era Stewart remembers catering her first dinner back in 1979 in Cartersville. “There was a salad, soup, an entrée with two sides, and dessert,” she recalled. “It was for 10 people. I did some of the food prep early and the rest on-site. I prepared the food, served it and cleaned up all by myself. I might have made $300-$400, including a tip of $100.”

Stewart used the money from that first catering job, plus a couple of others, to buy new drapes and initially that was her plan for her part-time catering business – something to fill her time while her two children were in school and make a bit of “mad”money. However, over the past 2 1/ 2 decades her enterprising spirit has built what began as a “time filler” into a successful, multifaceted business.

“I finished my degree in home economics education in 1974 and taught school for four years,” she said. “When our first son was born in 1979, I opted to stay home. But soon I got antsy to be doing something and began making hors d’ouveres for other caterers.”

Making appetizers for other caterers eventually led to that first job catering a complete dinner.

Stewart doesn’t volunteer her current income, but her company – now known as Very Vera – is located in a 6,000-square-foot building in Augusta and has 22 full-time employees. With one son in medical school and the second majoring in Family and Consumer Sciences at the University of Georgia, Stewart is no longer trying to fill time. Instead, she’s more likely to be searching for a free moment or two as she juggles the struggles that are a part of being a successful business owner.

“I stay intrigued and fulfilled,” she said of growing Very Vera over the past 20 years. “I read one management or motivational book each month. And at times, I can’t get enough of reading those books. I’m constantly going back to the drawing board looking for ways to improve or enhance my business. I’ve always had something to look forward to.”

By looking forward, Stewart evolved her business from catering to making and shipping cakes to customers throughout the United States and some foreign countries to preparing entrees, such as shrimp and crawfish fettuccine, beefy tortilla pie and veggie lasagna that also can be shipped across the country. She’s also opened a café that serves a steady stream of customers each day.

Stewart’s first step in her move to mail-order was her grandmother’s pound cake recipe.

“For a while, my catering business was going really well, but then more hotels began to open in Augusta that had their own in-house caterers,” Stewart explained. “I realized that if I was going to maintain a full-time business I needed to come up with a way to have income every day, but I knew I didn’t want to open a restaurant.”

In 1993, Stewart began Very Vera, a mail order subsidiary of Vera and Company, using her grandmother’s recipes with her own twists for flavorings.

But excellent recipes are only the beginning when it comes to the mail order business. There’s also the issue of how the cakes will arrive at their destination – tasty and intact, or dried out and in a million pieces.

“One of the hardest things was finding a container to ship the cakes in,” Stewart said. “We used to order cakes from everyone who was selling them by mail order before we finally found a company that made a can that worked for our cakes.”

And what company is that? Stewart’s not telling. “That is one of our best-guarded secrets,” she said, laughing.

Meanwhile, she’s appreciative of the company that was kind enough to tell her where she could buy the serrated plastic knives they used with their own cakes.

Once she had determined the recipes, the packaging and the shipping, Stewart began shipping pound cakes – they actually weigh nearly 7 pounds – in the fall of 1993. That holiday season, their biggest day was 40 cakes; this past holiday season saw the company ship out more than 600 cakes in a single day.

Since establishing her mail order business with pound cakes, Stewart decided to again expand her operation – this time she began to focus on the intricacies of making and shipping iced layer cakes.

“You can’t imagine how sick my friends and family became with receiving cakes that were in a million pieces,” she said.

Although iced layer cakes and pound cakes have some things in common, there are many additional issues to consider.

“You have to make sure the batter is the right depth when you bake the layers. You have to determine how to secure the cake in the container so it doesn’t slide around during shipping. You have to figure out how long to freeze the cake before you ship it,” she said.

Stewart points to photos of her cakes that have appeared in publications ranging from Southern Living to The New York Times to illustrate that she’s conquered these issues.

“The cake that’s shown on page 301 of InStyle magazine is the cake we shipped to them,” she said, pointing to a photo of a strawberry layer cake that appeared in a recent issue of the magazine. “They didn’t come here and take a photo of a cake we’d just made, that’s the cake they received.”

Stewart has expanded her mail order business even further by adding a “Gourmet to Go” line of entrees that include a shrimp and crawfish fettuccine dish as well as a more traditional staple of chicken and wild rice.

In addition to everything else, Vera has opened a lunch-time café that serves a broad range of sandwiches, salads and, or course, cakes for dessert. But in recent months she’s added non-cake desserts as well.

“I was in the back talking with one of our bakers and scooped up a handful of the cake tops that we slice off the layers to make them uniform,” she recalled. “I thought, ‘if it’s edible, it’s saleable.’”

With that notion, Stewart and her employees began experimenting with recipes and have begun to use the cake scraps as the basis for tiramisu and banana pudding.

Stewart said some of her best training in coping with the inevitable problems that come with running any business came from the time she spent in a Home Management House at UGA as an undergraduate.

“One of the requirements was to make a meal using all kinds of different equipment. So you had to learn to use the blender and the robo-coupe and the microwave,” she said. “Also, you would get assignments that said a key piece of equipment, such as the stove, was broken and you had to learn to adapt your skills and recipes and use other equipment.”

As she looks back over her company’s growth and evolution, Stewart’s focus is on the positive things.

“I’m a big believer that things happen for a reason,” she said. “Sure, I was disappointed when I wasn’t getting the big catering jobs and competition grew, but now I’m not working on the weekends, I’m spending them with my husband. It’s given us freedom as a couple to enjoy each other.”

Frequently, that time together is spent at their beach house in Beaufort, SC.

“We are very basic eaters at home,” Stewart said. “During the week, we frequently go out to eat or I take something home from here. But at Beaufort we cook. We enjoy standing in the kitchen and visiting with each other while we’re cooking shrimp and vegetables.”