The Garden Cafe and Bakery - Kimberly

Randy and Jane McCarron weren't planning on getting into the restaurant business. They had moved to the Magic Valley area to allow Randy to work for Jane's father on the family dairy. However, Randy had some "tractor challenges" and was not doing well with his new career.

A friend asked if he would be interested in taking over a restaurant. In Jane's words, "After some discussion, we figured there were only seven or eight tables to serve – how hard could it be?"  With some startup money from her parents, the two began Jane's first experience working in a restaurant and her husband's first experience running one.

The Garden Cafe opened for business in July1997 at Kimberly Nurseries. The Cafe had indoor seating for 18 and could seat 16 more on a seasonal basis in the outside dining area. The first day, all the tables were full and the couple was reading the menu to figure out what to put on the sandwiches.

They worked through the initial challenges and expanded, eventually moving the restaurant in December 2002 to its current location at the corner of Eastland and Addison. In the new location, they doubled sales over the past year in only two weeks and went from 12 employees to 45.

The McCarrons began working with the Idaho Small Business Development Center (SBDC) during their first year in operation. Cindy Bond, their SBDC counselor, helped Jane learn and do the bookkeeping. "The SBDC staff taught me an accounting program on their computers and I would go in once or twice a month to enter all of the information and produce the balance sheets and income statements," Jane said.

The SBDC has continued to be a valuable resource for the McCarrons, who credit their business success in part to the partnership. Jane says the SBDC helped them overcome many obstacles, such as working with your spouse, establishing a new business while parenting young children, making inadequate facilities work, dealing with employees, doing accounting, and delegating and managing.