How Cathy Bishop became Iowa Small Business Person of 2024

“My whole goal at that time was, there were too many people on unemployment, and I didn’t want any of our people to go on unemployment,” said Bishop, longtime proprietor of the Aggies, a Sergeant Bluff catering firm. “I wasn’t going to let people not have a job. That wasn’t going to happen.”

Catered affairs were practically nonexistent, so Aggies got creative: Her partner Jone Kent came up with the idea of ​​”COVID carryout,” in which beloved Aggies dishes were prepared and sold as takeout; a menu was posted daily on Facebook, Wednesday through Saturday.

“It was some of the hardest work I’ve ever done,” Bishop said.

Her business survived the pandemic, and catering roared back to life; this is Bishop’s 30th year in business, and he employs several dozen. In part because of her deft handling of that crisis, Bishop was recognized in April by the Small Business Administration as the Iowa Small Business Person of the Year. She was flown out to Washington, DC at the end of April, during National Small Business Week, for a ceremony at the Waldorf Astoria.

Born in Texas, Bishop’s family moved to Sergeant Bluff in 1970, when he was in the third grade; her family was in the military and government surplus business, and an officer housing project in Sergeant Bluff came on the market. Her family purchased it and operated the housing units as rental properties known as the Bishop Homes. She graduated from high school in Sergeant Bluff in 1979.

In August 1978, when he was a senior in high school, Bishop’s father, James A. “Jim” Bishop, a former Sergeant Bluff City Council member, was killed in a plane crash near Raton, New Mexico, during a hunting trip. With his death, and feeling that their time in Sergeant Bluff would be “temporary,” the family decided to move back to Texas.

“We went to Texas to bury him, thinking that we would never stay here,” Cathy Bishop said.

After visiting College Station, Texas, with an uncle, he decided to attend Texas A&M, where he studied industrial distribution. After college he moved to Sioux City, then transferred to Colorado, working for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency as a bank examiner.

When her office in Colorado faced closure, Bishop had the choice of moving to a larger city and continuing in her career path, or trying her hand at something else. She’d always felt an entrepreneurial streak: “When my dad was killed in a plane crash, it was a really crappy time,” she said. “It was terrible to lose my father, and my mentor, and — I always wanted to grow up and be in my own business like he was.”

So she resigned her post and, in 1994, built a full-service restaurant in Sergeant Bluff, with a name that nodded to her alma mater: Aggies. There wasn’t much in Bishop’s background that prepared him for that enterprise. It was a parlous proposition: Oft-cited statistics suggest that a majority of restaurants fail in their first few years, and only a fraction survive beyond five years or so.

“I had never worked in a restaurant before,” Bishop said. “So, I really rolled the dice.”

She decided early on that everything on the menu would be homemade from scratch; some menu items took their cues from favorite dishes Bishop had eaten at other restaurants while traveling in her work as a bank examiner. Another idea was a matter of business sense: “I knew that I had to find a niche, and there was no smoked barbecue in this area, so I decided to hone my skills on smoking meat,” she said.

“My mother was an excellent cook, and so was my grandfather, so we still use the recipes to this day that they developed,” Bishop said.

For all that she lacked in experience, the demand was there: “There was a need for restaurants in Siouxland in ’94, I mean we didn’t hardly have any restaurants in town, and there was hardly anything in Sergeant Bluff.”

The Aggies have been “dabbled” in catering almost since the beginning, Bishop said. In 2009, she decided to shift gears, turning Aggies into a catering company and making the restaurant into an events venue; demand on the restaurant side and the catering side then became overwhelming. “We were just catering so much that I got to the point where I couldn’t do both,” Bishop said.

“I had to do one or the other, and I thought I’d have more flexibility with catering,” she added.

Flexibility is key (“‘No’ is not in our vocabulary,” Bishop said) — and she likes it when customers bring in favorite family recipes for her kitchen to prepare. This past weekend the kitchen was busy cooking pot roast, chicken, brisket, New York strip, Italian food, barbecue.

“We cook in all languages, we make a lot of Mexican food, we make Italian food,” she said. “Our Chinese food is excellent too.”