Owner battles titans, gets sweet taste of success
Master’s Donuts owner Michelle Senna, featured on the cover, started out working the counter at a donut shop in Camarillo as a teen.
By Tom Bronzini
Special to the Business Times
The donut business is no piece of cake.
Michelle Senna, owner of Master’s Donuts in Oxnard, has weathered market bumps that devastated Krispy Kreme and prompted Winchell’s into rounds of store closures.
Senna said it was easier for her to adjust because she was willing to sacrifice and put in long hours. “For a small business, I’m the one doing everything,” she said, where a big franchise might have a manager, assistant manager and bookkeeper. “If the business is slow, I push myself more, have to work harder, think harder,” she said. She gets to know most customers as friends.
Senna was born in Cambodia, one of five children whose father was a teacher and whose mother ran a business making and selling clothing. The family was forced to flee to a refugee camp in Thailand when Senna was just entering her teens during the atrocities of the Pol Pot regime. An older brother, her youngest sister and her grandmother died in Cambodia, she said.
In March of 1981, the family came to Camarillo under the sponsorship of St. Columba’s Episcopal Church. Her father found work at a factory making wheelchairs and her mother at a Motel 6 before they were able to take over a Four Season’s Donuts store in Camarillo.
Senna got her first taste of the donut business by working the counter at a Winchell’s shop in Camarillo as a teen. By the time she graduated from high school, her parents had sold their Camarillo store and bought a Sun Donuts shop on Vineyard Avenue in Oxnard.
It was while working for her parents there that she began to learn how to run a business. After six months, she went in with some partners in 1987 to buy out the Foster’s Donuts franchise off Oxnard Boulevard that she now owns outright with her husband Eric as Master’s Donuts.
From 1992 to 2001, she owned and ran two donut shops at once while Eric was in the insurance business. At different times she had a shop in the Walmart center on Rose Avenue in Oxnard, in the Von’s center on Ventura Road in Oxnard and in a retail area off Victoria Avenue in Ventura.
She faced a big challenge in 2011 when her landlord at the strip mall in Oxnard told her a Lowe’s was coming in as part of a major rebuilding and renovation and that she would have to move her shop to another corner of the mall. Big national food chains were coming to the center, including IHOP, Kentucky Fried Chicken and, most worrisome, a 7-Eleven store that would be a big competitor.
Senna went with her husband to the Economic Development Collaborative-Ventura County for advice. Rose Obetz, a consultant for the organization’s Small Business Development Center, told them she could compete by expanding her menu to include grill items and a soft serve ice cream machine. The shop should have a full breakfast and lunch menu and offer items for evening takeout, Obetz advised.
Obetz told the Business Times that the landlord was really looking to welcome the big, lucrative chains and force out small- business owners like Senna.
“She was willing to take a big risk to stay there and take on the competition head on,” Obetz said. “…And so she really stuck to her guns … and saw this as a business opportunity with Lowe’s coming in and wanted to really give it a go.”
The shop moved to a freshly remodeled building set close to Oxnard Boulevard and Senna went ahead with the menu expansion. The move paid off with profits up 15 percent the first year, she said. But that was before the 7-Eleven came in right next door. Since then, she said, profits are lower than at her old location and she is constantly looking for ways to compete.
“Every time we meet, 7-Eleven is trying to undercut her in some new way and she just keeps on going,” Obetz said.
Senna said that for the last two years, she has not been able to spend the usual time at the shop because the family lost its nanny and she must be home in the mornings and afternoons to care for her three daughters, the youngest of their five children. Family is first priority, she said.
She was honored in 2012 as Camarillo Mother of the Year by the Camarillo Merchants Association when her 8-year-old daughter Leann’s poem about her was chosen as the top entry.
The Business Times asked Senna what advice she has about succeeding in a small business. “Sacrifice your time for it,” she said. “It’s going to take a lot of your time. Just stick with it. Believe in yourself, that you can do it. You have to be there and you have to know everything.”