Charlynda Scales was on active duty in the U.S. Air Force in 2013 when her mother handed her an envelope containing her inheritance: a secret recipe for her late grandfather Charlie “Mutt” Ferrell Jr.’s famous sauce. Without any experience in food manufacturing or entrepreneurship, Scales decided to have Mutt’s signature sauce bottled and sold to continue her grandfather’s legacy.
How SCORE Helped:
Shortly after embarking on her small business journey, Scales found SCORE, and started meeting weekly with mentor John Soutar. Soutar gave her checklists for each phase of the process and became Scales’ “personal cheerleader.”
Scales says, “Even though I don’t come from a family of entrepreneurs … John made me see it was still possible, and I launched four months after we started working together.”
In 2017, Scales won Bob Evans Farms’ grant competition for veterans, Heroes to CEOs. As a winner, she was awarded $25,000 and a mentoring session with Shark Tank’s Daymond John. Scales strategically used that money to scale up her business, going from producing 700 bottles of sauce per day to 8,000, and getting her product into more than 60 Kroger grocery stores.
