Leisa: Hello, I’m Leisa Holland nelson and welcome to another edition of Women Mean Business, where we’re going to bring you up close and personal with extraordinary women doing extraordinary things. My guest today is Dawn Neilson, Vice President of the Kolache Factory. Dawn, welcome to Women Mean Business.

Dawn: Thank you so much Leisa, I’m thrilled to be here.

Leisa: I understand the Kolache Factory is a family business, tell us all about it.

Dawn: All right, well my parents started it in ’82 – that would be 1982 – and I was just a young little kid then; I was 8 years old so they had me scrubbing the floors. And the reason they started it was my dad was in between jobs, it was a recession at that time and he fell in love with the idea of kolaches, thought it was a fantastic product that he could mainstream. They spent a lot of time and energy coming up with the perfect recipe; it’s originally Czech and they make them in small batches so his idea was how can we mainstream this, make it much bigger, get more out and not make them in little batches. And he did that, opened up and that’s the end of the story. We’ve got over 50 units right now and we’re just very excited about things that are going to come.

Leisa: So was your first store here in Houston?

Dawn: It was, off of Westhiemer and Gessner.

Leisa: Wow and where are you going now? How are you expanding; what’s the growth plan?

Dawn: So our plan right now is we’re really focused on franchising. We have 23 corporate units – we have more franchise units than we have corporate, it’s the first time in history that we’ve had that – we’re on the West Coast and we just opened last week in Virginia Beach so I’m very, very excited. We’ve got a few scattered in the Midwest, it seems like it’s going really great there and we’re just very excited about what’s coming. We have the bulk of our locations here based out of Houston, we’re in Austin, Beaumont, McAllen and expanding.

Leisa: Great, so if I want to franchise I’ll call you.

Dawn: Please.

Leisa: Okay, thank you for being with us.

Dawn: Absolutely.

Leisa: There you have it, another extraordinary woman doing extraordinary things. I’m Leisa Holland Nelson, President and Co-founder of ContentActive, Houston’s leading web and mobile design and development company. You can find me at ContactActive.com or follow me on Twitter @LHNelson. We’ll be back again next week with another edition of Women Mean Business.