14:42]:
I like that. And I would add to that strength, too. Whether it's customers you're dealing with or in your case, franchisees. You show your strength as a business when you're willing to react to it and not trying to hide or cower or walk away from challenges as they approach you. So your franchisees saw that you're strong, meaning you're going to stick this out, you're going to be successful so they can partner with you. And a lot of our listeners, they may not be in franchise businesses, but they have customers at least. Same thing. If we show our strength as a business that we're going to be around and we're going to be successful and we're going to help them to be successful, whatever that is, whether selling a product or a service or a franchise, whatever that might be.

Jon LaClare [00:15:19]:
That's a great story to share. Over the years, what would you say has worked best for your business? This is one story that catapulted everything. Now you're at that stage, okay, now I've got all this growth, where do I go from here? What else is, there's not going to be a lawsuit, luckily, around every corner, what's next? Or what has worked well for your business beyond that to really help continue that growth?

Bennett Maxwell [00:15:41]:
Yeah, just over three years ago, three years and a few months that I bought the company, and it's been less than three since we franchised it. And I've never worked in food, never worked in franchising. I don't know the difference between a franchisee or franchisor. Just three years ago, and it was surrounding myself with people that did so, first, getting a few good employees that have the restaurant experience and then building a board of advisors by giving them half a percent to a percent and a half of equity of a company that at that time was literally worth nothing. And then you get somebody who owns the largest property management franchisor. That is a phone call away from you anytime. That's been doing it for 20 years. Right.

Bennett Maxwell [00:16:21]:
When we franchise, I hired a CEO who founded a company called Maui Wowie Smoothies and coffee in 1983. It was the first ever mobile franchise in the world. You know, peaked at 650 plus location. So she came on because I'm like, who wants to buy a dirty dough from Bennett? Bennett doesn't want to run anything, but Jill has been doing this for 40 years. And then we got on Greg Majuski, former CEO of Jimmy John's as an advisor. And then beginning of this year, he came on a CEO. We pivoted the other CEO to presidente. And then just last week, Greg has another company with a ton of other brands.

Bennett Maxwell [00:16:57]:
They actually ended up acquiring us, which was great, what I've all been working for. But it was because constantly, it's always like, I don't know, franchising. I know that. I don't know that. So I need to go find people that do and try to take the best advice I can.

Jon LaClare [00:17:12]:
I love that. It's, you know, it's realizing our strengths and our weaknesses, our opportunities, right. And filling gaps. We can't do it. All right. So it's the entrepreneurial instinct to, hey, this is my idea, I'm starting it. And that's great, right. We need to have that energy drive, but there's some experience and also, as you mentioned, connections, right? Like whether it's property managers or whatever it might be along the way.

Jon LaClare [00:17:32]:
And also avoiding roadblocks, right. That other people, if they've done this before for other businesses, they know some of the stuff to avoid. Every business is a little bit different, but so many things are shared across those. So finding, whether it's a partner, a CEO, you bring in an advisory board member, somebody, but getting team members and mentors that really have experience doing what we want to become. So doing what we want to do eventually, not what we're doing today. As entrepreneurs, we sort of learn along the way. If we bring in people that have that experience ten steps ahead of us, they can help us get there, help us go those ten steps, successfully avoiding the roadblocks, some of the pitfalls, and growing faster.

Bennett Maxwell [00:18:12]:
I think all of that is 1000% true. And a secondary benefit is the sell side. Like if you are selling franchises and you have the, hey, this guy opened up a thousand Jimmy John's, you know, like, and ran the company, that's going to instill a lot more confidence and a franchisee buying into a system. So then increases sales, and then when you increase your franchise sales, increases your revenue, and now your marketing dollars increase, all of your centralized production costs go down, because now you're scaling with more stores open. So it kind of is a constant upward spiral, or it could be a constant downward spiral. I've hit both of those several times in the business, for sure.

Jon LaClare [00:18:53]:
Bennett, this has been a lot of fun. It's a great business. I can't recommend more. I can't wait. I'm glad to hear that. There's so many more coming on board. We've got a handful of them in Colorado. I can't wait to have some even closer to my home, my office as well.

Jon LaClare [00:19:05]:
And next time I'm in Abilene, I will be sure to stop by there. It's a phenomenal business. I encourage our audience. Please check out dirty dough. As always, if you're driving. It's in the show notes, of course. Well, Bennett, is there anything I didn't ask that you think could be helpful for our audience?

Bennett Maxwell [00:19:20]:
If anybody is in business knowing, like the, it's been very hard. Like just we've had to raise millions of dollars the entire time because you're always losing money, even though you're gaining money and the economy and all of that. And for me to have my sanity, I just looked at other businesses or the business wars podcast or talked with friends, and it's like, there's not any business that doesn't almost nothing make it ten times. So if you're in the business, like looking at Nike and FedEx and Walmart, they almost went bankrupt, or GM did go bankrupt, you're like, okay, it's just a little bit more on the grit. Can I keep going? Can I keep pivoting? For me, that's helpful. And hopefully that's helpful to any other aspiring entrepreneurs.

Jon LaClare [00:20:03]:
It's so true. It's one of the reasons I love doing this podcast, but also listening to others and reading books, hearing stories. Because every really, virtually every successful business, if they're being honest and they share their difficulties along the way, Mandy, and they face struggles that it almost seems like the bigger the struggle, the more successful the business is and vice versa sort of thing. So it definitely happens. It's good to hear that from people that have been so successful that, hey, there's struggles and trials along the way, just like a lot of our audience might be currently going through right now. Well, if there's anybody in our audience that might be interested not only in visiting a dirty dough store for obvious reasons, to enjoy the amazing cookies, but might be interested in a franchise, how do they get ahold of you?

Bennett Maxwell [00:20:43]:
Bennettmaxwell.com is my website. It has the dirty Doe franchising info, my podcast, and any social media, as well as if anybody just has any questions about franchising, so many people gave me free advice that every week I find myself talking to a handful of random people from LinkedIn on, like here, this is what I did, and this is what did not work, I would suggest you do this.

Jon LaClare [00:21:04]:
Yeah, that makes total sense. I do want to tell our audience again, go to their website, check it out, but also if you know or have need in your own business to meet with a member of my team, absolutely free for a 30 minutes strategy consultation. We've launched and grown hundreds of products and services since 2007 and learned some of our strategies while growing Oxiclean back in the Billy Mays days. We're here to help. So please go to harvestgrowth.com and set up a call to discuss further.