All of this started very innocently at my parent’s convenience stores in 1997.  After roaming the countryside chasing my dream to be a famous singer I landed back at home without much of a direction.  My parents had been in the convenience store business since 1985 and it was natural that eventually, I would end up back working for them.  I remember the first store that they opened.  The deli consisted of an electric skillet to scramble eggs and a hot plate to cook burgers on, not very fancy but never the less the American Dream.  I helped open three of the four stores that my parents built all the while still searching for my niche or my place in this crazy world.  My sister Loretta and I had several businesses through the years, painting T-shirts, making jewelry, and other artistic types of things.  While working for my parents I was able to have the space to cultivate and grow my business of pie baking.  My earliest memory of this was Cherry pie and Banana Nut Bread.  I would bake an assortment of sweets, let them cool, hand wrap them, and label them with labels that I printed off of my PC.  A lot of things have changed since then.  I now have real stick-on labels that are printed by a label company a wrapping machine to wrap them with and employees to bake my pies.  In 2005, my father gave me a ½ acre of land and I took the dive and built the first Pie in the Sky Pie Co..  It has been tough and I must admit that there have been days when I have doubted myself, it was much more simple to pick up a paycheck every two weeks.  But, when I walk in the back door of my kitchen each day I smile inside.