How an IBM IT exec mixes corporate duties with online coffeecake venture

A 20-year veteran of the IT business, Sherry Comes regularly architects technology solutions for Fortune 500 clients. She also loves a good cup of coffee. Her 5-year-old web site, CoffeeCakes.com, shows what can happen when those interests combine with the web.

Comes launched one of the Denver area’s first Internet cafes in 1995, and when the time came to let the café go five years later, café regulars weren’t about to say goodbye to the extra-rich coffeecakes that had been served up alongside their favorite brew. And that’s how Comes got into the online gourmet baked goods business with a web site that’s expected to generate about $500,000 in sales this year.

“We’re growing at the rate of about 30% a year,” says Comes, who, in her other life, joined IBM after she launched her web site. Comes designed the store platform herself, but with two employees, including Comes, everything about operations at CoffeeCakes.com is virtual, ranging from outsourced call center support to third-party contract bakers.

“Something called CoffeCakes.com might sound like it’s low-tech, but everything we do is high-tech and automated,” she says. That includes web order entry at the call center provider, The AnswerNet Network. Rather than using a standard template to record orders they take over the phone and then re-keying or manipulating the data so as to integrate it with the back end at CoffeeCakes.com, agents get Comes’ web interface imported to their screens so they can enter the information onto it directly.

Under that scenario, Comes estimates she saves the equivalent of $2 to $3 in agents’ time per order. With agents` fees figured on a per-hour basis, “Time is money,” she says.