Loren Castle started Sweet Loren's in her mom's kitchen in New York in 2011, obsessed with creating a better for you cookie dough that didn't exist yet. She rode the subway with her recipe and a toaster oven to demo at a New York City Whole Foods, standing there taking in what every person who tried it had to say. She spent a year in three stores, teaching yoga on the side to keep going.

Fifteen years later Sweet Loren's is the #3 cookie dough in the country, in over 35,000 supermarkets, and it's gone well beyond cookie dough: puff pastry, pizza crust, pie crust, breakfast biscuits, and now, refrigerated scone dough and oatmeal bar dough, the first of their kind. As for Loren, she's had three kids in the last five years, and spent the last four building a company that doesn't need her at everything.

In this episode we get into:

• Calling into the company offsite from maternity leave

• The first maternity leave that didn't happen

• Hiring the company's first president

• Giving up the parts of the business she loved most

• The departments that got better once she left them

• Handing off the work but not the responsibility

• Eleven out of ten or it doesn't launch

• Standing in a Whole Foods listening to strangers rate her cookies

• Hiring people who don't need the climb to be easy

• Deciding in her early thirties that the business alone wasn't going to be enough

• Two businesses, three kids, one house

• Doug and Joe, the two people she calls

• The rent her mom started charging her after chemo

• A mom who was never at the track meets

• Working out almost every day and treating it as non-negotiable

• What her kids are picking up without her teaching them

More:

• Find Sweet Loren's: www.sweetlorens.com