There have been times, particularly this month, when five-year cookie entrepreneur Tina Rexing longed for the $100,000-plus IT corporate management job she quit to launch T-Rex Cookies.
Adjusting to the measures designed to slow coronavirus, Rexing had to shutter the T-Rex shop she opened at Ridgedale Center in Minnetonka, which was off to a promising start after only two weeks of operations. She also had to lay off most of her new hires and the crew at her warehouse, bakery and retail outlet in Eagan.
"It's hard to hire people and then let them go," Rexing said. "I was blowing it out of the water at Ridgedale. I knew this would work. And then it ended. And we don't know [the future]."
She donated hundreds of huge cookies to the Eagan-Apple Valley school district, which is feeding low-income kids during the virus-related school closure.
Rexing, the mother of two teenagers, also is grateful for her husband's good job and benefits that will keep the family out of the poorhouse. This is a resilient entrepreneur, and a Filipino immigrant, educated in economics at St. Olaf College, who also has put a lot more dough into T-Rex than she has taken out.
The irony is that she thought she was over the hump this year. She had to close her two-year-old T-Rex Café on University Avenue in Minneapolis about a year ago. It fell victim in 2018 to the sale of the building where it was located. She had plans to resume operations in the new commercial-residential complex still planned for the site. But that was delayed and she bailed out amid a lawsuit, since settled, by Prospect Park neighbors who opposed the high-rise project.
Rexing and her husband paid off a $50,000 loan on the cafe from their savings. And Rexing opened a wholesale bakery in an Eagan industrial park, with a retail outlet. She also bought a "cookie truck" that visits corporate and event clients.
"It's a cookie-and-milk truck," Rexing said. "We don't fight for space with food trucks. We arrive by appointment."
