Outside Magazine

In 2003, Beryl Stafford and her daughter Alex (nickname: Bobo) decided to do some baking on a rare dreary day at home in Boulder, Colorado. Rifling through the cupboards, they found the ingredients for oat bars. The next morning, young Bobo backpacked some of the bars to school to share with friends. Meanwhile, Stafford, a single mother with a latent entrepreneurial bent, brought a dozen to a local coffee shop to sell commercially. When she stopped back into the Brewing Market a few days later, all the bars were gone and the shop requested more. Good stuff—except Stafford, who was a home baker and not a trained chef, hadn’t even been working from a recipe. Still, friends had long told her that she should sell her baked goods, so she pieced together another tray from memory, and Bobo’s was born. It was Stafford’s first foray into business.

Over the next 13 years, figuring things out as she went, Stafford grew Bobo’s to a $9 million company with national distribution. In 2015, she hired a 20-plus-year veteran of the natural-foods industry named T.J. McIntyre to take over operations. In less than three years, he nearly tripled revenues to $22 million. That bump allowed the company to raise $11.75 million in capital while increasing the workforce from 40 to 160 employees. Bobo’s just opened a second bakery in January 2019, which has already quintupled the brand’s manufacturing capacity and has the potential to increase it tenfold. Today Bobo’s is experiencing some of the fastest growth in the natural-foods marketplace. “It’s been an overnight success story,” McIntyre told me, setting up the classic small-business joke, “15 years in the making.”