Kate McCrea
Chief Executive Officer
What is the favorite part of your job?
I love people. Working through business challenges with my team is one of my favorite parts of my job. Digging in and finding a way to do something that seems impossible is what makes owning a business mentally stimulating every day. Meeting other business owners is another favorite. Small business owners face so many of the same challenges that it’s easy to find common ground and share problems and solutions. I love seeking new knowledge, finding the answers to questions that will make a difference to a particular problem. Maybe a business problem that seems intractable and is driving me crazy. I love to go find people who know more than I do and talk with them about potential solutions.
When/where are you most in your element?
Most in my element? I am most in my element in two places. On the one hand, I am a lover of the outdoors and I am at home in the remote wilderness. I like to be in places where the industrial world is far away and I’ve been lucky to spend time in the Arctic very far away from anywhere else. On the other hand, I am a city dweller and I love the hustle and bustle and the grit of Boston. I love the freedom of public transportation and walking to get from one place to another. This dichotomy has plagued me all of my life and I’ve solved it by living in Boston very close to the Blue Hills where I can walk in a small bit of nature saved for city dwellers. I can also get away to Maine and Vermont now and then but day-to-day, I live in the city with all of the various arts and culture offerings I could ever want.
What is your favorite caramel flavor (and why)?
My favorite caramel flavor is a reflection of my dichotomous nature. I love the maple caramel with its namesake ingredient coming right out of a tree, without killing the tree, just flowing out like a gift. We then take that gift to the city where we cook it into our beautiful caramel and enjoy the refined flavor of a fine candy.
What is the one thing you couldn’t live without?
Coffee. Coffee is family to me. It was served at every gathering, to every man, woman and child for as long as I can remember. My mother’s side of the family is Italian and we drank coffee from a very young age – loaded with milk and sugar, but coffee none-the-less. Taking it away from me is like losing all of those people with whom I shared a cup.
What is your three-track play list?
Nancy Griffith: Morning Song for Sally
Cat Stevens: How Can I Tell You
Carla Sciaky: Under the Quarter Moon
What quote inspires you?
"…I cannot find anywhere in my life a time, or a kind of time, that is unoccupied. I am free, but my time is not. My time is fully and vitally occupied with sleep, with daydreaming, with doing business, and writing friends and family on email, with reading, with writing poetry, with writing prose, with thinking, with forgetting, with embroidering, with cooking, and eating a meal and cleaning up the kitchen, with construing Virgil, with meeting friends, with talking with my husband, with going out to shop for groceries, with walking if I can walk and traveling if we are traveling, with sitting Vipassana sometimes, with watching a movie sometimes, with doing the Eight Precious Chinese exercises when I can, with lying down for an afternoon rest with a volume of Krazy Kat to read and my own slightly crazy cat occupying the region between my upper thighs and mid-calves, where he arranges himself and goes instantly and deeply to sleep. None of this is spare time. I can’t spare it.” Ursula K. Le Guin