Case Study: Sticky Fingers Cooking
The Challenge
Victoria Donahue owns and operates Sticky Fingers Cooking, a hands-on cooking class business built on a strong track record of profitability. Heading into the Impact Lab program, Victoria's business was already successful, but she wanted a clearer view of her financial position and a data-backed plan for growing into new markets.
The Impact
Over an eight-week engagement, Victoria was paired with an Impact Lab finance expert to build out a financial planning model that could support smart, sustainable expansion.
The team started by digging into Victoria's historical performance, including class volumes, teacher costs, and pricing structures, which showed that the business had room to bring on additional teachers while staying profitable.
From there, Victoria and her finance expert shifted toward strategy: should Victoria deepen her investment in her existing business model, or branch out into new offerings?
Her consultant advised focusing on diversification within her current industry rather than starting new ventures from scratch, and the two turned their attention to a concrete expansion opportunity, purchasing rights to a new territory.
Using the financial model:
Victoria calculated that teaching roughly 230 classes in a new district would cover the territory's $42,000 purchase cost, and the team built a payback framework she could reuse for future expansion decisions.
They also priced out operational needs like a part-time bookkeeper and, later in the engagement, the potential to hire an area director as the business scaled.
A pivotal moment came when Victoria caught a significant error in her own class-count projections, correcting the figure from 712 to 2,025 classes, which meaningfully changed her net income estimates.
That discovery led to a broader conversation about pricing strategy (including modest annual price increases to keep pace with inflation) and how to use the financial model on an ongoing basis for quarterly planning. Victoria also drew inspiration from a comparable cooking-class business in Chicago that had grown to roughly 4,000 classes a year after eight years in operation, giving her a benchmark for her own growth trajectory.
Outcomes
By the end of the engagement, Victoria had a reusable financial model, a clear-eyed understanding of what it would take to hit specific revenue targets, and a validated framework for evaluating new territory purchases.
Just as importantly, she came away with a stronger grasp of the big picture: knowing where her business stood against its projections and what tradeoffs (like hiring additional managers) would be required to grow profitably.
Sticky Fingers Cooking is now positioned to pursue expansion with a data-driven roadmap rather than guesswork.
Why Small Business Owners Should Apply to the Impact Lab
Running a small business often means making big decisions with limited time, data, or expertise to back them up. The Impact Lab pairs business owners with dedicated experts for an intensive, multi-week engagement focused on solving a real, high-stakes challenge in their business, whether that's building a financial model, refining pricing, or evaluating a major growth opportunity.
Take Victoria Donahue of Sticky Fingers Cooking: already a successful business owner, she used her time in the program to build a reusable financial planning model, catch a costly error in her own projections, and walk away with a validated, data-driven roadmap for expanding into a new market.
