By Benjamin Kliewer, Senior Reporter
After a long day, Jeramie Bradford flips on the lights to the Northwest MMA studio and thinks back to how he started the business in a 20-foot by 20-foot room – and by accident.
Local business owners like Bradford have a variety of reasons for starting a business, but many say they have faced challenges, found encouragement and learned lessons in the process.
When starting Northwest MMA, Bradford asked questions on Facebook to find people who wanted to learn mixed martial arts. However, he had so many people asking him to train them and their children that he decided to make a school for mixed martial arts.
“I’ve been training MMA and actually fought [competitively] for a while in the years past,” Bradford said. “I’ve always been in an area where there were schools you could go and train. After moving up here, I really wanted to get back into training, and so honestly, it happened by mistake.”
Bradford started Northwest MMA in December 2021. Around two years earlier, he started Northwest Nutrition.
He opened Northwest Nutrition with his wife, Timmori Bradford, to give the Alva community tasty and healthy options for teas and smoothies.
“We are both big into health and fitness,” Bradford said. “There are other clubs like ours throughout the country, and we had been going to a few others outside of town. We knew that Alva didn’t have anything like this.”
Another local business that started up in Alva to serve drinks was the Vanilla Bean, which started as a coffee shop in a trailer.
Teresa Earnest, owner of the Vanilla Bean, said she used to work in pharmaceutical sales and took coffee to the doctors. After she moved to Alva, she wanted something to do. She didn’t see a coffee shop anywhere, so she opened one.
“I’d go to Oklahoma City and go have brunch with my daughters,” Earnest said. “I was like, ‘This is what I want to do.’”
The Vanilla Bean is now in a permanent building and serves food and coffee.
Another small restaurant that opened in Alva is Chubby Dave’s.
Robyn Landis said she owned a little café in Kansas during the early 2000s and always loved to be in the kitchen cooking, so she opened the Chubby Dave’s restaurant in Alva this year. Chubby Dave’s primarily serves sandwiches, and it also has a salad bar.
CHALLENGES WITH
STAFFING, PLANNING
Landis said she struggled to hire and keep employees. Some employees would accept the job offer, but they would never show up to work. But that wasn’t the only staffing problem.
“Around the second week we were open, I had one of my employees end up sick, and by the next week, they were all sick,” Landis said. “So, we went through another couple of weeks with being closed [then] open for a couple of days [then] closed again. It was a struggle.”
Starting the Vanilla Bean offered its own hurdles.
Earnest said she did not know a lot about the restaurant world except her experience from being a waitress while she attended college. One of the challenges was not knowing all that was entailed in running a restaurant.
“There is so much to think about: taxes, employee taxes, so much stuff you don’t even really think about,” she said. “When you [say], ‘Oh, I’m just going to open a little coffee shop,’ well, good luck to you, because there is a lot to do.”
Northwest Nutrition was a new type of drink shop for Alva. Such establishments are not new to Oklahoma, but they are new to this part of Oklahoma, Bradford said.
Reaching college students wasn’t a challenge because many of them were from areas with the same type of businesses, but local community members weren’t, so getting name recognition took work, he said. So did finding a location near the college that could also attract community members.
Northwest Nutrition opened in December 2019 on College Boulevard directly across from the Northwestern campus. The Bradfords endured the pandemic almost immediately after opening the business’ doors.
“We didn’t plan that [opening] well,” Bradford said. “Not only did we open the week of finals when all the college kids were going to be going home at the end of the week, but as soon as they came back for the next year, they went home for spring break and never came back because of COVID-19.
“So, our first year in business, we had to try to grow through COVID. So that was a big, unexpected challenge.”
FINDING ENCOURAGEMENT
In an interview with Forbes Magazine, Stephanie Wells, owner of website developer Formidable Forms, said it is difficult for business owners to push out negative self-talk and convince themselves to take the leap on something. But she is glad she ignored self-doubt and made her own path, she said.
Finding encouragement is essential to getting a business off the ground, small business owners said.
Bradford said the community’s support was a strong source of encouragement to him. Even through the pandemic, the business grew while a lot of companies closed their doors.
Earnest echoed those sentiments.
“When I started and I would look out [the window] and there was a line [of customers] clear to the street and wrapped around, I thought it might work,” Earnest said.
‘EVERY DAY IS DIFFERENT’
Jeremy Zeller, the Woods County economic development executive director, said the Oklahoma Department of Commerce has a step-by-step guide for new businesses owners on its website, www.okcommerce.gov.
Business owners should first conduct thorough research.
“For example, I have been looking into creating my own food truck,” Zeller said. “The first stages of what I’m doing is pulling data and statistics [about other food trucks].”
Earnest advises business owners to keep their business plans simple at the start. When the Vanilla Bean opened, all it sold was coffee, helping keep startup costs low. She also said business owners should anticipate fluctuation.
“Every day is different,” Earnest said. “I’ve never had a Friday the same or a Tuesday the same. Sometimes, we’ll be slammed on a Tuesday, and the next Tuesday, we won’t be.”
Public visibility is important to a business, and Bradford said he used this knowledge to grow Northwest Nutrition.
Because university students went home during the pandemic, the Bradfords were forced to get outside their shop and into the Alva community, Bradford said.
They offered free sample teas to let the community know Northwest Nutrition was open and where it was located. Once they did this, sales numbers started to rise consistently.
“I think too many businesses sit back and don’t branch out like that,” Bradford said. “They just wait for people to come to them instead of going to the people.”
After facing the challenge of hiring and keeping employees, Landis shared what advice she would give to anyone starting a business.
“Focus,” Landis said. “Focus on your end result, and hang in there. There’s a lot of struggles along the way, and you’ve just got to push through them.”