For years, the Perfect Gourmet has successfully delivered prepared gourmet food across the state while its owner, Carol Allen, presents her products on QVC, writes Thomas Heath of The Washington Post.

To chase her  business idea, Allen had to leave a six-figure income, sell her horses and live without a paycheck or vacations for a while. But all of it has paid off as Allen now owns Perfect Gourmet, the 5-employee company that earned revenue of $11.5 million last year selling a total of about 250,000 flash-frozen dinners. She once even sold 29,000 orders in 18 minutes from her segment at QVC’s West Chester studio.

“That’s a crazy amount of food, enough to fill five tractor-trailers,” notes Allen.

One would think that her next step would be to expand to even bigger retailer chains, like Amazon and Walmart, but Allen is sticking with QVC.

“There should be loyalty in business,” she points out

After working in real estate in Ocean City for 8 years, Allan moved back to her native Baltimore in 1995, taking a series of jobs moving her focus nearer to the food-supply business. She eventually landed a job selling prepared food to restaurants and retailers. This time selling prepared foods taught her the economics of the business, but over time she got tired of constantly traveling.

Around 2005, she noticed the trends were changing in the prepared-food business, and she decided to use her experience to start her own company.

“Society is overscheduled,” She notes, “women who have cooked their entire lives say, I don’t want to do this anymore.”

After struggling at first, she got the idea to approach QVC. Among the 15,000 businesses which approach QVC every year, only two percent actually get a purchase order but Allen was successful. On August 6th, 2006 during her first time on air, she sold 900 orders in 9 minutes, starting her relationship with QVC and boosting her business.

Allen usually appears 6-8 times a month and sometimes up to three times a week. Last week, she pitched her shrimp scampi in an eight-minute appearance.

“It depends on what the item is,” says Allen when asked what magic words she uses to make the phone lines light up. Parmesan, wine, garlic sells the shrimp scampi, whereas terms like “calorie count” boost potsticker sales.

Read more about Carol Allen here.