PPP Helps Keep a Bakery Running in South Carolina

The Main Street Bakery & Gift Shop in Columbia has been a small operation run by its mother-and-daughter owners since 2004.

After COVID-19 was declared a pandemic in March 2020, the ensuing shutdowns and curtailments of businesses that depended on intimate customer contact created challenges business owners had never imagined.

Rosa Daniels founded the business with her daughter, Dana Myers, after Daniels retired after 30 years with the IRS.

But Daniels said the idea started long before. Daniels was five years old when she began learning to bake from her grandmother, Hattie Bell Tillman, and then married into a baking family.

Daniels’ husband’s mother, Mary Myers, was the go-to woman for friends who needed a fruitcake, cinnamon rolls or even a wedding cake. But not only was she a superb baker, she could also cook for the reception and tailor the groomsmen’s suits.

“She was the Black Martha Stewart,” Daniels said.

Mary Myers was also the main teacher for her granddaughter, Dana Myers.

“I was always at her table, measuring out flour for her. That’s where my love of baking came in,” Myers said. “Our family is a cooking family, but I took the baking part from her.”

Daniels and Dana Myers opened their first location in a declining local mall.

“It was definitely a learning curve,” Myers said. “I don’t think we did anything it tells you to do in the books.”

Around 2009, they moved the bakery to North Main Street, a once-neglected area of town that in recent years has drawn major street and utility improvements, younger residents and a flurry of new businesses.

After COVID-19 was declared a pandemic in March 2020, the women adjusted their operations.

They closed their tiny eat-in area, and required masks and social distancing. Traffic dwindled, and “we kept baking, but it was nowhere near the volume before people went home,” Myers said. “Everything was so uncertain.”

The launch of the Paycheck Protection Program offered a lifeline: An infusion of cash in the form of a loan that was designed to be forgiven as long as businesses used the money primarily to support payroll.

Daniels and her daughter were quick to apply through Wells Fargo, which held their business checking account.

“I think Wells Fargo was concentrating so much on large businesses that the smaller, family-owned businesses were just left out,” Daniels said. “That application sat in Wells Fargo for about three weeks. So I decided I would try through my credit union.”

They applied again through Self-Help Federal Credit Union of Durham, N.C. ($1.7 billion in assets, 97,314 members).

Daniels’ membership with Self-Help went back to the personal account she opened with Palmetto Trust Federal Credit Union during her 30-year IRS career. Self-Help acquired Palmetto Trust in a merger approved in late 2018 when the Columbia-based credit union had $17.5 million in assets and 2,248 members.

After several back-and-forth emails with document attachments, Self-Help got the application to the SBA for a 24-month loan for $12,645. The SBA approved it April 28, 2020 to support five jobs.

“I got such a positive response from them [Self-Help],” Daniels said. “They helped me walk through the paperwork to get the loan, and they were there every moment until it was approved.”

Self-Help also helped the bakery get a second PPP loan for $12,950 that the SBA approved Feb. 21.

“Now they’re walking me through the loan forgiveness process,” Daniels said.

See how the top 15 credit union PPP originators stacked up against one another, and how all credit union PPP originators performed by region, in this infographic that appeared in the June 16, 2021 print issue of CU Times.