When you don’t raise big VC funding, you get to do it your way and succeed on your terms. No two founders do it the same way.

And here’s yet another way to do it, in episode 100 of the Practical Founders Podcast.

Erin Fletter is one of those founders who wouldn’t do what people told her to do. She always followed her instincts and customers’ reactions to her newfangled service.

She had a long career in the restaurant business before starting an after-school enrichment program to teach kids how to cook at her daughters’ school in 2011.

Her cooking program became very popular, and she improved and expanded it to become a paid program called Sticky Fingers Cooking. Soon, she had a sizable business with over 100 chef-instructor employees who conducted engaging classes daily in Denver.

Her team created custom software to help manage their complicated operations, from enrolling students, coordinating instructors, building relationships with schools, and handling payments and payroll.

The software grew slowly at first but eventually became a powerful system that helped them scale their complicated business and run it very efficiently.

Erin considered turning her amazing software app into a software company, as many tech-powered businesses do.

Instead, they kept improving the software and expanding operations, serving over 150,000 students and thousands of schools and venues.

Now Sticky Fingers Cooking® is a fast-growing and successful franchise business with a software superpower.

No other franchises are organizing after-school cooking classes with their own customer software.

Erin describes their decision:

“We had talked for years about selling our software as a white-label solution because the demand is there. We’ve had inquiries for the last ten years. That was a direction we could have taken. But we didn’t do that.

“We are just laser-focused on Sticky Fingers Cooking. It’s a very simple business, and our technology helps us do it incredibly well. We want to be the best at what we do. I didn’t really want a diversion from the path of taking our business national through franchising.”

Uber is a technology company with custom software that arranges for their contract drivers to provide an amazing transportation service in the real world.

Sticky Fingers Cooking does it with custom software that enables the frontline employees of their franchisees, delivering amazing cooking classes to young students.

That’s yet another way to play the software game.

Check out Erin’s yummy story here on the Practical Founders Podcast.

#practicalfounders